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

llishunsheng about 11 hours ago 12 comments

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.

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Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jordiburgos•9 minutes ago

Furniture design.

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

yen223•about 3 hours 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.

late_night_fix•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

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

SyntaxErrorist•about 9 hours 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•about 6 hours ago

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

itsyounish•about 5 hours ago

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

austin-cheney•about 9 hours 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.

pants2•about 8 hours ago

Folding my laundry

codegeek•about 1 hour ago

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

aimiraclemag•about 5 hours ago

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

fieldsate•about 4 hours ago

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