Copiloting into a dead end

Another week, another weeknote. Or, in fact, a fortnightnote this time.

This past couple of weeks has been much, much quieter than… well… than the past 4 months! Some of the knottier issues that I was managing at work have – thankfully – gone away. That means I’ve had time to focus on strategic problems, not reactive ones.

But before that…

This is not the assistant I’m looking for

We’ve all been given Copilot access at work. Not just the chatbot; we’ve been given the full suite of applications and tools.

When I say “given”, I mean “very aggressively had it put in front of us at every opportunity”. Microsoft 365 is very, very aggressive at putting Copilot front-and-centre every time you open Outlook, a Word doc, or a presentation. And it’s… not very useful?

Don’t me wrong; I don’t think the use of LLMs and AI is inherently useless. They are prone to lying to you and they often go wildly off the rails, but I assume those things will get better over time. I have been using tools like ChatGPT and Claude frequently on side projects and hobbies outside of work for about a year now. They can be very helpful.

But at work? I’m struggling to see the benefit.

I can’t use it to write my emails in Outlook – as it seems insistent I should do each time I start a new email. By the time I’ve written a prompt, I may as well have written the email. Where I tried to use it, it fabricated information in the draft that took longer to correct than to have done the task myself.

The summaries presented at the top of every email are often longer than the emails themselves. Summaries are also presented at the top of every Word document – it’s not clear to me why I would want that, when I almost always need to read the actual document.

My emails are now allegedly being “prioritised” based on custom prompts; but now literally every email is being marked as a priority which feels kind of pointless.

The things these kinds of tools are reliably useful for – like taking data in CSV format and transforming it into JSON format – is something I have never needed to do at work.

I did use the tools to teach me about a topic I didn’t understand this week and it was a good starting point to know what to look for elsewhere; but I could probably (and did) just look for an explainer on Youtube.

I’m left wondering what the point of these tools is. Maybe I should just be grateful that AI won’t be coming for my job first!

Back to blogging

Now that the gamma (0.4) trust framework is out in the world and certifiable, we’ve started to get lots of interpretative questions, like “do I have to use a certified component in my service?”¹. That means I’ve been able to get back to what I love doing – blogging! Expect more of these kinds of blog posts to pop up, soon.

Away and a full day

On Wednesday, our senior management team had an away day and – in opposition to the usual Civil Service precedent – it was both away and a full day².

We mostly focused on whether we were set up to effectively deliver against our current priorities and the priorities we knew were coming down the track. It was useful to take a step back and do this for the first time in what feels like a long time and – importantly – to have a meaningful discussion about what we can stop, so we can pivot to new priorities.

Alphaing

The alpha team – established to explore how we can extend our web service into machine-readable infrastructure – is now firing on all cylinders.

The problem we are trying to solve is not straightforward. We know that there will be third parties that need to programmatically verify that a Digital Verification Service is on our register. We know we want that verification to be highly resilient, available and robust. We know it needs to have the potential for offline capability. And we know we won’t know who is involved in the transaction – it could be one or dozens of different service providers and relying parties.

We think the answer is some kind of certificate authority and possibly an XML-formatted “trusted list”. So that’s what the team is trying to verify.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of the past week getting my head around the intricacies of certificate authorities, chains of trust, and the ETSI TS 119 612 standard; as has the wider team.

More to follow!

Formulating forms

When our pilot certification and accreditation processes end, we will need to have a way for conformity assessment bodies to apply to us to offer their services under the scheme. We’re currently exploring whether GOV.UK Forms might work as a better way for CABs to submit their applications.

I’ve spent some time with the team this week thinking about what might look like, and I’ve had a chance to tinker around with the service too. It’s great.

Possible exciting things

Something unexpected happened last week, which has prompted lots of hurried conversations this week, and that might lead to something exciting happening next week. You’ll know when I know! Never let it be said these weeknotes don’t have an air of excitement.

Fin!