Claude Code and Public Service: Modernizing How State and Local Governments Build Software

A live, demo-first session on how SLED IT and digital services teams are using Claude Code to understand and safely change legacy systems — and ship new constituent-facing services in days instead of quarters.

State and local agencies don’t have a shortage of engineering work — they have a shortage of engineers who understand the systems they inherited. Benefits eligibility on COBOL. Permitting on aging .NET. Tax and DMV systems whose original authors retired two budget cycles ago. Every mandated rule change is a risk because nobody’s sure what else it touches.

And the same teams are on the hook for new digital services — online applications, status portals, public dashboards — that sit in the backlog while the legacy estate absorbs every available hour.

Claude Code is Anthropic’s agentic coding tool. It runs in your developer’s terminal, works directly on the repo in front of them, and handles the multi-step engineering work that normally takes a sprint: read and explain an undocumented system, generate the missing tests, make a targeted change with confidence, or scaffold a new service end-to-end.

This session shows it live. We’ll run Claude Code on a realistic government codebase — map and safely change a legacy eligibility module, then build a permit-status lookup service from scratch — including where the engineer has to steer and how teams build in review. A state digital services practitioner will share what they piloted first and how they got security and change-advisory comfortable.

Then we open the floor. Bring your hardest questions on FedRAMP, data residency, audit trail, and rollout.