Your job has an AI score
There’s one question that comes up in pretty much every conversation I have these days, whether it’s with colleagues, friends, or random people at conferences:
Could AI do my job?
So I built a website to help answer that: Could AI do your job?.
Answer 10 simple questions about the nature of your work, and it tells you how applicable today’s AI tools are to your occupation, based on real usage data and a score formula from the research paper: Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations.
I made the whole thing using AI (of course), with GitHub Copilot agent mode doing most of the heavy lifting, using the paper’s data and formulas. The source code is available on GitHub, as a fork of the original paper’s repo.
Why I made this #
Not to be alarmist. Really.
I personally think there are way more angles to consider than what raw data can show. But I was tired of the vague hand-waving that usually comes with the “AI is coming for your job” discourse. I wanted numbers. Even imperfect ones.
The goal isn’t to accurately predict the end of your job. It’s more about getting a feel for how much you may be (or already are) impacted, and how transformative you can expect the coming years to be for your daily routine.
My own experience #
Mine has already changed a lot in the past three years, and even more so in the past six months.
Agents are starting to tackle increasingly complex tasks, more autonomously. As a developer, my current challenge isn’t whether AI can help me, it’s how many agents I can handle and steer in parallel. The feeling of being the bottleneck is not great sometimes. I’m the slow part now. That’s a weird place to be.
I’ve yet to completely move to what Dan Shapiro calls level 4 of agent usage. I still catch many tricky mistakes in the output, making me hesitant to fully trust automated AI reviewing AI’s output. Or maybe I’m still too clingy about what I consider “good” code or content. Either way, I’m not ready to entirely skip the human review & steering stage at this point.
Is this a good thing? #
Honestly? I don’t know yet.
What I know for sure is that many disciplines are changing fast because of AI, and I’ve yet to find out if it’s ultimately a good or bad thing. But I’m confident about one thing: we can’t ignore it. This won’t just pass as a trend, the way crypto arguably did. AI is here to stay.
I think it’s how we use it that will determine whether it ends up being a net positive or negative for everyone. And that makes it worth paying attention to, not with fear, but with curiosity and a healthy dose of critical thinking.
Try it out #
Go ahead, take the quiz: sinedied.github.io/working-with-ai
Take the result with a pinch of salt. Talk about it. Disagree with it. That’s the point. The conversation matters more than the score.
And if you’re curious, the source code is on GitHub. PRs welcome if you want to improve the data or the questions.