Having consulted on government projects - especially huge projects spanning dozens of government …

I just fed the above into Claude Code and it one-shotted this in 5 minutes. Already doing $3B ARR after lunch.

This touches on the absolutely vital issue of domain knowledge. Everybody understands that you're not supposed to have the same people handle sewer maintenance and preschool teaching because these are two entirely separate skillsets. To an extent you can also treat kindergartens and treatment plants as black boxes that consume money and produce desired services. For people who don't know much about programs it's sort of natural to assume that software engineering works the same way. Put in money and specs, get back programs. But of course it doesn't work like that, because software dev is not a single skillset. To write useful programs, you have to know how to code and understand the environment in which the program will be used.

To be fair, that’s a rare exception. Most government tenders are quite narrow in scope. What I have found is that they’re written by people with zero knowledge of either the solution requirements or the technology! Combine that with zero profit motive and zero personal consequences, and you can end up with total nonsense even on projects with billion dollar budgets. A state school department here put out a tender for wiring over two thousand schools with fibre, but the way the contract was stipulated only a single applicant could win the contract and most handle every single location across a thousand miles of territory. Hence, only the largest incumbent telco could possibly win… which they did… at 15x the cost of a bunch of local contractors doing the work. This cost something like a billion dollars to taxpayers. The excuse of the guy writing the tender was “it’s easier for me to get on…