The announcement said fifty AI applications across government. What that sentence hides is the work: fifty first contacts with fifty systems that were never designed to be touched by a model.
It starts with access. Weeks before a line of model code runs, you're negotiating credentials, data-residency rules, and a change-control process that treats a prompt tweak like a bridge inspection. The frontier model waits while you earn the right to deploy it.
Then the mess. A citizen-services queue backed by a database whose schema encodes twenty years of policy exceptions. An identity system nobody fully understands. Latency budgets set by hardware you can't upgrade. The model is the easy part; making it survive here is the job.
And the eval. In a ministry, "it works" means auditable, explainable, and defensible to a non-technical official who will be asked about it in public. You don't ship until you can prove good — and you defined good on day one.
The engineer who thrives isn't the one with the cleverest architecture. It's the one who stays calm in the constraints and treats them as the problem. That's the whole role, compressed into one deployment.