Your `if` statements are a database nobody can query

Somewhere in your codebase there is a line that looks like this: if ( user . plan === ' enterprise ' || user . tenantId === ' acme-corp ' ) { // ... } Nobody remembers who wrote the second half of that condition. It has been there for two years. It is almost certainly still load-bearing. Here is the thing I want to convince you of: that line isn't code. It's data, and it's stored in the worst possible place. Every conditional that encodes a business decision is really a row. It has a condition, an outcome, and a bunch of implicit context about when it applies. You have hundreds of these rows. They're spread across a dozen services, written in four different styles, and there is no way to list them. You have a database. You just can't query it. Five things a database gives you that your code doesn't Once you look at it this way, the problems stop feeling like sloppiness and start feeling structural. There's no schema. One service decides a customer is premium by checking plan === 'premium' . Another checks subscription.tier > 2 . A third checks a flag that was set during a migration in 2023. All three are "the same rule" until the day they aren't, and there's nothing in the system that would notice the drift. There's no way to query it. Try to answer a simple question: what rules are live in production right now? You can't. Someone has to read the source. And grep won't save you, because the interesting conditions are compound, spread across guard clauses, and half of them are expressed as an early return rather than an if . There are no migrations. Changing a rate limit from 100 to 200 requires a pull request, a review, a CI run, and a deploy window. You're pushing a code change through the full pipeline to change a number. It's a schema migration with none of the tooling that makes schema migrations tolerable. There's no audit log. Git tells you who edited the line. It doesn't tell you who decided the rule, when it was supposed to expire, or whether the customer it