Although the field faces numerous challenges, none of them is obviously insurmountable. On the contrary, the rapid progress over the past seven years since the publication of the DeepNovo paper illustrates how quickly this field is moving forward. With novel machine learning strategies, growing collections of publicly available data, and improving mass spectrometry instrumentation, we can expect the use of de novo sequencing tools to become more common, enabling many types of analyses that have previously been challenging or impossible to carry out.