Legalize on Xataka, 14 countries and the first RAG on legislation
From Hacker News to Xataka
Less than two weeks ago I posted Legalize on Hacker News. 140 comments in three hours. It was wild. But what happened next was even better.
On April 5, Xataka published an article about the project. Xataka is the most-read technology publication in Spanish. That's a whole different level of visibility.
The combination of Hacker News (international tech community) and Xataka (massive Spanish-speaking audience) has brought Legalize to people I never imagined. Lawyers, civil servants, journalists, researchers. People who don't know what Git is but who perfectly understand the problem Legalize solves. The legalize-es repository has already surpassed 1,000 stars on GitHub.
The open source community is incredible
This is what surprised me the most. After the Hacker News post, contributions started pouring in from all over the world. Not requests or suggestions: code. People who just went ahead and adapted Legalize for their country's legislation.
Legalize now covers 14 countries: Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Greece, Andorra, Chile, and Uruguay. Each with its own official source, structure, and particularities. And most of these repositories were built by community contributors.
On top of that, Legalize has been included in awesome-spain, a curated list of the best Spanish open source projects. A nice recognition.
This is exactly what I hoped for from open source, but living it is something else entirely. Seeing someone in Korea, Austria, or Andorra take your project and adapt it to their reality is priceless. The project is no longer just mine: it belongs to everyone who is contributing. Thank you all for your help.
An API for the world
With so much data growing, it was clear that a standardized way to access it was needed. So I launched a public API at legalize.dev. It's free, requiring only a login to manage usage.
The idea is simple: any developer, researcher, or company should be able to query versioned legislation programmatically. No scraping, no PDFs, no proprietary databases. Clean, structured, and versioned data, accessible with an HTTP call.
Someone has already built a RAG
And here's what excited me the most. A guy named Dani took the Legalize data and built a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) on top of it. That is: an AI system that can answer questions about legislation using Legalize data as its source of truth.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Legalize isn't meant to be the final application: it's meant to be the infrastructure. The clean, versioned data that others can build on. The fact that someone has already done it, this early, confirms the idea makes sense.
What's next?
The project keeps going. More countries are on the way, the API will keep growing, and I'm working on legalize.dev to make all this information accessible to everyone, not just developers.
What started as an idea that had been bouncing around in my head for years is now a project with a community, international traction, and a real product. Let's see where it goes.
The code is on GitHub: github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize