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The Anti-Toolkit

Uncomfortable Reading

A Brutally Honest Companion to Everything Else in This Repository
The rest of this toolkit tells you how to do things right. This section tells you when "right" is wrong.

"The first rule of AI projects is: most AI projects should never have been AI projects."

Why This Exists

The rest of this toolkit tells you how to do things right. This section tells you when "right" is wrong.

Every best practice has a dark side. Every template can become a trap. Every process can become theatre. This is the part of the toolkit that says what everyone's thinking but nobody's writing down.

Use this when: - You're drowning in process but delivering nothing - You suspect the governance has become the goal - Someone's using "best practice" as a shield - You need permission to do the obvious thing - The templates are making things worse

Contents

Core Documents

Document What It Really Is
when-to-ignore.md Permission slip to use your judgment
governance-theatre.md How compliance becomes performance art
templates-waste-time.md Which templates hurt more than they help
process-tax.md Calculating your bureaucracy overhead
comfortable-lies.md Things we tell ourselves that aren't true
when-to-kill.md Signs your project should already be dead

Tools

Tool Purpose
Bureaucracy Budget Calculator How much time are you spending on process vs. value? (under development)

The Uncomfortable Premise

This toolkit exists because:

  1. Most government AI projects fail - not because of bad technology, but because of organizational dysfunction that no template can fix

  2. Process can be a hiding place - "We followed the framework" is often code for "we avoided making real decisions"

  3. Best practices are averages - They're designed for typical situations. Yours might not be typical.

  4. Compliance is not the same as competence - You can tick every box and still build something useless or harmful

  5. Sometimes the bravest thing is to stop - More projects should be killed. Earlier. By people who saw it coming.

How to Use This Section

If you're a practitioner: Read this when you feel like you're going through motions. It might help you identify what's actually wrong.

If you're a leader: Read this to understand why your teams seem busy but stuck. The problem might be the process you mandated.

If you're in governance: Read this to check if you've become the blocker. Good governance enables. Bad governance performs.

A Warning

This section is not an excuse to skip things that matter. It's a tool for distinguishing what matters from what just feels like it matters.

If you use "the anti-toolkit said so" to justify cutting corners on ethics, safety, or genuine risk management - you've missed the point entirely.

The goal is less theatre, not less substance.

"The best process is the minimum process that prevents disaster while enabling delivery."