AI Pair-Programming to Rebuild Barbados's Government Website

Barbados's government technology agency, GovTech Barbados Limited (established September 2023, led by CEO Mark Boyce), launched a public alpha of a unified government website, alpha.gov.bb, on 18 October 2025, intended to eventually replace the fragmented gov.bb portal. In a November 2025 post, GovTech developer Matt Hamilton described using generative-AI coding tools — primarily Anthropic's Claude Code, alongside Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT — as a core part of building the platform.

GovTech frames rigorous automated testing as a necessary guardrail, and the post explicitly lists what the tools cannot do: make design decisions, conduct user research, guarantee security, or judge when a feature is finished.

According to the agency's own account, Claude Code produced 137 of 204 code changes (about 67%) made since August 2025, Gemini was used for content migration, and around 500 unit tests were written for the platform's forms code. In one documented case, the team migrated 230 service pages from the old site to the new platform in a single afternoon, though roughly 10% of AI-migrated pages needed manual correction afterward.

These figures come from GovTech Barbados's own blog and have not been independently audited; a March 2025 briefing by the UK consultancy Public Digital on the same programme corroborates the agency's existence, leadership and modernisation mandate but does not itself verify the AI-specific productivity figures. The practice describes internal software-delivery productivity, not a citizen-facing AI service, and no data-protection or algorithmic-fairness review applies since the coding tools themselves process no personal data.