LLM

My friend Glen recently sent me a LinkedIn post about the future of bioinformatics. It was not a happy one. The author teaches an intro bioinformatics course. Their argument went like this: Nothing in an intro course makes a newbie employable anymore. Entry-level positions are gone, because Claude is smarter and faster than any entry-level research assistant. If you are a student thinking about this field, stop. The field is doomed.

Almost three years ago I wrote Has AI Changed the Course of Drug Development?. The post was cautiously skeptical. AlphaFold was the headline. BenevolentAI had just flopped a Phase 2a in atopic dermatitis. Verge Genomics’ VRG50635 was about to enter the clinic. I argued that data quality was the real bottleneck, not algorithms. Time to revisit that. I now lead epigenomics bioinformatics at AstraZeneca and I use Claude Code daily.

My first blog post in a long time! I wanted an AI assistant that knew me. Knew my research. Knew my content calendar. Knew that when I say “write a thread about batch effects,” I mean single-cell RNA-seq batch effects with Harmony and Seurat code, for an audience of computational biologists who already know what a UMAP is. So I built Helix. An OpenClaw agent running on a Mac Mini in my home office in Boston, connected to my Google Calendar, my content docs, and a deep memory system that learns my preferences over time.