Developers in the Public Authority: Procurement, Public Code and Legitimacy

All courses / AI Developer / Module 3 / Chapter 18

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

• Explain three ways in which a public authority is a different place to develop
• Draft procurement criteria for an AI coding tool in terms of work classes, usage modes and verifiable evidence
• Explain what publishing code as public code commits the authority to
• Classify a component as in-house or supplier using the chapter's six questions

Key concepts

The tender is the first delegation decision

The book's conclusion for procurement: the ceiling of the delegation profile, the agentic switch and the review clause for model, price and feature changes belong in the contract, because a coding tool is not a delivered system and will test the limits on changing a contract.

Evidence in the criteria

Claims about a tool's benefit enter the procurement as statements with population, task, period and method, each criterion with a way to verify it, and the Region measures its own work after award.

Public code as a promise of maintenance

Software developed with public money and published for reuse under an open source licence. Publishing creates an expectation, so a component is a candidate only when it is generic, has no secrets or personal data in its history and has an owner; an unowned repository is not published.

Records on purpose

Specification records and ADRs are certainly records under the public-access and archives rules. What the Region keeps of prompts and runs is decided with the archivist, counsel and the union before the tool is switched on, and requests are answered by the competent official, not by the developer.

In-house or supplier per component

Decided per component and recorded with exit criteria. A component that encodes the Region's own legal interpretation, changes on its timetable and can be tested with an oracle the Region owns tends towards in-house.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Teaching plan

Discussion

1. The Region's own pilot figure has the same weakness as a supplier's claim. How should a tender treat evidence from the buyer's own pilot?
2. Why does the practical guide ask for the criteria sheet to be reviewed with the union's IT representative before publication?
3. The benefits-triage scoring is in a supplier's hands. Using the six questions, what would have to be true for the Region to judge what it cannot test?

Written exercise

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

1. Why did nothing in the framework agreement NR-2025-102 address the consultant who pasted a test-database connection string into a public assistant?

   1. The agreement covered only suppliers of finished systems
   2. The agreement had expired before the incident occurred
   3. The agreement for about 22 consultant developers had no clause on AI tools
   4. The agreement delegated all tool decisions to the consultants' employer
   Show the answer

   C. The agreement for about 22 consultant developers had no clause on AI tools
   The chapter notes that the Region buys more than tools: its framework agreement for consultant developers had no clause on AI tools, so the contract did not cover the case.

2. Which answer to the chapter's six questions tends towards building a component in-house?

   1. The component encodes the Region's own legal interpretation
   2. The rule changes rarely, or on the supplier's timetable
   3. The component is a generic service used by many authorities
   4. The Region has nobody who can own the component
   Show the answer

   A. The component encodes the Region's own legal interpretation
   Where a component encodes the Region's own legal interpretation, the Region must be able to explain and change it, which tends towards in-house. The other answers tend towards a supplier.

3. Under the Region's rule, who answers a request for public documents that concerns code or design records?

   1. The developer who wrote the code, since they know it best
   2. The competent official, with the developer's help in finding the material
   3. The supplier of the coding tool, under the record clause
   4. The union's IT representative, after reviewing the logs
   Show the answer

   B. The competent official, with the developer's help in finding the material
   Withholding is decided case by case on grounds fixed in law. The Region's rule is that the competent official answers, with the developer helping to find the material, and not the developer.