Episode Description

Roughly $100 billion a year goes into federal IT, and by GAO’s count about 80% of it goes to maintaining old, complex legacy code bases. As AI speeds up everything built around them, those code bases become the thing the whole enterprise waits on. Jake Sortor ran into this himself as an intelligence officer in Iraq, trying to get a Python script he’d written tested on a secure network. He leads public sector at Blitzy now, and his argument is that AI is the only thing that attacks a backlog this size — with humans still making every decision that matters.

What’s happening on the second front

• Why maintaining legacy code, not model capability, is the ceiling on government software speed
• What “human in the lead” actually looks like when 80–90% of the development lifecycle is automated
• The case that automation turns developer work into judgment — architecture, deployment, configuration — rather than eliminating it
• Why state and local government may be the most underserved and most transferable market in modernization
• What Jake learned teaching himself Python downrange in Iraq to fix a clunky Excel workflow, and the heat he took for it

Jake Sortor is a former Air Force intelligence officer who taught economics at the Air Force Academy, went on to a JD/MBA and a year in corporate law, and now leads public sector at Blitzy while continuing to serve in the reserves.

Connect with Jake

• LinkedIn: Jake Sortor

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt