@neil

"I imagine that, in reality, “digital sovereignty” would be a remarkably expensive undertaking. Perhaps more expensive than buying commodity services from overseas third parties."

For business, yes maybe.

For the public sector, I suspect it's only expensive from a purchasing perspective. Yes, MS employ quite a few people in the UK, but a chunk of the £9Bn UKGov just signed will go direct to Ireland/tax havens. That £9Bn spent with Collabora/Canonical/etc would employ Brits, develop/support a UK skillbase AND mostly circulate back to HMRC eventually.

IIRC there was a report last year that EU industry sends ~€100/mo/worker to the US in software licensing... It's not just that the money could be spent domestically... by leaving the country, it doesn't loop back as tax revenue.

In that respect, "cheap" overseas vendors are only cheap on the price tag - they're expensive both socially and economically, but procurement doesn't seem to account for that monetary cycle.

@gatesvp @gerrymcgovern
"OP's article Links to a medium article which doesn't link to either the CCC thing or the Franken thing."

Please follow the links. Like, really read the articles in detail.

OP's article from The Register (https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_businesses_faking_it_reckoning_coming_codestrap/)

links to >

Medium (https://medium.com/write-a-catalyst/an-ai-wrote-576-000-lines-to-replace-sqlite-7ea538826d72)

links to >

Katanaquant (https://blog.katanaquant.com/p/your-llm-doesnt-write-correct-code)

links to >

FrankenSQLite.

It's all there.

I don't discount that Smiley might have mixed up their stats in the Reg interview with the 3.7x LOC quote, since that is quite similar to the CCC figures.

Both are relevant to the articles tenor though - AI can output code that will run, but lacks domain knowledge and will do exactly what you ask it to, even if it's ridiculous ("Hey, write me a cleanup tool", instead of "what's the best way to do this cleanup - 1 line cron job").

@gatesvp @gerrymcgovern

"This isn't what happened. It was a C Compiler that was rewritten. A different tester then rebuilt SQLite using both the AI and the official one. The AI one did worse."

There seems to be some confusion on your part. I suspect you're thinking of Claude's C Compiler, which made a hash of building SQLite (although it's impressive it managed that at all).

If you follow the links from this article, they're referring to an analysis of FrankenSQLite (https://frankensqlite.com/), which is billed as a "clean room reimplementation", from the same guy who vibe coded an 80k LOC disk cleanup daemon to replace a one-line cron job. 🙄

And it runs. It's just awful.

https://blog.katanaquant.com/p/your-llm-doesnt-write-correct-code