Recent content on Mechanical Survival

 “Wood, chainsaw, tree” by pb826 on Pixabay 
 I first picked up a chainsaw two summers ago. 
 I was staying with a friend at his farm on Dartmoor. We spent a drizzly
afternoon splitting logs with a hatchet, clunking and thunking our way through
the pile until the time came to carve up a bigger section. He said “I’ll tell
you what”, grinned, disappeared into an…

 “Woman photocopying her face” licensed via iStock 
 I want to propose the term design by cliché for the software architecture
anti-pattern of trying to arrange things based on what they are called, not
what they do. 
 In this post I will share an example of design by cliché and some ideas about
why and how it happens, and I’ll invite you to recognise it…
I gave this talk at Agile Cambridge on 2 October 2025 
 Thank you very much for having me. I’d like to start with a quote from Ian
MacKaye, who is a musician and also a skateboarder: 
 
 “Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you. For
most people, when they saw a swimming pool, they thought, ‘Let’s take a swim.’
But I thought,…
AI code generation is causing us to climb the ladder of abstraction beyond
code , and if current trends continue, code
itself is on its way to being little more than a disposable artefact—the output
of the function “prompts × model”. 
 When this is the case, prompts are the entire specification, and the last
design documents we have left. 
 We should record them! 
 A…
The Prime Minister recently announced
Extract ,
a project by colleagues at i.AI . 
 Very briefly, Extract uses Large Language Models and segmentation models like
Segment
Anything 
to convert untidy PDFs of planning regulations into sparkling
GeoJSON-plus-metadata, ready to be fed into digital planning systems. 
 Not only does Extract address real problems with the…

 Platformland: An anatomy of next-generation public services 
by Richard Pope. 282pp, London Publishing Partnership, September 2024 
 
 Richard Pope’s
 Platformland is
a vision of the state as a set of interlocking, cooperating software systems, a
refinement and extension of Tim O’Reilly’s idea of Government as a
Platform .
In Government as a…

 A woman watches potatoes move down a conveyor belt (US National Archives, recoloured by deepai.org) 
 Last week I and my colleagues at the Incubator for AI put on a one-day
conference about retrieval-augmented generation . We called it
 RAGtime , of course. 
 We pitched it differently from most AI events, in that it was neither a
hackathon, nor an academic conference, nor…
This is the text of a talk I gave at the GOV.UK developer day on 6 December
2023. 



 
 
 It’s an honour to be here. Thank you for having me. 
 Good news — I’m here to talk about documentation! 
 Yes, documentation, the least glamorous, lowest-tech part of
software development. 
 I want to talk about it because documentation is changing, the way…

 Andromeda, Juan Antonio Escalante, C17th. From
 Wikimedia Commons 
 I was lucky enough to be a delegate at Timo Hannay’s excellent AI in
Education Summit last Tuesday. 
 The discourse around Generative AI (GenAI) in education is turbulent,
with a wide range of hopes, doubts and ideas tumbling under one heading.
In the background of every conversation is the…
by Duncan Brown and Sarah Fisher 
 Congratulations! You, a Deputy Director in a Government department, have
become responsible for a digital delivery project that is big,
complicated, risky and potentially transformative. You don’t understand
exactly how it works, but you know that it is important. And you’re
well-versed in the political and policy landscape in…
Perhaps you recognise this feeling: “If I could only go a little bit
deeper into Google Analytics, I would finally get it .” 
 I feel it every time I look at a web analytics dashboard. By analytics I
mean usage data: rate of requests, time of requests, etc. 
 I’ve always wanted to use these tools expose the system to my
senses, not just my brain. I want to see…
Sarah Fisher and I collaborated on this Medium
post .
In public service, we want “digital transformation”. 
 That is, we want to use technology to better serve citizens, and we
recognise that our institutions need to change if we’re to accomplish
that. 
 This process will be complete when we no longer use the word “digital”.
There will be no “digital” and “non-digital”, no…
At work, we very much want to understand whether people tend to
apply to train to teach subjects for which their degrees are relevant. 
 But our data isn’t good enough. 
 This post is about training a neural network to classify degrees
for us, and the part GPT-4 played in that process. 
 What CAH? 
 Ideally every teacher training application we held would have its…
As managers we prize autonomous teams because there is no limit to the
quality of work they can deliver, and they are teams we ourselves would
like to be in. But autonomy does not imply autocracy. 
 When teams create private Slack channels and don’t work in the open they
are crossing the line into autocracy. We don’t like it, but the truth is
that in doing this,…
I needed to create some files in the shell and I used a brace expansion to do it: 
 mkdir -p static/ { css,js,images } 
 This code creates this folder structure. 
 static
 ├── css
 ├── images
 └── js
 This is quite cool! But it also turns out that if you put a brace
expansion next to another brace expansion, bash will give you every
permutation of the contents…
It occurred to me while interviewing that I was more interested in the
questions the candidate was asking than the answers they gave. 
 I know I’m dimly aware of this already, because I often try to structure at
least one interview question so that the candidate has an opportunity to ask
questions about the work. One way to do this is to advertise and then…
I’ve been working on a ClojureScript simulation of Set . 
 
 If you’re not familiar with the rules of Set, the aim of the game is to collect
“sets”. A set is 3 cards where each attribute of colour, shape, fill
and number is the same for all three cards or different for all 3 cards: 
 ( defn makes-set? [cards]
 ( let [attrs [ :colour :fill :shape…