> where we identify public servants with strong technical aptitude across government, bring them into dedicated product teams
> 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.
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.
You would be a fool to not ensure that things will go at least a little easier in even the worst case.
The other option: cost plus bids (that is you pay their actual costs plus a fixed amount of profit) is even easier to game because you can add costs in so many ways. That is why most large bids are fixed cost despite that downside - they are much harder to hide extra costs in.
There is no alternative to carefully watching your suppliers. Some are more honest than others (and you should blacklist the worst).
You still have to watch your suppliers even when they are in house. Things change, but not the fundamental problems. In many cases out sourcing really is the better cheaper option (this seems to be when an expert can be a deeper expert because they do the same thing for multiple different groups)
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".
Great idea, and hopefully great results. But it’s written like LinkedIn “broetry” and that AI image at the top promises a fluffy article. Maybe expand a bit on some of the impressive tech described in the body?
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.
I've been saying this for a while now. They could just have put an Alberta landscape shot or something else that's actually aesthetically pleasing and relevant, and doesn't feel as trashy as the picture actually in the article.
I genuinely don't understand this trend of slapping AI slop on top of your article. I've even seen good articles do it.
An image signals that the author put time and energy into the article and that they have an eye for detail. Even if it's an AI generated image because the author still had to pick a fitting image.
I disagree. Especially with AI, it’s far too easy to generate and insert an image with no time, energy, or eye for detail.
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.
If you generate an image that contains a bunch of low-quality gobbledegook, the signal that it sends is that you have zero eye for detail. Look at any single part of that image, and you will notice how little detail there actually is.
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.
> 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.
Ah, that's what the AI ingredient is.
Seems reasonable, the kind of drudge work that gets avoided because nobody wants to do it. Requirements-capture what the existing system does. This often fails in the real world because it's done at some distance: either writing down what they think the system does, or want it to do, or getting political interference to pretend the process is something other than it is, but ignoring the actual working on the ground process.
"On the client side, this project would not have been possible without the exceptional support of Deputy Minister Mark Kleefeld and his team at the Ministry of Infrastructure. From the very beginning, Infrastructure’s leadership understood what we were trying to accomplish and backed it fully. That kind of top-down support from the client ministry is rare, and it made all the difference."
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.
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.
> They understand the business processes they’re digitizing.
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)
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.
Writing quality was distracting. Very breathey. Hard to understand if I was getting important information or not -- but it's ok, some people will defend this style.
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.
The only time I want to read something written by AI is when I am interacting with an LLM directly. I don’t know who these people are that think others want to read their slop. Even if the content is good, I can’t stand reading it.
I don't know... I read the article, and what I really saw was a simpler argument: The buy vs build decision had drifted so far to capture by vendor, where the vendor charged to gather the already in-existence in-house knowledge, that it was much cheaper to build in-house. The AI bits could be seen as a speed-up, but I think it more likely that those designing the new system were designing from pain. That is, they knew the pain points based upon years of intimate knowledge. No wonder the new system, stood up quickly, and quite possible still in MVP mode, is so popular.
In brief, the story isn't AI as an accelerant. It's someone finally letting loose their internal knowledge to build to spec rather than buy.
The shortlist came down to four major consulting firms.
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.
This sounds like the exact type of system my team replaces. 4 years and $54M sounds like some consultancies saw a money piñata (government contract) and decided to take a crack at it.
There is no reality on this planet where this project costs $54M and 4 years. Good on the folks in the ministry to notice this and not blindly follow implement.
I wonder how much of the needs satisfied by this software in Alberta is also needed by other states?
Yes, it's great that they saved money and built what they need so quickly, but a catch with govt is that they build out these proprietary processes that need more bespoke software.
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. I've seen this over and over again (the problem is that large organisations often prefer to go the slow and expensive route with the big consultancy companies for a complex variety of reasons). So it would be like an article saying "our small inhouse team using VS Code did a much better job than a big outsourced consultancy using MS Visual Studio - isn't VS Code awesome".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm using AI every day (and it's not really about AI), but:
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"?
I think it's more argument for in-housing than AI (as vendors would probably use AI anyway)
Smaller team that's closer aligned to business goals can be far more agile and efficient than bouncing between middle managers of 2 separate corporate structures
Alberta needs to leave Canada. Imagine having the profit from all of your natural resources leave the state to fund social programs that don't benefit you at all. The rest of Canada does nothing for Alberta.
> where we identify public servants with strong technical aptitude across government, bring them into dedicated product teams
> 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.
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.
> 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?
This is the wrong question. But one often asked because of the sunk cost fallacy.
The real question is: what if I 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.
Yes - and they also have to deliver for $54m if things are much easier.
The tender process often imposes an overhead of several million $ per bid, which has to get rolled back into the margin on the projects.
You would be a fool to not ensure that things will go at least a little easier in even the worst case.
The other option: cost plus bids (that is you pay their actual costs plus a fixed amount of profit) is even easier to game because you can add costs in so many ways. That is why most large bids are fixed cost despite that downside - they are much harder to hide extra costs in.
There is no alternative to carefully watching your suppliers. Some are more honest than others (and you should blacklist the worst).
> There is no alternative to carefully watching your suppliers
Hence: inhouse.
You still have to watch your suppliers even when they are in house. Things change, but not the fundamental problems. In many cases out sourcing really is the better cheaper option (this seems to be when an expert can be a deeper expert because they do the same thing for multiple different groups)
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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Great idea, and hopefully great results. But it’s written like LinkedIn “broetry” and that AI image at the top promises a fluffy article. Maybe expand a bit on some of the impressive tech described in the body?
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.
I've been saying this for a while now. They could just have put an Alberta landscape shot or something else that's actually aesthetically pleasing and relevant, and doesn't feel as trashy as the picture actually in the article.
I genuinely don't understand this trend of slapping AI slop on top of your article. I've even seen good articles do it.
An image signals that the author put time and energy into the article and that they have an eye for detail. Even if it's an AI generated image because the author still had to pick a fitting image.
I disagree. Especially with AI, it’s far too easy to generate and insert an image with no time, energy, or eye for detail.
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.
Two posters above found that the signal was more like “get ready for a gen-AI article filled with vague woolly sentences”.
Wasn't there anything relevant available? Screenshots of the new tools in a before/after collage perhaps?
An AI image signals that the author did not put time and energy of their own in, they had the AI make it up. It's a yellow flag.
I am 100% convinced that you are either trolling or that your comment is explicitly made in bad faith.
If that's the image they picked, I question their taste.
If you generate an image that contains a bunch of low-quality gobbledegook, the signal that it sends is that you have zero eye for detail. Look at any single part of that image, and you will notice how little detail there actually is.
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.
> 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.
Ah, that's what the AI ingredient is.
Seems reasonable, the kind of drudge work that gets avoided because nobody wants to do it. Requirements-capture what the existing system does. This often fails in the real world because it's done at some distance: either writing down what they think the system does, or want it to do, or getting political interference to pretend the process is something other than it is, but ignoring the actual working on the ground process.
Totally. A small motivated team working iteratively with the users of the current system. That’s a great way to work, regardless of the AI “hook.”
"On the client side, this project would not have been possible without the exceptional support of Deputy Minister Mark Kleefeld and his team at the Ministry of Infrastructure. From the very beginning, Infrastructure’s leadership understood what we were trying to accomplish and backed it fully. That kind of top-down support from the client ministry is rare, and it made all the difference."
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.
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.
> They understand the business processes they’re digitizing.
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)
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.
Writing quality was distracting. Very breathey. Hard to understand if I was getting important information or not -- but it's ok, some people will defend this style.
You can look at a histogram of number of words per sentence, and you'll find immediately that it's written by an AI.
The only time I want to read something written by AI is when I am interacting with an LLM directly. I don’t know who these people are that think others want to read their slop. Even if the content is good, I can’t stand reading it.
lol, I copied the first 4 paragraphs into gptzero and it confirms, 100% ai generated. Which makes this submission against HN guidelines...
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.
I'd put my money on "edited by an AI". Some of it feels info-dense enough to be a person.
I don't know... I read the article, and what I really saw was a simpler argument: The buy vs build decision had drifted so far to capture by vendor, where the vendor charged to gather the already in-existence in-house knowledge, that it was much cheaper to build in-house. The AI bits could be seen as a speed-up, but I think it more likely that those designing the new system were designing from pain. That is, they knew the pain points based upon years of intimate knowledge. No wonder the new system, stood up quickly, and quite possible still in MVP mode, is so popular.
In brief, the story isn't AI as an accelerant. It's someone finally letting loose their internal knowledge to build to spec rather than buy.
USDS and 18F proved that strong, internal technical leadership and dedicated teams make this work.
The shortlist came down to four major consulting firms.
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.
This sounds like the exact type of system my team replaces. 4 years and $54M sounds like some consultancies saw a money piñata (government contract) and decided to take a crack at it.
There is no reality on this planet where this project costs $54M and 4 years. Good on the folks in the ministry to notice this and not blindly follow implement.
AI seems somewhat orthogonal. It may have sped up the timeline, but the people using it need to be competent in the first place.
Well, an AI will be using it of course. The people will be using the AI.
I wonder how much of the needs satisfied by this software in Alberta is also needed by other states? Yes, it's great that they saved money and built what they need so quickly, but a catch with govt is that they build out these proprietary processes that need more bespoke software.
The UCP did something, anything without the buddy buddy system? How did the kickbacks work?
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. I've seen this over and over again (the problem is that large organisations often prefer to go the slow and expensive route with the big consultancy companies for a complex variety of reasons). So it would be like an article saying "our small inhouse team using VS Code did a much better job than a big outsourced consultancy using MS Visual Studio - isn't VS Code awesome".
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Good point. Beating lame ducks seems to be "AI"'s top use case.
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.
I'm using AI every day (and it's not really about AI), but:
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"?
I think it's more argument for in-housing than AI (as vendors would probably use AI anyway)
Smaller team that's closer aligned to business goals can be far more agile and efficient than bouncing between middle managers of 2 separate corporate structures
Thankfully they added that horrible AIslop image right in the beginning of the article, so I knew instantly to not trust the author on anything.
Well, Nate Glubish seems to be the Minister of Technology and Innovation of Alberta.
Bet Nate Glubish didn't write a single word. Not even the prompt for the "AI".
It was some intern...
The only thing this piece of information does to me is lower my respect for Alberta.
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This is really awesome work. Solving these legacy IT problems in government is under appreciated. Love that you all were able to accomplish this.
Super disappointed to see most of the comments just complaining about AI and not engaging with the contents of the article.
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.
Alberta needs to leave Canada. Imagine having the profit from all of your natural resources leave the state to fund social programs that don't benefit you at all. The rest of Canada does nothing for Alberta.
I'm happy to be part of Canada, go back to whatever country you came from.