LLM execution needs to become 100x cheaper, and sovereign. I can’t see a pathway to that without cheaper electricity.

Classic use after free bug. This had me head scratching for literally WHOLE MINUTES 😂. I’ve not had so much fun on a personal project since 2016.

I shipped the ability to enforce touch ID to allow <specific process> to access <specific directories>. It also can create short lived sessions so it’s not annoying. Security should not be annoying! github.com/craigjbass/c...

AI economics are already starting to hit. The big established hyperscalers are loss leading their products, meanwhile the unestablished startup - anthropic - are trying anything to move into a profitable position. That $20 plan? Yeah you’re probably spending more than $20 of their compute per month.

I don’t know whether to be happy or sad that the days of writing wild regexes <<just to refactor a codebase or reformat some data into code / method calls>> are literally over. Whole generations saved from matching groups and negative lookaheads.

We might be at the tipping point where mutation testing is more effective than TDD. Same goal and outcome, different methodology

I've brought the energy impact of craigjbass.github.io/clearancekit/ down into battery-usable levels in the latest 4.2.17 release. It no longer drains your battery in 1 hour with millions of incredibly pointless UI updates.

Been tracking down a gnarly intermittent bug. I thought it was concurrency or performance... turned out it was a simple issue & solved in github.com/craigjbass/c.... On the plus side now I have an awesome metrics system. So I hooked it up to the GUI...

OK I'm happy with the performance of the App Jail feature now. Release a non-beta version! github.com/craigjbass/c...

Latest beta release of ClearanceKit github.com/craigjbass/c... now supports jailing processes like Node.js to specific paths. It also propagates the jail to subprocesses and taints them even if they get reparented. You have to fettle it to get nodejs to start (so it can load dependencies).

I built a fully featured endpoint security tool for macOS >>> find out why in the project readme github.com/craigjbass/c...

I think CyberEssentials+ criteria is fundamentally wrong for macOS, with the right MDM policies. “Local admin access” to a device is viewed as *unrestricted*, which is simply not the case when combined with endpoint security APIs and policies. Impact is that devs have a sad time.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026... The amount of pothole repairs I have seen over the last 3-5 years fail within the first year is staggering… have we suddenly forgotten how to repair roads … or is it something else?

Before GenAI I had a good sense of how long it would take me to build something… so i wouldn’t bother if it was a personal project and would take too long (to do right, to achieve feature levels, etc) Now with AI… i have absolutely no idea, so I’m tackling personal projects and completing them

People keep saying AI is going to replace humans in dev teams… I think what’s more likely is that AI is going to increase the cost base of running a dev team… think every dev gets a $200 per month subscription plus additional credits… which means you can afford less humans overall.

People that don’t understand what good “digital delivery” looks like might view “digital” as akin to throwaway code seen produced by digital marketing agencies… dismissing the good engineering techniques applied at scale and at pace across the public sector.

If you really want to slow down programmes of work around your system, assuming it has an API and lots of systems want to connect to it, make it really expensive to spin up new environments for testing. Make it cost the same as a whole production environment, and take multiple weeks/months of time

Providing corporate laptops for people who write code and deploy software to production is nothing like providing laptops for people who don’t. It is more similar to providing a platform to software teams. It requires deep understanding of the nature of their work and the way that dev tools work

Do you know what the best way to slow things down? - do more stuff in parallel - add more people The winning formula always has been a) laser focus and b) small teams

We need to make public transportation cheaper in the UK. Yes, we could explore lowering fares but is this sustainable? What about making public transport (including to your usual place of work) tax deductible. Then sell volume train fares to employers to create stable train revenue demand.

There is no such thing as a “business strategy” nor “tech strategy”. There is just “the strategy”. People separate them but they always discover failure or compromise.

In a world where you don’t regularly see your colleagues f2f… I think people forget how important interpersonal relationships are, and how difficult they are to maintain over video calls. It requires active effort from BOTH parties, even more tricky for groups to resolve interpersonal dynamics.

Hmm, the usual approach of “has >5 years real world experience in X” to determine if someone is good does not apply to cutting edge things like AI engineering. Things that are on the left of the wardley map… you can’t “buy” the knowledge without spending extreme amounts of money or getting lucky.

Getting these vibes, really

It is okay to fund and build a thing that is designed entirely for other software development teams to use/integrate with… so that the end user facing systems in the overall “whole system” context are simpler/easier to deliver faster/reliable/secure/etc. BUT product management of these are tricky!

When government services turn users into enterprise service busses, ferrying data between disjointed steps on a complex journey… this is what drives administrative burden up. I’d hypothesise that your population only has so much bandwidth to deal with admin burden, before impacting productivity

Factorio is really good at teaching theory of constraints Factorio Space Age is really good at teaching you that you are smart enough to manage that much complexity at the same time on your own 😂

How did I miss WHSmiths changing its name to TG Jones. 🫨

The UK has multiple methods that appear to solve “identity”; - driving license - passport - national insurance number - birth certificate - government gateway - GOV.UK OneLogin None of them solve the whole problem. For various Reasons ™️. We do need to tackle that. What do other countries do?

“Vibe Coding Cleanup Specialist”… what an absolutely amazing opportunity for TDD loving, approval test wielding, extreme programmers everywhere.

Supply chain attacks are a real threat Cyber security investment is urgent It isn’t more important than treating people with dignity and respect

The service design around “abandoned vehicles” is really poor. > car with no number plates is not considered abandoned > DVLA are like its LA problem > LA use fix my street which routes to highways team > highways team are like “not my problem” it’s a parking enforcement issue (diff team)

This latest Sharepoint vulnerability shows how important multiple trust boundaries are necessary in system design. Also why deserialisation of arbitrary data from any user is bad. This video has the best description I’ve found for anyone looking to avoid the same mistakes! youtu.be/HL8YZwjZHFE

I wish that I could, in building digital services, just tell users to stop using the service so much. Like water companies do. This is surely predictable and could have been avoided with appropriate infrastructure investment.

Private finance for public service is back. How do we learn the lessons of past issues here? We produced an @nao.org.uk report drawing together lessons from 140 NAO reports on.ft.com/446gixl

The platform side announcer this morning I noticed it didn’t say “the blah blah blah southwestern railway service to… etc” It said “Arterio Service” Arterio isn’t a company it’s the train stock. I wonder if it’s intentional or the result of a code change now these trains are under public control

GenAI is still in its cheap massively capex funded phase. Couple dozen £ per month. ChatGPT wants to sell me a £200 per month subscription. So this is probably still at a loss for them but they think cheap…. I reckon the prices are going to be WILD in a few years. Properly wild.

Denmark, Ministry of Digital Affairs publishes it will ditch Microsoft for Linux and Libreoffice.

Outlook encourages people to not reply to calendar invites by default. Which lowers productivity of teams. In Google if you decline, the event remains but it is striked through. In Microsoft if you decline, THE EVENT DISAPPEARS AND THE EMAIL THAT INVITED YOU IS DELETED. Super confusing.

People are sceptical about LLMs but frankly I’ve seen some crimes in legacy systems that no GenAI would ever commit. I’m not sure I’m scared or happy that this is the case.

Schleswig-Holstein state in Germany decides to migrate away from Microsoft 365 for productivity suite. I suspect it’s going to be a challenging move, but I generally support diversifying the number of suppliers in this space.

I think the myth that agility is this “digital” or “tech” thing done in shady basements by nerds (or top floors) is sort of half the battle. No you can’t keep doing agile and good digital delivery if the organisation policies and processes can’t adapt to digital delivery.

I suspect “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (which is nonsense) will get more traction as a tool to jail or restrict freedoms of people Trump doesn’t like. Expect some people “everyone” hates will be punished first with this tool e.g. Musk. Trump has already said that Musk has TDS. It will expand.

Controv: Day rate caps make sense when the strategy is to outsource substantive roles in volumes. Where staff augmentation is the model and margin is blended across many teams. If Gov is serious about reducing volumes, whilst accessing expertise in bursty pattern then day rate caps are incompatible

Unconvinced that optimising for maximal GDP is optimal for the future of humanity. Fundamentally, we need to divert course away from “infinite economic growth” as a species and discover a new way of measuring species enbetterment.

Looking at business models around media is fascinating. Throughout history produce has been in limited supply, you buy a manufactured item. For the first time we are experiencing infinite abundance of some items. Legally digital piracy is theft. Ethics in the public consciousness do not match this

Imagine if trains we so simple; just tap in and out, and cost was calculated on a simple system like “as the crow flies” mileage. Like £10 per 100 miles. And what if they were run as a critical enabler of the economy, not as a method to make a profit, like as a public service.

Remember: engaging in cyber security theatre decreases cyber security, folks.

“A new Trello is coming to everyone soon” Literally nobody wants this but the quasi-JIRA team that was put in charge of Trello.