You are missing the larger problem: it isn't a fixed capital cost you can put in the budget.

Modern accounting (for some good reasons) counts different costs in different buckets. If you invest in a system, the cost should be spread out over all the years the system is in use. However if you investing long term we want to be sure it is worth the investment - there is a point where something is not worth the cost. For things that are only for this year we can easially understand if the cost was worth it, but if we need to spread it out over many years it is much harder. If we can set a cost today we can have a debate on if it is worth the investment.

However designing something is not an fixed cost process. I cannot say if it will take me 1 week or another year to get the current bug I'm working on fixed, but if it takes more than a month my boss will say it isn't worth the cost of fixing it. (and then we get to sunk costs: what if I put in 1 month and am only 1 day from the fix, should I quit now?)

When you put a design contract out for bids they have to go big. They have to deliver for $54M even if things are harder. When someone says the real cost is likely to be $100M they really mean that once you have the $54M version you will realize what you wanted wasn't what you needed, and there is $46M in extras to turn what you specified into what you really need.

more general, it's related to the ongoing struggle between private vs state owned utilities. it is not clear from the get-go which approach is better. it most often depends on the quality of the people involved.

The original idea of doing it privately was that free market will compete for best solution at cheapest price but many, many, many projects later it ends up not being cheapest nor best, just ones that can navigate the politics and red tape best. And that before any kind of corruption gets involved.

It also gets very silly, like one public one that company I work won was literally just iterating the company that currently hosted their infra infrastructure, so the previous company automatically checks all the boxes and any new one have to fit that, and it went to silly degrees like describing clockspeed of CPUs that have to run it. We just gave them older servers that happened to have higher clocking CPUs so the requirement backfired badly on them.

And that is not even neccesarily malice on their party, they just didn't wanted to go thru PITA of migrating everywhere just because some pencil pusher required looking for vendors every few years "in case it will be cheaper".

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I’m at the point where if I see an AI image at the start of an article I just back right out. It would be so much better if the author just didn’t include an image at all. What did this image actually add to the content of the post? If you’re just doing something for the sake of doing it you’ve lost the plot.

The tech isn't the big news. It's the process opportunity for governments. That said, I did really like what they reported on a use case of Gemini -- they got a bunch of people to video every single process in the old systems, and then got Gemini to watch the video and write full specs for the new systems. Niiice.

What you have in civil government is a lot of people and a lot of time -- turning that into inputs for acceptance on the new codebase is super smart -- and using only their expertise (legacy system screen caps), but relying on the AI to do all the tech spec work feels super smart.

Deputy ministers are supposed to be the top non-political/bureaucrat position in a ministry, so theoretically it wouldn't matter if the government is conservative. The elected minister sets the goals and gives general directives, the professional deputy is in charge of execution. In reality this neat distinction is often broken, some governments politicize appointments even below the minister level, etc.

We're having the users who understand the business processes use Claude to create clickable demos. Then these are presented to the engineering team to re-build. The users are loving it because they can ask for exactly what they want.

In our (B2B) case we hired support personnel from the industry, so we have a lot of in-house domain knowledge that way. And since we've retained the majority of our employees that has spread, so now most devs have a lot too.

It really does make us punch above our weight. We can ask important questions and identify critical issues early in development of new things.

You can look at a histogram of number of words per sentence, and you'll find immediately that it's written by an AI.

    When?
    Today.
    Minutes.
    Four years.
    $54 million.
    Collect feedback.
    Delivered faster.
    Not days.
    Not weeks.
    It's free.
    ...
    No $19 million in upfront costs.
    They're now doing meaningful work.
    Let me put that in context.
    That's a 95% cost reduction.
    But think about what that represents.
    And we can show you how.

It's written like a LinkedIn post, with the TED Talk pauses for effect. I've come to filter out anything written in that style.

It's written by an AI. That's why it's a bit shit.

Well, an AI will be using it of course. The people will be using the AI.

> I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams from the big consultancy companies.

This assumes that small in-house teams are inherently effective/efficient, which is not necessarily true.

In this sense, the difference between proven engineering leads (as the article states/assumes) leading a small team versus AI is that the latter is entirely under their control, which minimizes the risk.

So AI vs. small teams is about controlling/guaranteeing effectiveness/efficiency.

On the one hand, yes.

On the other, procurement is so broken, that if their inhouse team is only marginally better, it's a win.

Mm, did you read the part where they have hundreds of people in and reporting bugs and feature requests every week? Testing is probably too granular a concept for the target audience of this blog post.

Well, Nate Glubish seems to be the Minister of Technology and Innovation of Alberta.

When the article is written by AI too, it makes reading it an exercise in trying to distil it back to what you think it was prompted with.

I don't see any reason to engage with obvious slop, and I wish people didn't submit it to HN.

I'm happy to be part of Canada, go back to whatever country you came from.