AI Shrinks "Build" to Hours, Making 12-18 Month Government Discovery Projects Obsolete
round · x · 2026-10-01
In "Alpha is discovery" (CIVICWORKS), Jack Strachan argues our capacity to experiment is growing far faster than institutions' ability to absorb what experiments reveal.
- UK public sector now counts time spent living with legacy systems as part of risk; legacy is a choice, not an age.
- Traditional 12–18 month discovery projects rarely produce action, while AI makes once-weeks-long work testable in an afternoon.
- Anthropic's AI-native SDLC playbook makes the mismatch literal: build collapses to hours while human-speed governance barely moves.
- Government is great at interrogating risk but bad at deciding, so it has piled up machinery — business cases, boards, approvals — between thinking and doing.
- Conclusion: the economics of transformation have shifted; "you have to build the thing to find the skeleton."
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