Ask HN: What do you still do manually in 2026 that should be automated?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48045237

by lishunsheng • 3 months ago

20 34 3 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm researching pain points around manual workflows that haven't been automated yet.

Specifically looking for tasks where: - You do the same thing 5+ times a week - You've looked for a tool but nothing good exists - You'd pay $10-20/month if something just worked

What's yours? Curious to hear both technical and non-technical answers.

austin-cheney• 3 months ago

I have nothing that fits that criteria exactly. I still write tests for test automation manually and that should be automated but new tests are only needed as features are created or retired, which is irregular and infrequent.

SyntaxErrorist2• 3 months ago

Tried a few workflow tools but most either break often or need more setup than the task itself. Would easily pay for something that just quietly handled all of that in the background.

lishunsheng• 3 months ago

"Curious what kind of workflows you're talking about – are these dev-related tasks or more general business processes?"

SyntaxErrorist2• 3 months ago

Mostly a mix of both. Some are dev related workflows while others are more operational like content pipelines, research tasks and internal automation stuff.

pants2• 3 months ago

Folding my laundry

aimiraclemag• 3 months ago

Ahahaha, good point! Some automation on that field would be precious.

codegeek2• 3 months ago

Some companies are building Robots for this already. for example https://figure.ai

_aavaa_• 3 months ago

Except that robot probably costs more than the prevent value of all clothes I’ll ever buy.

skyberrys2• 2 months ago

I found this job ad for them, as a data collector. Does that mean they will pay me to fold my laundry, while they finish up their robot system?

bjourne• 2 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PkUOl2FRQss

skyberrys2• 2 months ago

It's touching to hear Anthony Bourdain reminiscing about laundry. The point about a laundry maid giving me back time better spent engineering is a practical dilemma.

itsyounish• 3 months ago

I'd say if you could automate product sheet details with detailed image recognition would be really interesting

fieldsate• 3 months ago

preparing for a trip , travel, lots of moving pices like itenary , packing , tickets , IDs , cabs .no sync .huge mess

jp42• 3 months ago

I believe this will get solved once agent protocol is adopted widespread.

late_night_fix• 3 months ago

I still manually synthesize information from multiple sources(docs,blog posts and treads).LLM help with sumaries but merge into a reliable decision step is very human-heavy.

judahmeek• 3 months ago

Do you think that can actually be automated? Seems like a judgement-heavy process to me.

yen2232• 3 months ago

Drawing vector graphics.

Image generators can make reasonable-looking raster images. LLMs are good at coding. But drawing SVGs sits at the worst of both worlds.

RanHal3• 3 months ago

Drawing SVGs via LLMs is mid, but how about converting raster images to SVGs? That sounds like something that shouldn't be too hard

yen2232• 3 months ago

I thought they'd be good at vectorising raster image, but no.

jordiburgos• 3 months ago

Furniture design.

Give the measures of a bookself and get the pieces and materials needed.

AiReadyApi• 3 months ago

Do the dishwasher and throw the rubbish out

rho_soul_kg_m3• 3 months ago

Knowledge retrieval. Something where I could ask a question, say in natural language, and I would get an answer. Of course the responses have to make sense and not be made up.

RanHal3• 3 months ago

I opened my Obsidian directory with Augment Code, and it indexed it in seconds. Now all my written knowledge is retrievable. You could probably get the same effect with any other RAG-based indexed agent

LogicCraft678• 3 months ago

I still manually organize my gallery, especially screenshots and downloads

swissdom• 3 months ago

on the smartphone or pc? If i may ask :)

brudgers• 3 months ago

You'd pay $10-20/month if something just worked

If you are selling to ‘enterprise’ that business model might work well as a per-seat price.

At retail, into small bespoke niches a business built on $20 problems is unlikely to be sustainable because it is not enough money to reliably reach small markets and it is not enough money to sustain high quality service to a small number of customers…sure 1000 customers would be $20,000/month, but you have to get there first and stay there second.

Getting there is probably more money and calendar pages than you think and staying is going to gobble up more of the $20,000/month than you want through churn and employees.

My advice: find some thing you want to work on or find actual customers who will pay you handsomely to solve their important problems. Good luck.

sovenyr• 3 months ago

choosing and playing boardgames - hope it never changed

khaledh• 3 months ago

Reviewing AI generated slop.

kamphey• 3 months ago

Formatting Google Sheets. I work all day every day in google sheets. I make video tutorials, and templates, and tools. Sometimes I work with clients/for clients. Sometimes I just make something on my own. Been thinking more and more about coding up a formatting engine in apps script. As that's what I've done many times before. But really would perhaps a SaaS or a Chrome add-on (not a sheets Add-on) be able to handle this better? But I don't really know how it would handle looking at a sheet and knowing what to format it like. Or would some kind of template actions be able to account for data out of place. This is where I fall apart in my thinking and wonder if someone else could really take a crack at a good UI for this. Instead of me who I am too in the weeds.

takko_the_boss• 3 months ago

Going to the bathroom.

Like, I gotta get up, walk a few steps, sit down, read Facebook, and then i gotta clean my own rear end. Why aren't we in Wall-E world yet?

I want to just wake up, eat, sleep, repeat without ever having to move out of my floating platform apparatus. Instead of deciding what to eat, goop is dispensed to you from the comfort of my own floating chair/bed thing. Pottying should be the same. A large blocker in this lifestyle is the necessity to get up and do the business yourself. I want a platform that directly handles bodily waste material without you ever having to get up.

MSKJ• 2 months ago

I like taking a break personally; but a foot massager at the loo, I'd pay for that

chistev• 3 months ago

Upwork removed their RSS feed. I'd like a tool that sends me an email when a certain job matching certain job/client filter criteria is made, rather than me checking the recent jobs.

The tools that I could find didn't have email support and weren't good enough in some ways I don't remember.

The inbuilt Upwork alert system sucks.

Ask HN: What do you still do manually in 2026 that should be automated?

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