II. What Came Before

Code After: Law, Accounting, and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence (v0.9, April 2026) is the foundation of the project. It is an open-access manuscript of roughly 55,000 words that diagnoses four structural gaps through which the governance of AI fails and proposes a constitutional framework designed to close them. It was released through Zenodo with a persistent DOI and is also shared through SSRN and ResearchGate. It has begun to draw responses from scholars and practitioners across law, accounting, and AI policy.

The reception of v0.9, even at this early stage, has clarified four things.

First, the framework travels. The four gaps — Visibility, Rule-Execution, Categorical, and Measurement — describe recurring and recognisable failures of governance, and the analytical machinery developed around them extends beyond the jurisdictions the manuscript addressed. Readers in countries the manuscript did not cover have found the diagnostics applicable to their own. The break appears to be of one kind, even where the institutional starting points differ.

Second, the density is a major barrier. The manuscript was written for readers with substantial prior exposure to at least one of the multiple disciplines it synthesises, and readers without that exposure have found it difficult to hold the whole argument at once. This is a structural property of interdisciplinary work written at frontier density, and it is not correctable within the form. A second approach is required.

Third, the pace does not fit. Code After began in late 2024 as a single academic paper on the fusion of law and accounting in AI governance. By early 2025, it had expanded into a fifteen-chapter monograph of around 150,000 words intended for submission to a major university press. As the first draft came into shape, it became clear that the monograph path would take years — review, revision, production, print — during which AI would move so fast that much of the analysis might be overtaken before the book reached a reader. The decision was made in early 2026 to release a shorter open-access version at 55,000 words, structured to establish a dated scholarly record on Zenodo and to reach readers at a pace the subject matter required. That became v0.9, released in April 2026.

Even that decision has proved insufficient. In the eighteen months since the project began, AI has moved faster than any reasonable projection available at the start — more capital, more compute, more energy, more models, more capability, more competition between the U.S. and China and within each of their ecosystems for talent, capital, and market penetration. The ground the analysis stands on has kept shifting. The monograph path was too slow for the original 2025 conditions.

The open-access release was faster, and AI has still outpaced it. A publication rhythm sized to the subject matter has to assume continuous adjustment, because the subject matter does not stop moving while the analysis is being written. This is why the series is structured the way it is. Six papers at four-month intervals, each capable of standing alone, each updatable as the substrate evolves, each released at a cadence that has at least a chance of matching the ground it is describing. The work cannot outrun AI. It can, with discipline, avoid falling so far behind that it stops being useful.

Fourth, the framework reaches further than v0.9 can hold. As the work continued, it became clear that the arguments developed for governance also explain what is happening in other areas the manuscript did not address — language, education, work, evidence, measurement, jurisdiction. The break v0.9 named in governance recurs across every domain the inherited apparatus of modern life was built to service. Going back to add another gap and another section to v0.9 would distort a manuscript already built for a different purpose. The framework's reach is real, but v0.9 is not the vehicle for it.

A separate paper on language was considered in response, and from that process the recognition followed: the framework would need a series of its own, each extension sized to its domain and written on its own terms.

These lessons did not arrive as settled conclusions. They emerged in the doing. The series proceeds on that basis, and the discipline of the work is partly the discipline of staying honest about what is still being found out.