Exposed: Day One
Every fortnight I receive a copy of the Private Eye, an investigative magazine that reveals where the money flows in UK politics. Often you'll see how MPs get jobs at companies that they used to scrutinise through parliamentary select committees. Or perhaps they'll join lobbying firms to make use of their WhatsApp group chats that power Westminster. These are both instances of what we call the revolving door. Politicians float between political decision making and corporate interests.
One quite public instance of this was how Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister during the coalition years, joined Facebook (now Meta) after he drove his party to electoral destruction in 2015. From a meritocratic perspective, it's hard to understand how Clegg got this job. After all, the Lib Dems never really recovered as a party since then. But when seen as part of a wider trend, documented well in Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, senior UK politicians moving to support and lobby for US corporations after their time in office is nothing new.
In US politics, the bonds between politicians and corporate interests form much earlier in the political lifecycle. Anyone following the recent Democrat primaries will have seen the battle between the hegemonic PAC and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates. In the Michigan primary the incumbent purportedly received ~$30 million from the Israeli super PAC. This capital intense political system means that many politicians have to sell out before they even reach office.
Fortunately, the UK has mostly resisted the urge to move towards US-styled campaigning. Nonetheless politicians are still subject to lobbying and are by law required to register financial interests they may have. This can range from owning a company to receiving tickets to a high profile boxing match. Importantly, these interests are published and are queryable via an API.
As part of my journey back to employment, I've started work on Exposed (name subject to change). The goal is simple: make the financial interests of today's politicians easy to explore. Beyond this humble goal, I want to use this time to really sharpen my agentic coding skills. Many of the interview processes I've been through so far require non-trivial amounts of vibe coding. This has replaced LeetCode styled problems. The name of the game is building fast while maintaining understanding of the system in place.
After a day of building the tool so far, I'm still struggling with finding a suitable scope for Codex to work at. If you go too coarse, you get a lot of slop that is hard to reason about. Too fine, you move too slowly and end up fighting for perfection. I'll be keeping these pages up to date with my future learnings, so stay tuned!