Knowledge as Code

Martin Monperrus

For millennia, knowledge has been carried by language, and large language models still put language at the center. Yet the coding agents built on these models mostly write code. This paper is a contribution to epistemology, which asks what kind of knowledge code is and how it is obtained. We define knowledge as code as knowledge written in a programming language or in a machine-parsable data format, whose validity can be checked by executing it. We define thirteen epistemic properties of knowledge media and show that code is the first medium to have all of them. We distinguish two ways in which knowledge enters code, encoding and learning by execution, where code is both the experiment and the record of its result. Agents make learning by execution observable, since their trajectories record every probe, observation and line of code they keep. Code is thus not only a tool of knowledge work but a knowledge medium in its own right, the first that can check what it holds.