Most legacy government systems exist in a state of profound documentation poverty. The knowledge lives in the heads of retiring employees, in COBOL comments from 1987, in binders that may or may not reflect current behavior. Against this baseline, the question of what makes a “good” spec file takes on...
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The Public Interest Tech Webring is a collection of blogs dedicated to civic tech, public interest tech, government tech policy, and similar topics.
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12 December 2025
Civic Innovations – What Does a Good Spec File Look Like?
11 December 2025
Matt Bailey – Star ratings are blasphemy!
04 December 2025
Civic Innovations – Proving Out a New Approach to Legacy System Modernization
02 December 2025
Civic Innovations – The Future is Ahead of Schedule
28 November 2025
Justin Gosses – Using instruction files to guide GitHub Copilot to help you consume less risky code dependencies
About five years ago, I got fed up with Goodreads and decided that I could just build my own replacement. That turned out to be shockingly easy - the /reading section of my site runs on Jekyll and is free to maintain. For a long time I basically just maintained...
Government legacy systems hold decades of institutional knowledge – eligibility rules, policy interpretations, edge cases learned the hard way. When agencies modernize these systems, the typical approach is to translate old software code into new software code. But this typical approach misses something fundamental – the knowledge embedded in these...
MCP Apps and the Acceleration of Just-in-Time Interfaces In August, Dan Munz and I wrote about the end of civic tech’s interface era, arguing that the rise of AI-generated, just-in-time interfaces would fundamentally change how civic technologists think about designing government services. We acknowledged that these ideas were still mostly theoretical”this...
Explains how to use instruction files to guide GitHub Copilot to help you consume less risky code dependencies. Also introduces different types of dependency risks and how they can be assessed.
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