Typical of Villa to let us all down when it matters. #KRO

Messing around with m5stack.com devices is fun...

Voters contend with 'dodgy' data in party leaflets for English local elections www.theguardian.com/politics/202... leaflet analysis from @fullfact.org Election Leaflets electionleaflets.org The Lib Dems were pioneers in this area but it looks like Labour and Reform have caught up #LE2026 #datavis

For the past couple of weeks I've been messing around with open weight locally-hosted LLMs. They're better than ever. I'd recommend having a play... loosemore.com/2026/04/16/p...

Great thread from Ciaran. Genuinely world class state capability. In a new(ish) institution.

@alexparsons.bsky.social has been thinking about the increased demand on public systems created by #AI - not just #FOI but for all areas where the public interface with government. Here's a suggestion for an approach that can work for the public benefit: www.mysociety.org/2026/04/14/r...

I've wasted so much time over the last 30 years matching shonky bloody UK address datasets. Just needed to get that out there. Feel a bit better already.

I've written a piece for Computer Weekly about how public services are at risk of agentic flooding. www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Floo...

@lccmunicipal.bsky.social I thought you might like this commemorative plate I found at my parents’

I am normally keen to support hard working civil servants trying to deliver difficult projects under huge pressure but the Pensions Scheme debacle is inexcusable.

Some people struggle with digital services all of the time. But all of us will struggle with them some of the time. Really excellent new report on the myriad small steps needed to fix this digital participation gap. www.connectionproject.co.uk/insights/mis...

Introducing OverBanded.com, a total nonsense made possible by AI. It guesses if you're in the "right" council tax band using logic that would make a surveyor weep. loosemore.com/2026/03/20/i...

Brilliant analysis of what went wrong with the expensive redesign of Australia's version of the met office app. leisareichelt.substack.com/p/what-went-...

Our next event! 🚨 6PM, WED 25 March 🚨 At the MoJ or online. Lara Groves and Oliver Bruff, Ada Lovelace Institute, on AI transcription tools in social care ​Owen Prendeville, on the ICO’s campaign to drive improvements for access to care records luma.com/8i84tnwy Please share! Thanks 🙏

Me and my LLMs were beaten by the bins. loosemore.com/2026/03/13/b...

I've paid for a Rest Is History subscription since 2021, but they've just quietly raised their price by 33% and so it's back to the ad skipping for me.

Making public services confusing and time-consuming has long been a tactic to reduce demand. AI Agents will kill the practice. This is good. And bad. New trade-offs needed, and these will need to be uncomfortably explicit. All terribly un-British, I know. loosemore.com/2026/03/11/d...

I blogged about using AI Agents to infer benefit entitlement directly from bank statements. Which is kinda wild... (also, Open Banking is a huge national asset). loosemore.com/2026/03/05/4...

Has anyone got OpenClaw working well with a local LLM? This article is giving me the fear, but I'm sure most of my stuff doesn't need cloud LLM oomph rentamac.io/best-local-l...

I fear the French are overtaking us... goodtech.info/datagouv-ser...

Over the weekend I played with using OpenClaw (Opus 4.5) and my new MissingBenefit.com MCP server to conduct mock benefit entitlement sessions. The results were... well, have a look at the video my blog post. loosemore.com/2026/03/02/o...

My friend Russell on persuading the powers that be that ministers, apparently for the first time ever, watch a ppt-style presentation in the actual Cabinet Room - leading to some excellent advice about visiting a venue before you present.

You don’t hear much about efficient and effective govt so here’s a good news story in our latest @nao.org.uk report - HMRC collected an extra £16bn from the biggest businesses last year after it took a “more hands-on approach” www.ft.com/content/c96d... (Full report: www.nao.org.uk/reports/taxi...)

What's the best OpenBanking API provider for normal UK customers? Just need statement read access, nothing complicated, but ideally statement entries normalised across banks @dgen.net

Most IFAs are toast.

I've done some more blogging, this time about MCP. "In the future, all our AI Agent Overlords will speak MCP." loosemore.com/2026/02/27/i...

I cannot claim that as my own. I have picked that up from teams in Digital Prevention Services at NHS E who I would say are some of the humans doing digital things in some of the best ways right now.

This is disappointing and I don’t understand why. It was useful when @therealnooshu.bsky.social did (started?) it, to be able to see a very broad UK-wide level of browser usage. Are they going to ask @therealnooshu.bsky.social to delete his old tweets?

"Successful Digital Public Infrastructure should aim to be so good it’s negligent not to use it." Taken from a wonderful talk by @richardpope.org on how to apply the principles in his book Platformland to deliver the NHS 10-year plan. www.rpp.works/ways-of-doin...

I wonder if anyone in Cabinet Office has read up on the Canadian Federal Government's outsourcing of its payroll? www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Good vibe coding

AI agents will join up government before government joins up government. This may be a mixed blessing. Blog post. with some reflections about my recent agentic adventures: loosemore.com/2026/02/25/a...

I've written a blog post about the dream of joined-up government. It's slightly grumpy. loosemore.com/2026/02/24/t...

Brilliant, geeky, healthy news... well done to @bengoldacre.bsky.social et al.

So I made an app. It didn't go well. tomloosemorework.wordpress.com/2026/02/23/l...

I'm making an app. I know, I know...

Delay Repay is doomed. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Good day to do this trip...

I wanted a comprehensive UK-wide Benefits Calculator API to feed my OpenClaw agent. I emailed one of the existing web calculators over the weekend to ask if they'd give me access to one, but I'm inpatient so I made one myself over the weekend. See MissingBenefit.com Crazy times.

Spending Saturday evening watching AI debug its own code. It's genuinely mesmerising, and the code gets less trashy by the month. I can still tell that's it's still kinda trashy. Just.

New blog Data infrastructure as economic power Those who set the rules and govern data flows, control the value agentgav.medium.com/data-infrast...

People are wondering when AI will be helping people navigate government services. The answer is, uh, right now. Here's Gemini (built into Chrome!) giving both accurate and helpful information to a common and high stakes question on a SNAP application.

Finally reading @harikunzru.bsky.social 's derive account, full of so many familiar spots, Dee's mirror, the Hawksmoor churches, the Mudchute circle. I've walked the same routes, and felt the same exhaustion, sense of something just out of reach, a shared dreaming. harpers.org/archive/2026...

People often jump to saying online propaganda is either the work of radicalised actors, or else Russia. In practice, it’s amazing how often the answer is much simpler – someone is chasing either (a) clout, (b) money, or (c) both.

I'm 30+ years into this. And I've seen many terrible things. Terrible services run by demoralised, disempowered teams.

I'm on a train from Bristol to London. As we left Bristol, I noticed the government today published its Fuel Finder API, sharing real time prices at petrol stations around the UK. I'm just arriving in London, Here's the app that I made using AI while en route. fuel-finder-replit3507.replit.app

GOV.UK One Login, you say? I now find myself managing 3 different GOV.UK One Login accounts.

I built a little web app that makes it simple to send a photo postcard to friends/family (and the outbound card has a QR code that makes it easy for them to reply with their own photo postcard back) Such a delight. Seriously, use Claude Code to build stuff you want to exist in the world.

Reading this made my day, from a lead designer in the NHS. mikegallagher.org/posts/in-pub...

Claude Cowork is also LOTS of fun, and a little bit less wild west that Clawdbot. Cowork just submitted this FOI request for me with minimal faff www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/week...