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

jordiburgos · 2026-05-07T14:59:17 1778165957

Furniture design.

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

yen223 · 2026-05-07T12:37:04 1778157424

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.

late_night_fix · 2026-05-07T11:42:17 1778154137

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 · 2026-05-07T13:37:44 1778161064

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

SyntaxErrorist · 2026-05-07T06:07:41 1778134061

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 · 2026-05-07T09:27:49 1778146069

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

itsyounish · 2026-05-07T10:32:40 1778149960

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

austin-cheney · 2026-05-07T05:48:10 1778132890

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.

pants2 · 2026-05-07T07:25:22 1778138722

Folding my laundry

codegeek · 2026-05-07T13:45:37 1778161537

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

aimiraclemag · 2026-05-07T09:48:44 1778147324

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

fieldsate · 2026-05-07T11:35:47 1778153747

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