I think one of the more interesting questions around AI right now is what types/shapes of new organizations it enables.
Who's doing the best thinking-out-loud on this?
The best quality of life use of AI I have now is a little tool where I can just go for a walk-and-think an use Siri to save thoughts and ideas, and then have Claude process them based on type (eg this is research, kick off a research task! this is an idea, riff or propose an MVP!)
A piece of advice that I strongly believe in public/civic entrepreneurship is that it can be very effective to dial in on one key issue that basically no one else is working on and go hard at it. I think the first folks who apply AI leverage to this will have massive public positive impact.
People who work on government technology need to be taking much more seriously what it means if AI enables a small team of permanent staff to fully own frequent changes to the system, rather than managing vendor change requests.
What consumer services do you wish were provided by the government? To be honest this surprised me! It's a durable pattern for new (private) entrants to be the way that consumer things get better, but much less so for government ones.
I’m not sure it requires unification, just as smartphones did not reach 100% channel switching
A salient point made a decade ago in civic tech thought was that people's expectations have been elevated by consumer tech relative to government services. Worth wrestling with what an even bigger gap—including with agentic volume increases—could similarly imply.
I was learning a bit about pandemic preparedness and have discovered a new vector to build defenses against:
The SF Cal Academy of Science on a day that daycare and schools are closed.
@econberger.bsky.social do you have any go-to for empirical scenarios of AI caused job losses? The impetus for my question is starting to build out what the scenarios would imply for benefits programs (eg SNAP, UI) and what one would expect the second order impacts of that to be as a result
We've had user research participants telling us how they use LLMs to summarise their NHS App health records for them.
We are doing evals on this! One upside is that all of these things are empirically measurable, today.
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.
I really don’t like snark and try to minimize it in my life these days. But… Google’s model doing bad things it’s aware are bad in pursuit of maxing out KPIs is… pretty darn funny to me.
(Also this paper scares me, as does much research in this area honestly.)
Fixing government technology outcomes is not possible if one rejects the very premise that it is a market, and you need market interventions on both the demand and supply sides.
Yup
Truly though! (Someone did this internally just for fun this week.)
A bit of tacit knowledge on a Friday: it's long been a known heuristic that if you're doing innovation/tech change stuff inside government, often the political leadership wants something flashy but not so deeply impactful - a flash tax.
Take note: AI is very good at generating flashy web apps.
If AI capabilities are really on the exponential, then the constraint for using them for true public goods in the economic sense becomes giving the government the agency (capacity) to actually do things.
State capacity = capability + agency
If you have a persistent AI agent with memory, I highly recommend assigning it to read James C. Scott's classic, "Seeing Like A State"
There’s a surprising amount of criticism/FUD around government use of AI that, when read carefully, rounds to the assertion that government cannot be trusted to do effective management at all.
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.
The most *practical* value I've gotten out of Claude Code is writing a bunch of helper scripts for Asana (where I manage my life + our household stuff).
It's mostly grinding out friction, but for tasks I do hundreds of times a day... awesome.
(And I usually run on Claude iOS app; no server needed)
A small-but-mighty trick for using LLMs for cooking:
- Use an AI voice transcriber app to just walk through your pantry and capture it all by just talking
- Do the same for fresh fridge stuff
- Now you can give the LLM *way* more context for what to cook tonight
File under things that are wild to me:
Claude Code can't access congress.gov pages because their Cloudflare config blocks all bot traffic.
Pretty sure today marks the first time a current or former Medicaid Director has ever used Claude Code. (Was pretty darn cool to facilitate it.)
I think those who want to do serious work on fixing government procurement outcomes should be most focused on what on the government side makes rational optimizing vendors do what they do.
One of the more interesting things to me about AI agents is they potentially open up a market structure where a payer pays for an outcome, rather than software (or change requests on software.)
For AI transition philanthropy this could be interesting: market making for current market failures.
Candidly I can't believe Google continues to fumble its user advantage on AI so badly.
Gemini in Google Docs... can't directly change formatting in the doc?
(This is could be an interesting eval to track just how far behind Google's inertia is putting it.)
I'm early in the exploratory phase, but it's so interesting to give Claude Code a SNAP automation project scope that is illegal under federal rules (but not implausible) and see it refuse to build it.
(Interestingly, if asked to move barely >30 day apps to the end of the queue, it accepts.)
I guess I just don’t believe the change I care about can come from that; and also plenty of prior art on “performance management” or “good government” without tech. It’s fine to do something else! But at the core is “what does tech (now) enable that makes the solution space different?”
