Chris Pitcher

GenAI is amplifying the skills gap in software engineering All the available evidence suggests that GenAI-assisted coding is most powerful in the hands of highly experienced software engineers, while having neutral or even negative effects for less experience...

I wrote an article for Ada National College for Digital Skills, who run digital technology apprenticeships in the UK

I don't think people appreciate enough the fact that, at a time where global warming was approaching an inflection point yet renewable energy was finally becoming economically viable, we decided to squander that opportunity because literal death cultists decided we needed Infinite Bullshit Machines.

OpenAI axes ChatGPT models with just two weeks' warning : GPT-4o gets second death sentence after last year's reprieve, but this time barely anyone's bothered

The next round in our game of Who Wants To Be A Software Developer is called "Patching and Upgrades". You'll love it!
www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/o...

A colleague posts this morning...

"I have written a few agents on Co-pilot how do I get them to see docs in our local shared drive?"

As I say, lots of people about to discover things like the constant pain of managing permissions.

The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site Or, as they like to call it, the 'AI Skills Hub'. Which was built by PwC because of course it was

Hang on, I had missed the fact that the AI Skills Hub cost £4m. mahadk.com/posts/ai-ski... If this wasn't tax payers' money it would be quite funny. Also, can only assume PWC spent some time rolling around in gold because they did NOT spend it on building this

Reading an interview with Streeting in the HSJ on 31 Jan 2025

When asked if he would abolish NHS England his response was: "I could spend a lot of time and money changing job titles and email addresses and not make a difference to the patient interest"

2026 Streeting would strongly disagree

Getting the first 90% done of any tech project has always been quick and easy. The final 10% is where all the pain is. And *then* there's the ongoing support and maintenance to ensure business as usual.

Lots of people vibe coding, or playing with AI agents, or even just relying on Copilot to take meeting notes, will quickly find themselves in a tech support role when it misbehaves or breaks or just disappears. And they probably won't like it.

These AI companies are simultaneously the most money-grabbing, cash-burning, hyper-capitalist businesses we've ever seen, whilst they're also...

seizing the means of production.

NHS Wales App update allows patients to see waiting list status People across Wales can now see their NHS waiting list progression and view their referrals using the NHS Wales App.

Well well well!!
www.digitalhealth.net/2026/01/nhs-...

A lot of people in Trumpworld - especially those who like to use the phrase "there's a new sheriff in town" recently - would do well to remember that 3 years from now the boot could well be on the other foot.

Plus these proofs of concept are all well and good when they have:

- no deadline
- no limit on tokens
- absolutely bare minimum expectations around quality

I just do not see a route from here to production.

Era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ is here, UN report says Overuse and pollution must end urgently as no one knows when whole system might collapse, says expert

Oh boy. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Anything in the speech about working with people on frontline rather than doing everything from Whitehall?

Am still learning about waiting lists, very much not my area of expertise, but my understanding is there are BIG data quality issues here. Giving people greater visibility to these problems could actually create more frustration for individuals, not less.

Why is Trump interested in Greenland? Look to the thawing Arctic ice | Gaby Hinsliff Forecasts suggest that global heating could create a shortcut from Asia to North America, and new routes for trading, shipping – and attack, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff

Really wish more focus was on the climate crisis aspect of this story, rather than whatever nonsense the orange convicted felon blurted out today (which he will have forgotten by tomorrow) www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Thanks to everyone involved in organising #ukgc26 and all the attendees for a really interesting day. Keen to keep the conversations going especially anyone who wants to get into it around the NHS / healthcare

Really, really scary stuff coming out of the US.

It's incredible the extent to which an unreliable statistic oscillating around zero is reported each month as if it actually means anything

In the real world, there are real problems that cannot be solved with a slick pitch.

"Uptime spells out the bottom line bluntly: 'It is unclear how the industry will continue to deliver capacity at the rate that many projections forecast'"

Could be a safeguarding type thing? If a constituent (for some reason) emails their MP and situation is an emergency, does MP's office have some sort of duty of care to pass on to correct service which only really works if said service can then phone the individual straightaway? Dunno

Just don't see how the LLM bros solve this problem. We are probably at "peak data" it's all downhill from here as slop poisons the well that models train on, even without folk actively speeding it up!

Billions and billions of dollars burned for this. Massive carbon emissions for this. Rare earth metals wasted for this. What a mess.

Whatever the merits of the current doctor strikes in England, the BMA campaign is having a dangerous side-effect that will do the NHS great harm...

Pretty obvious limitation of LLMs which gets lost in all the noise is the random element i.e. same prompt gives different result every time. Fine for one-off tasks, not great for automation. The latter is why we bothered invented machines in the first place: reliably doing some repetitive task.

Maybe something more fundamental than training? Would make naive sense that models just predicting what the next word should be give most weight to the most recent word it spat out, less to the word before that, and so on backwards, so low/zero weight given to words 20 or more ago => repetition?

2/ Almost as significant is the clear message being sent by two dates associated with the Black community being deleted, despite both being federal holidays: parks are no longer free to enter on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (third Monday in January) and Juneteenth (June 19).

www.fjc.gov/history/judg...

Who is Aileen Cannon and why is Trump's Florida trial delayed? Critics say the inexperienced Trump appointee Aileen Cannon has indulged the former president's delay tactics.

Southern District by any chance?

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Trump ordered to pay $382,000 after losing UK lawsuit over Steele dossier Orbis, founded by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, compiled allegedly damaging intelligence on Trump in 2016

Is there any info on where this hypothetical action might take place? Only because I think the last time Trump tried something similar in UK courts he.... lost www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024...