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Civilytics Consulting

@civilytics.bsky.social

We are an independent data science consultancy focused on applying cutting edge social science to promote social good. We believe that truth and evidence eventually will win the day in policymaking that builds a more just and fair society.

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Civilytics Consulting @civilytics.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Getting good work from an AI agent on our Census of Governments API had more to do with planning, review and documentation than with how I worded prompts. The longer I kept steering a session past its opening instruction, the more often the agent admitted an error. 🔗

Share of the agent's work and of its admissions, for sessions grouped by how many messages I sent after the opening instruction's run: 0–3 messages (15 sessions), 4–9 (27) and 10 or more (26). The share of work rises from 15% to 35% to 50%; the share of admissions rises faster, from 2% to 23% to 74%.

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Civilytics Consulting @civilytics.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

On our Census of Governments API, AI agents caught nearly two-thirds of their own errors before anything shipped. Here's what I learned from the errors agents missed: I caught 12, tests caught 11, and both API outages came after I pushed an agent past its plan. 🔗

Human turns per interactive session, in order. 74 bars from April 16 to September 4 2026; half of the sessions take between five and 15 turns and the tallest takes 38. Filled circles mark the 27 sessions where the agent admitted at least one of the 75 errors, open squares sessions with an unclear prompt of mine. Both kinds are spread across the whole project.

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Civilytics Consulting @civilytics.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

A preview of what we have cooking up in the lab: COG Chat. Pick a city or county, ask about its finances in plain language, and get a chart, the figures and a summary from the Census of Governments. Here I ask about Spokane's police spending, with the waits sped up. COG Chat isn't public yet. 🔗

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Civilytics Consulting @civilytics.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The Census of Governments Place Explorer is a free, no-code way to look up revenue, spending, and cash and securities for every state, county, city and township government the Census Bureau surveyed, across 56 published years: cog-demo.civilytics.org/…/ 🔗

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