AI Agents move the bottleneck from coding to decision making. iNaturalist has many features (and known bugs) that wait for action. Can AI agents usage in a careful way to help make those changes quickly?
Since iNat has added more staff we get the 6 month product goals
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/133388-our-product-goals-for-july-december-2026
That is progress, if you have iNatted for years.
the majority of people I know who work with LLMs in their workplace, for coding included, have reported that using them does not improve outcomes and often worsens them, all while making the workplace environment more unpleasant. I’m sure there are specific use cases, and I’m sure that non-LLM AIs can also be used, but I’m cynical that integrating generalized AI into workflows is a good idea.
there’s also the fact that the iNaturalist team received some devastating backlash / negative feedback the previous time they tried to integrate LLMs into their systems. Even if it were beneficial, a project like iNaturalist is totally dependent on public trust to function. The social/trust cost may not be worth it.
I hope not…