How AppThentic finds a rule, asks about it, and keeps the answer honest.
This page is for the engineers who will be asked "is this real?" It explains the mechanism and shows real output.
Finding business rules in your systems
AppThentic reads your systems (repositories, docs, Slack and Jira) and looks for the logic that encodes business decisions: conditions on money, dates, roles, regions and status. It reads commits, pull requests, tests, tickets and threads for the reasoning that is already written down, so it only asks about what is missing.
41def refund_allowed(order, today): 42 window = 30 if order.channel != "b2b" else 60 43 return (today - order.delivered_on).days <= window
Why 30 days for consumer orders, rather than 60 as for B2B?
Our payment partner settles chargebacks within 35 days. Thirty keeps every refund inside that, so we never refund money already lost to a dispute.
Asking the right person
Ownership comes from who wrote, reviewed and last changed a rule, refined by the answers people give. Questions are few and specific, anchored in what the system really does: "Why 30 days rather than 60?" or "Where does this rule stop applying?" If the person asked isn't the decision-maker, AppThentic follows the answer to whoever is.
refunds/policy.py:42 sets 30 days for consumer orders and 60 for B2B. Why 30 rather than 60?
I implemented it, but Finance chose the number. Ask R. Mehta.
Our payment partner settles chargebacks within 35 days. Thirty keeps every refund inside that window.
Every fact carries its status
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Observed | Seen in the system or its behaviour |
| Documented | Written in an existing doc, ticket or commit |
| Inferred | AppThentic's reading, not yet confirmed by a person |
| Approved | Confirmed by the rule's owner |
| Disputed | Two sources disagree; both are kept |
| Stale | The system or the reason changed since approval |
| Unknown | Nobody has answered yet |
An Inferred rule is never shown as Approved. Coverage is shown openly, so a team sees which parts of the system are understood and which are not.
Use it from your tools
- MCP server: Claude Code, Cursor and other MCP-capable assistants can look up a rule, its reason and its owner before changing code.
Questions
Where does our data go?
Nowhere. AppThentic runs in your infrastructure, om included.
How much time does it take from rule owners?
A few short questions at a time, only about rules they own.
What if nobody knows why a rule exists?
It is marked Unknown, visibly, instead of guessed. You see exactly where the gaps are.
What if two people disagree?
Both answers are kept, and the rule stays Disputed until its owner resolves it.
How is this different from documentation or search tools?
Those show what your system does. AppThentic records why, from the person who decided, and keeps it current.
See it on your own system.
Click through the demo, or book thirty minutes and bring your hardest questions.