I introduced him to scratch the other month. I have loved his excitement when he builds the simplest things. I've seen him run into problems where I thought his attitude of 'it's too hard' would come to the surface. He tackled them head on, figured out where the bug was and supplied a fix.

I hope he has a fulfilling career in CS or sciences in general. So I sincerely hope scratch and this experience builds up his confidence and beak the cycle of poverty and drug abuse

This is correct because cement is not an adequate plug for well decomissioning. Cement cracks and erodes due to groundwater aggressivity, heat stress and other stresses. Over time will lead to leakages. A better alternative would be expansive clays like bentonite but a far more costlier exercise.

Even then, there is significant uncertainties. Many sustainable yield estimates are based on historical climate conditions and recharge rates. As rainfall declines and droughts become more frequent or prolonged, aquifer recharge may decrease, reducing the volume of groundwater that can be sustainably extracted. In some regions, the number of licensed users may ultimately exceed future sustainable allocations identified through updated modelling and monitoring. This creates a difficult policy challenge, as regulators may be required to reduce allocations or revoke licences from existing users, often with substantial social, economic and political consequences.

Groundwater management is further complicated by the fact that aquifers are not homogeneous reservoirs. They are complex geological systems, with groundwater availability and flow behaviour controlled by local stratigraphy, structural features, recharge mechanisms, hydraulic connectivity, and ecological dependencies. Effective management therefore requires aquifer-specific assessments rather than broad, one size fits all approaches.

There are probably very few hydrogeologists browsing HN so hello to any colleagues that are out there.

I understand what you're saying. My opinion is I see agentic workflow similar to the star trek universe where they ask the computer questions and get a response while they continue with their work. But that doesn't mean not learning how to do things from first principles. This is what I tell juniors in my field when I pass jobs to them. They can use LLM but to ensure they know and understand what's going on and most do from their university degree. I think this is where we need to pivot towards when discussing LLM.

This has lowered the barrier of entry for many non-SWEs. I'm primarily a data scientist myself in the environmental sector with limited front end development.

My partner proposed an idea to help manage her horses and over the course of several weeks we fleshed out an android app that would enable/assist her with horse care.

I spent a few days in planning mode pointing claude to the services we want to utilise and the functionality.

We now have a fully developed app that we are testing but found several features missing. For example, Claude implement X but without a level of verbosity it failed to implement the edit/deletion of X.

The app is highly tailored to her use case and I had already built the main parts as a POC but she had no user-friendly method to interact with the information she required. Claude made this possible in such a quick time frame that just seems insane. As someone time poor (as most horse people are), it would have taken me a year+ to produce something unpolished when compared to what Claude produced.