It’s frustrating when reports like this cite the “highly interoperable nature” of commercial software as a given. Interoperability doesn’t mean “everything in one place”—it means the opposite. But redefining it allows vendors to present a magical solution.

corollary: if you run an open source library with any users at all, you are now in a vulnerability-finding arms race with those who will mechanically find and exploit security issues in your code… and embarrassingly, any software that depends on it

new post on translation, holding different versions of reality, and living between worlds mikegallagher.org/posts/of-med...

Noting that NHS England currently has job ads out for a CDIO and CDAO (this is in addition to the Department of Health and Social Care CDO): findajob.dwp.gov.uk/details/1794... findajob.dwp.gov.uk/details/1794... There's a month to apply.

“bottlenecks are not natural obstacles – they are, in most cases, the consequence of increasing production” 💎

“We continue to immediately ban and publicly ridicule everyone who submits AI slop to the project.”

So it looks like the government is announcing a National Police Service. Again. It's one of those ideas that seems perfect from the outside, but yet we never seem to be able to get right. It got my brain whirring, so I wrote up some reflections. andreasthinks.me/posts/reflec... #Policing #uk

formats over apps

How many govt services end up crocked, despite the efforts of skilled teams. (Policy and delivery being treated as separate. Shared platform cosplay. Leaders rotating off every 2yrs.) medium.com/@veroj/inter...

Wrote about my first 7 months transforming the technology underpinning the national breast screening programme: lizlutgendorff.substack.com/p/lessons-le...

My sense is that the Test and Learn movement in the public sector anchors much more on “build-and-test” than “describe-and-defend” as this essay sets them out… possibly to its detriment?

“You want your structural engineers to be drawing, not laying bricks, after all. I don’t know if structural engineering works like this, but software engineering doesn’t. In practice, architecture advice often has to be ignored by the people on the ground.” www.seangoedecke.com/you-cant-des...

My 2025 #yearnote as—sorry!—a listicle. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/2025/

I disagree with the conclusions of this excellent, reasonable article by @zoescaman.bsky.social zoescaman.substack.com/p/the-palant...

One of the many joys of using AI for programming is the creation of huge PRs on complex topics that the authors barely understand, but still suggest "because they work". Here's a great example from #OCaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/... Kudos to OCaml's maintainers for handling this so gracefully.

This really resonates. Meetings are the synchronisation penalty public servants pay for an overwhelmingly synchronous, distributed system of management. The “meeting culture” is not optional—it expresses a cultural void where autonomy can’t flourish.

This fantastic paper "proposes a vision of AI that embraces local vernaculars, the multiplicity of objectives, the responsibilities that come with producing persons, and the potential of instigating rather than circumventing political contestation." read.dukeupress.edu/public-cultu...

A few ideas on what "good software" (not "good code"!) is, touching ethics, interop, commercials and functionality 🧵

"[Open standards] can feel like a burden to the participants. They should! The alternative is each product imposes its incompatible opinions directly on the users rather than working through the trade-offs with competitors first." Yet as we outsource "the work" to suppliers, we outsource this too.

This morning's AWS outage prompted reflections in NHSE towers that "disaster recovery" and "inclusive services" directly overlap. For instance, the Record a vaccination service have designed a paper-only data capture process for when the internet is unavailable

Clichés take hold in political language, a vicious cycle that runs through campaign speeches, through citizens’ expectations, and down into the software we build or procure by cliché, whose accordingly poor performance invites further calls for simplification. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/design-...

a wonderfully humane take on the real consequences of our choices around ai and teamwork and diversity and pretty sure i would have been ugly crying by the end.

Some reflections on @duncanjbrown.com's recent article "Team dynamics after AI", which is one of the best/most important pieces of writing I've read on AI in a long time

Why yes that IS a @charity.wtf sticker on my work notebook! 💖

Why I don't believe in "small giants": mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/team-dy...

If prompts are all we have left to record our intentions when we're programming, we should keep them. Automatically, if possible. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/prompts...

In praise of AI applications that can finish. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/structu...

A *massive* thank you to @duncanjbrown.com, Elliot from HFEA, @ayymanduh.bsky.social and @mrdudders.bsky.social for being brilliant at Data Bites last night - one of the best we've done Watch back as live: app.sli.do/event/6buz4o... #pddatabites

If you're interested in UK #govtech or #opendata, the Incubator for AI have just open-sourced this like of "Awesome UK Government Datasets" and are looking for contributors! github.com/i-dot-ai/awe...

🧵 Some standout quotes from this paper, which uses the Prison Service as an example of how centralised political control can impoverish us when it annihilates the autonomy of people directly responsible for delivering public services: bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...

Ministers and officials need to confront the two lies that dog spending reviews: effiencies are rarely that, instead they lead to blunt cuts with unconsidered consequences; the Treasury's self-identity as a strategic performance budgeter is shattered by their increased use of input controls

This was an honour! ❤️

Chris Cunningham eat your heart out

This is righteous. Imo gatekeeping is not only a plausible explanation, but *the best explanation* for all the gratuitous complexity in frontend development that’s sprung up over the last decade.

More detail in here. Test and learn sounds sensible but (a) we all know secondments will mean PwC, (b) planting people from small teams as heroes in big orgs is tough on everyone, (c) why not just give more money and power to people who know what they're doing? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

At DfE “board” had got mixed up with “authority” so people reached for the first when they wanted the second

Thinking about this post a lot this week www.ftrain.com/wwic

New language today: the expression “code piece” instead of “piece of code”, for an LLM output. The speaker meant piece as in “artefact”, not piece as in “fragment”, and the LLM had “broken” the piece by making a bad edit.

How do you refactor a country? Whilst top-down reform on a national scale is obviously the road to hell, I think we should take the #Platformland invitation to radicalism seriously. mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/the-way...

My old team is recruiting. If you're interested in setting the UK Government right on AI, stop snarking online and put your career where your mouth is. ai.gov.uk/join/