[hn_throwaway_99]

That's actually not accurate. See Jevons paradox, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. In the short term, LLMs should have the effect of making programmers more productive, which means more customers will end up demanding software that was previously uneconomic to build (this is not theoretical - e.g. I work with some non-profits who would love a comprehensive software solution, they simply can't afford it, or the risk, at present).

[hnthrowaway6543]

yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous.

you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done

[ConspiracyFact]

I'm casting about for project ideas. What are some things that you think need to be built but haven't?

[zdragnar]

Every company that builds software has dozens of things they want but can't prioritize because they're too busy building other things.

It's not about a discrete product or project, but continuous improvement upon that which already exists is what makes up most of the volume of "what would happen if we had more people".

[hadlock]

A consumer-friendly front end to NOAA/NWS website, and adequate documentation for their APIs would be a nice start. Weather.com, accuweather and wunderground exist, but they're all buggy and choked with ads. If I want to track daily rainfall in my area vs local water reservoir levels vs local water table readings, I can do that, all the information exists but I can't conveniently link it together. The fed has a great website where you can build all sorts of tables and graphs about current and historical economic market data, but environmental/weather data is left out in the cold right now.

[a_bonobo]

some ideas from my own work:

- a good LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) that incorporates bioinformatics results. LIMS come from a pure lab, benchwork background, and rarely support the inclusion of bioinformatics analyses on samples included in the system. I have yet to see a lab that uses an off-the-shelf LIMS unmodified - they never do what they say they do. (And the amount of labs running on something built on age-old software still in use is... horrific. I know one US lab running some abomination built on Filemaker Pro)

- Software to manage grants. Who is being owed what, what are the milestones, who's looking after this, who are the contact persons, what are the milestones and when to remind, due diligence on potential partners etc. I worked for a grant-giving body and they came up with a weird mix of PowerBI and a pile of Excel sheets and PDFs.

- A thing that lets you catalogue Jupyter notebooks and Rstudio projects. I'm drowning in various projects from various data scientists and there's no nice way to centrally catalogue all those file lumps - 'there was this one function in this one project.... let's grep a bit' can be replaced by a central findable, searchable, taggable repository of data science projects.

[tonyarkles]

> A thing that lets you catalogue Jupyter notebooks and Rstudio projects. I'm drowning in various projects from various data scientists and there's no nice way to centrally catalogue all those file lumps - 'there was this one function in this one project.... let's grep a bit' can be replaced by a central findable, searchable, taggable repository of data science projects.

Oh... oh my. This extends so far beyond data science for me and I am aching for this. I work in this weird intersection of agriculture/high-performance imaging/ML/aerospace. Among my colleagues we've got this huge volume of Excel sheets, Jupyter notebooks, random Python scripts and C++ micro-tools, and more I'm sure. The ones that "officially" became part of a project were assigned document numbers and archived appropriately (although they're still hard to find). The ones that were one-off analyses for all kinds of things are scattered among OneDrive folders, Zip files in OneDrive folders, random Git repos, and some, I'm sure, only exist on certain peoples' laptops.

[mindok]

Ha - I’m on the other side of the grant application process and used an LLM to make a tool to describe the project, track milestones, sub-contractors, generate a costed project plan and all generate the other responses that need to be self-consistent in the grant application process.

[robwwilliams]

Ditto for most academic biomedical research: we desperately need more high quality customized code. Instead we have either nothing or Python/R code written by a grad student or postdoc—code that dies a quick death.