I searched this report for "test". Result: none found.

> what if a small team of public servants, equipped with modern AI development tools, built the replacement systems themselves?

Next: bridges and brain surgery.

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actionfromafar 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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nottorp 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> procurement is so broken

Anecdata: while i was in a tiny tiny software company, we got an in at a large auto manufacturer. They said they had been trying to get someone to do that job for like 2 years.

The job was of the 'two people 3 months' magnitude. The procurement system was also of the 'two people 3 months' magnitude so we simply gave up.

In the article's case, they could have done this even before coding assistants. It would have cost the estimated 5 million instead of 850k, but that's still 10x less than the 54 million.

	▲	actionfromafar 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I think the innovation here is social as much as technical. The AI Magic Sprinkle fairy dust on the proposal to solve internally, is what grants permission to go ahead. It both increases the chances of actual success and gives something external to put the blame on if something fails.

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CoastalCoder 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I totally agree.

As flawed as this new approach might turn out to be, the traditional approach may (or may not) have an even worse probability of success.

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chrisjj 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Good point. Beating lame ducks seems to be "AI"'s top use case.

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vessenes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.