Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data


  • Three Projects I’m Proud of in 2025

    In 2025, I built a lot of things to help me understand the changes that are happening and the things we need to focus on going forward to make government work better. Here are three I am most proud of.

  • What Does a Good Spec File Look Like?

    I’ve been thinking a lot about spec-driven development lately and that got me thinking: what does a good spec file actually look like? How do we know when it’s good? The answer – it depends.

  • Proving Out a New Approach to Legacy System Modernization

    Government legacy systems hold decades of institutional knowledge that disappears when we focus only on translating old code to new code. I’ve been developing SpecOps—a methodology that uses AI to extract that knowledge into plain-language specifications that policy experts can actually verify.

  • The Future is Ahead of Schedule

    In August, I wrote about just-in-time interfaces as a future vision for civic tech. Three months later, that future seems to be arriving.

  • Infrastructure as Code for AI: The Rapid Evolution of Agent Instructions

    AI coding agent instructions have evolved from simple markdown files to sophisticated orchestration frameworks in months, not years. For government, this rapid maturation offers new opportunities for collaboration that traditional code sharing never achieved.

  • Maybe We Shouldn’t Call Them AI “Agents”

    We should think about how we use the word “agent.” The words we choose matter: they shape understanding, trust, and how people perceive technology’s role in public service.

  • Building the Foundations for the AI Era

    Just as protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, and DNS established the foundation of the Internet in the early 1990s, new protocols like MCP, ACP, and A2A are being developed to support AI applications today. This isn’t glamorous work, but it’s the kind of infrastructure plumbing that will determine what’s possible in the AI era.

  • AI Agents aren’t as radical as they sound

    People think AI agents and delegation-based digital services are a radical idea. But people delegate all kinds of interactions with government to third parties today. It’s way more common than you might think. Understanding the kinds of services that people delegate, and the reasons that they choose to delegate are critical to inform how we…

  • Designing for delegation

    Agentic, delegation-based services could reshape how people access government, cutting administrative burden – if agencies start building the right design patterns now.

  • AI instructions as platform infrastructure

    Software delivery platforms provide reusable building blocks that reduce complexity. AI accelerates custom software development. The next evolution? Treating AI coding agent instructions as core platform infrastructure.