EXPOSED
The hands-on core — clamping and gluing up carcasses, fitting doors and drawers to a fraction of a millimeter, hand-sanding and spraying finish, scribing to an out-of-plumb wall — is not something current robotics does at cost. The real pressure is not language AI but CAD-to-CNC workflows: nesting software, automated panel saws, edgebanders and boring machines now absorb the cutlist, layout, and drilling work that used to be skilled bench time, and AI design tools shrink the drafting and quoting hours further. No license protects the trade, and imported RTA casework keeps compressing the low-custom end.
Tasks largely resist digitisation. CNC has swallowed the flat-panel work — nesting, dados, 32mm system holes — but reading grain direction before a glue-up, planing a twisted door flat, scribing a face frame to a wall that's 6mm out over 2.4m, and rubbing out a finish still take a body at a bench, which is why this sits at 14 and not 18: a big slice of your day (cutlists, layout, boring) already left for the machine.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. You work in a shop full of dust, solvent vapor, and unpredictable stock — a board that pinches the blade, a sheet of 19mm melamine that needs two people to lift onto the slider — and half the job finishes on site in someone's kitchen, kneeling on a subfloor, shimming a run of uppers; only the drafting and CNC programming keep it off 20.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no state license to make cabinets: no exam, no bonded status, no continuing education, and if the installing contractor holds a license it is theirs, not yours — a 2 rather than 0 only because shop-level OSHA obligations on guarding and finish-booth ventilation attach to somebody.
Some relationship component. Custom shops live on the designer, GC, and homeowner who come back and refer, and clients do ask for the maker who did the last job — but the deliverable is a boxes-and-doors package judged on fit and finish, and most bench carpenters in production shops never meet the buyer, which caps it at 9.
Meaningful discretion. You decide how to handle a wide slab that will move seasonally, whether to notch or add a filler when the site measure disagrees with the drawing, and when material is bad enough to reject — real calls with real money in scrapped stock, but they happen inside a shop drawing someone else approved, so the ambiguity stops well short of the 14+ band.
Has AI actually changed your work?