Week 39: sometimes you've just got to decide
I’m working with GovTech Barbados, where we’re helping them build alpha.gov.bb by showing them how to move quickly and not break things.
This week has been a lot of plate spinning. Most days it’s felt like I’ve been running just to keep up. It’s been a lot! At times it’s felt like we’re not moving quickly enough, but I always want to go faster.
There’s been so much happening, but here are a few things that stood out for me.
Security people are getting interested in what we’re doing. We had a good, reassuring call with a colleague about it. Luckily, one of our developers used to work in security, and while I’m no expert, I have spent time building a security product, so I know enough to hold my own in these conversations.
We’ve agreed (OK, I decided) the first 20 entry points we’ll be doing. It’s more art than science, and there isn’t a right or wrong way to do it. I forced myself to stop overthinking it and just picked 20 things that look achievable. We can change them, but not making a decision felt like it was holding things up. Sometimes you’ve just got to make a decision.
I’ve been using ChatGPT to speed up the information-gathering part of producing content. I tried asking it to write the prompt for me, and then used that prompt to do the research. It’s filled a gap where there was a void, and hopefully progress follows.
I’ve also been thinking about what we’re calling the deeper transformation: registering a birth and getting a birth certificate. This is about doing the minimum to make things better. At a high level, I want to build a form people can fill in that generates an email and lets someone print a certificate, without disrupting the existing process.
Agents and MCP
Outside of that, I had coffee with a mate who works at Nvidia and had a great chat about AI. Interesting fact: Lovable made $130 million with 60 people because they’re an agent-first business.
Most of our conversation was about MCP, the Model Context Protocol. It’s an open standard Anthropic introduced in November 2024 to let AI models and agents connect to external data, tools and systems through one consistent interface, rather than custom plumbing every time. Some people call it a USB-C port for AI.
His view is that in the future, people will interact with agents, which will talk to an MCP server that knows everything about, say, registering a birth. And those agents will interact with each other, passing data between them. I’m now thinking about interoperability frameworks and agents in a similar way.
Not racing
On Sunday at 5am I’m running 50K with 3,500m of up and down (there won’t be much running). It’s supposed to be a race. I’m not racing. I’m not prepared. I just have to beat the cut-offs.
Have a great weekend, whatever you do.