Editor of The Manifesto Project. Disliker of bullet points. Irredeemable plane spotter. Politically homeless. https://xitter.twitterapi.xyz/t.co/w9tsRXoVQY @policyprojectX
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Joined December 2014
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This is true. I don't see AI replacing software engineers in my lifetime. A lot of businesses operate on legacy systems that evolved with their business, each of which have their own idiosyncrasies and bespoke links with third party systems. Before you can be let loose on any mature and established data system, you have to know *exactly* what it does, how and why. AI especially struggles with that last part because it doesn't have the context.
AI can certainly speed up laborious coding tasks within a system, but it all has to be checked and understood before it can be deployed, and tested afterwards. Vibe coders can't do this. When it comes to financial transactions especially, you can't just trust that it works.
AI code might work for 90% of test cases, but there are always unanticipated exceptions, and the test of good software is how well it copes with exceptions. As such, whatever the code your bot produces, you have to be able to read it and understand it, and ensure that it runs as intended.
AI will revolutionise application development and arts and entertainment, but the business world will still require expert human supervision. High stakes business critical software can't take anything on trust.
“AI will replace software engineers because it can write all the code.”
Nope.
Several years ago I built software that unlocked more than $10M a year in additional profit for the business.
The code took less than two weeks.
With today’s AI tools, I could probably do it in under a week. Maybe even a day.
But the code wasn’t the hard part.
The hard part took months:
Understanding a messy domain.
Pressure-testing assumptions with experts.
Working through edge cases.
Deciding what not to build.
Making tradeoffs around risk, complexity, and value, then getting stakeholders to sign off on them.
By the time I wrote most of the code, much of the real engineering had already happened.
That’s why “AI can write code, therefore AI can replace engineers” misses the point.
Code is an output of engineering.
AI makes that output faster and cheaper.
But someone still has to understand the problem, challenge the assumptions, make the tradeoffs, and decide what the software should actually do.
That’s the engineering.
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AI will never replace world-weary bloggers. Grok just doesn't have my knack for depressing the hell out of people.
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I don't lose any sleep over it either way. If Labour took us back in I would strap myself in for the comedy ride of a lifetime. At the first Euro elections we would see Reform and Restore sweep the boards, linking up with the AfD and others to create the biggest blocking coalition, which would massively boost their domestic profile, and within the decade we'd leave without referendums or negotiations.
🇬🇧🇪🇺 They will witness the burial of Brexit.
Reform UK’s general secretary has resigned, and the party has fallen to third place.
EU–UK summit will pursue integration on youth mobility, food trade and carbon markets.
Rejoining options will be offered, including flexibility to keep the pound.
Brexit’s legacy is lower productivity, weaker trade and slower growth.
In 2016–2025, EU+ net migration fell from +322k to −42k; non-EU+ rose from +82k to +350k.
The biggest lie in British history.
It is time to end this farce.
renaissanceeurope.org/insigh…
You say that like Tory backbenchers won't turn to jelly the first time the Guardian runs a poverty safari piece in the back hills of Wales.
This was a piss weak argument in 2016 and it's just as dumb now. A big part of the reason Britain is a squalid shit tip is the Waste Framework Directive and the EU landfill tax. A big part of the reason we struggle to build anything is the onerous EU derived planning laws and the Habitats Directive. The Working Time Directive is why the NHS is reliant on temps, and that was made even worse by the Agency Workers Directive.
The main reason we screwed up the national grid was because of the Large Combustion Plant Directive and the Renewables Directive. One of the main reason our meat industry is dying is because of the EU veterinary system. Not forgetting the EU EV mandate and emissions rules that have demolished our car industry.
I could do this all day. Everything is saddled with unsustainable bureaucracy. There are endless malign influences of EU technical policy that a know-nothing like Massie would have zero comprehension of, and I'd be here til midnight were I to detail them all.
Leaving the EU was a perquisite for making any strategically important reforms - and until it actually happens, Britain will remain a declining moribund economy.
People won't want to hear this coming from Cameron but, nevertheless, he makes a lot of sense here.
Brexit was a mistake, imho, but there is a case to be made that one of the most damaging things about it was the opportunity cost it imposed.
That is, years were spent arguing about Brexit to the exclusion of the many things that needed to be fixed before they had deteriorated to the weary, unhappy, state they are in now.
There's no real reason why we should. The problem is with the British judiciary. If the Tories abandoned their pledge to quit the ECHR it would make them more electable. It's a braindead slopulist policy based on fiction spun by the Telegraph.
🚨 The Tory party will NEVER leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
Everybody knows it's dominated by 'one nation' liberals who have zero interest in regaining control of our laws.
Clip from my longer chat with Suella Braverman MP
mattgoodwin.org/p/exclusive-…
The worst thing about it is that it has completely divided the nationalist right and made it electoral kryptonite. The dumb fucks of Restore and the ethno-right (including the Swindon fucktards) swallowed this poison wholesale and wrecked any chance of developing a functioning right wing party.
It didn’t become en vogue by accident. It was completely and totally manufactured by an echo chamber that was created by Steve Bannon and picked up on by the entire rest of the podcast Manosphere. They kept it civil and above water for a long time until they earned people’s trust, and then slowly but surely they injected this crap into every single podcast, every single day for two years, and then they’re surprised when they got the exactly the result they wanted.
This is why I'm not voting. The message from all the parties on the right is "We know our policies are shit, but this is all we can be arsed with and you have no choice anyway so suck it up".
It's been interesting how the zoomer nationalists fell for it hook, line and sinker. Anyone who's been on this earth a bit longer knows that the Palestine cause is bullshit and that everything they say is fake. Just a shame Restore Britain made such utter cunts of themselves by sucking up to them.
Having a deeper read of the Conservative welfare policy. As a piece of policy work, it's pretty good. It's better than Reform's effort because it stands on a better research base and isn't about performative cruelty. But the Tory capacity to produce decent policy isn't really in question. Their will to deliver, however, very much is.
Welfare is one of the most urgent are for reform, not least because that's where most of the spending is going, and there isn't much room to cut anything else. There is a clear economic and moral case for reform. But it is also one of the most politically difficult areas of policy. Any attempt at even minor revision is greeted with floods of sob stories, and the general rule when it comes to welfare reform is that the bolder the policy the bigger the u-turn.
This is especially problematic with the Tories in that there are too many wets in the ranks who will oppose their own party's reforms. They enter parliament with good intentions then quietly drop their more ambitious ideas and kick the problem into the long grass.
Then they say things that I simply do not believe. Their policy states "Our plans to remove non-EU foreign nationals from social housing will free up 230,000 homes for British citizens. This will reduce the pressure to build new social housing, and so the case for large surpluses is reduced. Our savings also account for offsetting the lost revenues to councils".
I think this is an essential policy that must be done, and it would be wildly popular with the right. But who honestly believes the Tories will do it? I haven't seen any real plan as to how they will do this. It will have grey areas and complications they haven't properly considered, and will probably drop the policy at the first hurdle.
The policy does not set out the precise legal mechanism or primary legislation that would terminate existing tenancies, how mixed households (e.g. one UK/EU partner, children, or people with refugee/humanitarian status) would be treated, timelines, notice periods, or eviction processes, or what happens to the people who lose the tenancy. There's a lot that can and will go wrong. Does anyone seriously think the Tories will send the bailiffs to drag foreigners out of their homes?
This is the sort of detail I want to see before I am convinced they're electable. I want to see that parties have actually through their proposal through so they do not encounter surprise problems that derail the whole agenda - which is what usually happens. Time and again the Tory party gets elected on the back of bold promises they have neither the technical ability or the will power to see through. Remember Dominic Raab's British Bill of Rights.
This is just as true of Reform too. Jenrick has authored his own welfare reform paper that raises more questions than it answers, and would cause a cascade of consequences for which they have no plan, or the technical knowledge to anticipate. The right is very easily impressed with the slop policies we get from the Tories and Reform, but they seldom withstand any serious probing, and if you ask a serious question you never get a serious answer. I'm not falling for it again.
He is elected to speak. They have no right to prevent him from doing so. He is not answerable to a HR department. Only the people can fire him.
Just a pity this gobshite couldn't have worked it out three years ago.
There you go
From the horses mouth
@annathinksaloud @StompWompin
How few people stood on principle.
Anti Israel sentiment was funded and fuelled by foreign interests and the left.
You’ve caused untold damage to good people. You’ve ruined lives.
I'm trying to discern what Reform's actual plan is. I mainly have to go off what Danny Kruger has written because there nothing much else to go on. We know that the party intends to leave the ECHR. We've seen mixed messages as to what we are transitioning to and how that will work. We know that the party intends to walk away from the withdrawal agreement so that probably means collapsing the GFA and the TCA.
They say they will attempt to renegotiate but that won't happen, and where the GFA is concerned, the parties will not agree to anything because it's Northern Ireland where the parties would collapse the GFA is they were tasked with deciding what colour to paint bus stops.
That then raises the question of the Northern Irish boarder. Kruger thinks there are magical trusted trader schemes and "mutual recognition agreements", and that everyone's making a fuss over nothing. He's wrong. It probably forces the EU to cut Ireland out of the single market in goods and restore mainland checks. The EU will not be happy about this. Ireland will not be happy about this.
The net effect of all this is the collapse of all formal relations with the EU, and if we are to believe Danny Kruger, we'll be trading on WTO terms. This is the Brexit he always wanted. Random Reform supporting anon accounts will say this is absolutely fine and there's no problem, but I rather think this will bring a lot of serious technical problems, and will open up a low level trade war with the EU.
We do not know if Reform's plan is to revert to the original Brexiter plan of dropping all tariffs, and deleting any protections for the British farming sector, and there's no updated models about what would happen in this eventuality.
We know from @RobertJenrick's attempts at policy that the party will scrap all housing and welfare entitlements for non-Brits, along with a raft of regulatory reforms, but there's been no modelling of the real world political consequences. Suffice to say the autistic screeching in the media will be off the charts.
The main mitigation comes in the form of energy policy, where there are questions around how Reform would transition away from renewables. Regardless, it's going to take at least ten years to turn brown field sites into operational power stations, so we need to see some sort of interim plan.
In fact, just about every Reform proposal has seismic second order consequences, for which you need a credible and coherent plan that takes all of the technical and political fallout into account. That's a major problem for Reform because that kind of detail is far beyond their capabilities. To me, it looks a lot like they are biting off way more than they can chew, and will not be able to withstand the political and economic fallout. Arguably these are all very necessary measures, but knowing how you execute it is paramount.
This is where you need serious policy brains with an intimate understanding of the treaties and laws in play, and a realistic assessment of Britain's room for manoeuvre. To my knowledge, the British right tends not to produce such people. The technical ability has largely stayed with the Tory party (not that their plans are much more robust). In the words of Mike Ehrmantraut, "You know, I can foresee a lot of possible outcomes to this thing, and not a single one of them involves Miller time."
What it probably means is a government that walks into every ambush, has no real idea of what it is doing, and very rapidly finds itself far out of its technical depth, and no plan to cope with the political and legal fallout. To me it suggests a lame duck government within eighteen months, where the PM is forced to resign, only to be replaced by someone even less politically capable.
Not forgetting the full spectrum of opposition from academia, the civil service, local authorities, the devolved assemblies, Ireland, the EU, the media, the left, parts of the right, and dissenters from within their own party. Essentially, you can't look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that this is a serious party with capable people.
The sad part is, to a very large extent, I want what they want. I am part of Reform's natural constituency even if I wouldn't vote for them. I just need to be convinced that this is a party that knows what it's doing - not least because the price of getting it wrong is incalculable. Losing after one term, having made a monumental pig's ear of it, means the right never takes power again. Can any of us afford that?
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I'm trying to discern what Reform's actual plan is. I mainly have to go off what Danny Kruger has written because there nothing much else to go on. We know that the party intends to leave the ECHR. We've seen mixed messages as to what we are transitioning to and how that will work. We know that the party intends to walk away from the withdrawal agreement so that probably means collapsing the GFA and the TCA.
They say they will attempt to renegotiate but that won't happen, and where the GFA is concerned, the parties will not agree to anything because it's Northern Ireland where the parties would collapse the GFA is they were tasked with deciding what colour to paint bus stops.
That then raises the question of the Northern Irish boarder. Kruger thinks there are magical trusted trader schemes and "mutual recognition agreements", and that everyone's making a fuss over nothing. He's wrong. It probably forces the EU to cut Ireland out of the single market in goods and restore mainland checks. The EU will not be happy about this. Ireland will not be happy about this.
The net effect of all this is the collapse of all formal relations with the EU, and if we are to believe Danny Kruger, we'll be trading on WTO terms. This is the Brexit he always wanted. Random Reform supporting anon accounts will say this is absolutely fine and there's no problem, but I rather think this will bring a lot of serious technical problems, and will open up a low level trade war with the EU.
We do not know if Reform's plan is to revert to the original Brexiter plan of dropping all tariffs, and deleting any protections for the British farming sector, and there's no updated models about what would happen in this eventuality.
We know from @RobertJenrick's attempts at policy that the party will scrap all housing and welfare entitlements for non-Brits, along with a raft of regulatory reforms, but there's been no modelling of the real world political consequences. Suffice to say the autistic screeching in the media will be off the charts.
The main mitigation comes in the form of energy policy, where there are questions around how Reform would transition away from renewables. Regardless, it's going to take at least ten years to turn brown field sites into operational power stations, so we need to see some sort of interim plan.
In fact, just about every Reform proposal has seismic second order consequences, for which you need a credible and coherent plan that takes all of the technical and political fallout into account. That's a major problem for Reform because that kind of detail is far beyond their capabilities. To me, it looks a lot like they are biting off way more than they can chew, and will not be able to withstand the political and economic fallout. Arguably these are all very necessary measures, but knowing how you execute it is paramount.
This is where you need serious policy brains with an intimate understanding of the treaties and laws in play, and a realistic assessment of Britain's room for manoeuvre. To my knowledge, the British right tends not to produce such people. The technical ability has largely stayed with the Tory party (not that their plans are much more robust). In the words of Mike Ehrmantraut, "You know, I can foresee a lot of possible outcomes to this thing, and not a single one of them involves Miller time."
What it probably means is a government that walks into every ambush, has no real idea of what it is doing, and very rapidly finds itself far out of its technical depth, and no plan to cope with the political and legal fallout. To me it suggests a lame duck government within eighteen months, where the PM is forced to resign, only to be replaced by someone even less politically capable.
Not forgetting the full spectrum of opposition from academia, the civil service, local authorities, the devolved assemblies, Ireland, the EU, the media, the left, parts of the right, and dissenters from within their own party. Essentially, you can't look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that this is a serious party with capable people.
The sad part is, to a very large extent, I want what they want. I am part of Reform's natural constituency even if I wouldn't vote for them. I just need to be convinced that this is a party that knows what it's doing - not least because the price of getting it wrong is incalculable. Losing after one term, having made a monumental pig's ear of it, means the right never takes power again. Can any of us afford that?
What right have they to ban an elected member?
Reform MS Joe Martin banned from speaking in the Senedd bbc.in/4BVDkaf
This is where we need to see more detail from both the Tories and Reform. This is especially relevant for @robertjenrick. Over the last week or so he's been talking up the need to prevent Gordon Brothers from cannibalising Poundland. I don't agree but I do get where he's coming from. You can't simply take a free market approach to everything and let ordinary people's livelihoods be wiped out at the stroke of a pen.
If, though, the party is talking about dismantling the entire Brexit settlement and, as Kruger has indicated, and trading on WTO rules, he is opening the door for all the Brexit free trade radicals who would drop all tariffs, even those protecting our farmers from cheaper lower overhead competition. How are these two positions reconciled? What exactly is Reform's trade policy, and where does Jenrick envisage intervening?
The Tories have today announced in their welfare reform measures that "A large portion of foreign nationals in the UK who claim Universal Credit are from the EU and have EU settled status. As part of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, it was agreed in Part Two of the Withdrawal Agreement that EU citizens in the UK – and UK citizens in the EU – would under new settled statuses continue to receive equal treatment. We will honour that commitment, providing certainty to British citizens living in the EU and avoiding an unnecessary rehashing of the Brexit negotiations".
This is perhaps more politically significant than the reforms themselves. Reform’s paper explicitly says they would renegotiate to end that equal treatment for welfare purposes. That's clear blue water between the Tories and Reform.
I doubt there is any scope for renegotiating with the EU so Reform will have to state explicitly whether it is their intent to rip up the withdrawal agreement, and consequently, the TCA. If that is the plan, what is their mitigation strategy?
This matters because it could easily turn 2029 into a re-litigation of the Brexit wars, with Labour wanting to take us closer in, Reform presumably wanting to trade on WTO terms, ripping up the Northern Ireland Protocol in the process, leaving the Tories in the middle of the road with nothing much to say.
This is where the Tories do need additional policy because if they have the vaguest intention of sorting out energy, deregulating, and scrapping Net Zero, they're also on a collision course with the EU - particularly TCA Level Playing Field provisions. They also need to specify what they will do in the event that ECHR withdrawal does not result in agreement over a rights framework for Northern Ireland.
Neither party of the right has been especially forthcoming with detail on these matters but it's the sort of thing we need to know if either wants our votes. Certainly, the Tory party needs to be clear that they will reverse Burnham's EU reset or lose the entire Brexit voting cohort.
Either way, though, it rather smells like the whole reason Burnham is engaging in this process is to seed further divisions over Brexit on the right. The Tories will paint Reform as Brexit extremists, and Reform will accuse the Tories of selling out to Brussels, and maintaining a settlement that stands in the way of vital reforms, meaning that the Tories are lying about their radical energy and planning reforms. Both will be correct, meaning that the split on the right is irrecoverable, divided over Europe (as usual), and not being entirely honest about what they will do in office.
Meanwhile, the last thing the British electorate wants is another protracted debate about Northern Ireland customs, tariffs, sausage regulations and fishing. Especially as the country slides into the economic abyss. With Labour broadly united under Burnham, and the Green threat seen off for now, Labour might well win by a landslide.
You'll get distracted halfway through.
I'm the shadow disability and welfare minister, and I have ADHD.
Here's why I want to cut the benefits bill 👇
thetimes.com/life-style/heal…
