Hello Bioinformatics lovers,

Tommy here. We will talk about AI for bioinformatics today.

Half of reddit/bioinformatics is excited. The other half is panicking.

The trending threads aren’t about new tools or papers. They’re titled things like “Am I redundant?”

Here’s what’s actually happening.

The excited half sees AI as a 10x multiplier on tasks that used to take days.

AlphaFold 3 predicts proteins, DNA, RNA, and small-molecule complexes in one model.

OpenProtein.AI lets biologists engineer proteins through a no-code web interface — no Python required.

The anxious half does the math. If a junior bioinformatician’s job was running pipelines and making plots, and Claude can now do both in 30 minutes, what’s the new job?

Here’s what I tell my team.

The skill stack changed. The work didn’t.

What still matters: knowing what question to ask.

Knowing when the answer is wrong. Knowing how to tell the biology story to people who don’t speak code.

What matters less: memorizing samtools flags, writing boilerplate ggplot, debugging pandas indexing for the hundredth time.

The bioinformaticians thriving right now aren’t the ones who learned more AI tools. They’re the ones who got better at biology.

Domain expertise is the moat

AI tools amplify whatever direction you point them.

Point them at a vague question, you get vague analysis faster. Point them at a sharp biological hypothesis with the right controls, you get insights in hours instead of months.

The redundancy isn’t in bioinformatics. It’s in the part of the job that was always commodity work — the stuff that should have been automated a decade ago anyway.

Biology thinking has never been more valuable. The people who treat AI as a replacement for thinking will struggle.

The people who treat it as a force multiplier on sharp thinking will run circles around everyone else.

If you’re asking “Am I redundant?” — the honest answer is: not if you double down on biology.

Hit reply and tell me: what’s the most useful AI workflow you’ve built into your day-to-day analysis? I read every response.

Tommy aka Crazyhottommy

PS:

If you want to learn Bioinformatics, there are four ways that I can help:

1. My free YouTube Chatomics channel, make sure you subscribe to it.
2. I have many resources collected on my github here.
3. I have been writing blog posts for over 10 years https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/​
4. Lastly, I post veryday on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/%F0%9F%8E%AF-ming-tommy-tang-40650014/recent-activity/all/ you will find some posts useful!

Stay awesome!

PPS: