It was some intern...
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.Wasn't there anything relevant available? Screenshots of the new tools in a before/after collage perhaps?
Authors do it because it supposedly leads to better engagement, shows up bigger on social media, and breaks up the text. But generally, unless the visual content meaningfully adds to the text content, users will largely ignore it.
I genuinely don't understand this trend of slapping AI slop on top of your article. I've even seen good articles do it.
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.
I feel this has more importance than they think. Outside consultants would not have had this domain knowledge and would have spent months learning it. And then would have had to fix their mistakes because they misunderstood something (billed to the province, naturally)
Super disappointed to see most of the comments just complaining about AI and not engaging with the contents of the article.
That's kind of amazing. Alberta has a conservative govt so I am surprised "in-house" got the pass over "outside company". It is good to see fiscal conservatism over 'govt-bad' conservatism. Hats off to the deputy minister et al. for approving this.
Using Google Gemini to generate requirements/spec document from video is amazing. I wonder what the prompt looked like and if there was custom support to help process the videos.
Anyone else closed the article immediately after seeing the low-taste, sloppy image at the top?
How do you call this aesthetic? "Futuristic vomit"? AKA "Generate image of: code blocks, AI-brain image, diagram, smiling guy and bunch of other crap. Make it look cool and futuristic, make no mistakes"?
> The team’s approach was straightforward. Build working software fast. Put it in front of real users early. Collect feedback. Fix things quickly. Release updates every two weeks.
> That’s a 95% cost reduction. Both systems instead of one. Delivered faster. With 643 users already on the platform
This is a proven solution. These parts, the non-AI management ones, are proven to work in all sorts of places. Gov.uk is another example.
However, there's one massive problem with this: it doesn't involve the free market and it doesn't make any money for corporations to feed back to politicians in campaign donation kickbacks. It even involves respecting civil servants - maybe even paying them market wages! These parts are so heretical that most governments would choose the solution that 10X more expensive and also doesn't work, every single time.
This is the problem in a nutshell. Those firms are structured to extract money from their customers, not to produce useful work. The fact that anyone is signing contracts with them any more blows my mind.
chrisjj•1h ago
> what if a small team of public servants, equipped with modern AI development tools, built the replacement systems themselves?
Next: bridges and brain surgery.
actionfromafar•52m ago
On the other, procurement is so broken, that if their inhouse team is only marginally better, it's a win.
CoastalCoder•31m ago
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.
nottorp•26m ago
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.
vessenes•16m ago