COOKED
The work — populating boards, crimping and routing harnesses, torquing fasteners, running functional test fixtures, logging results on work orders — is manual rather than text-based, so language AI barely touches it directly. The real pressure is industrial: pick-and-place, automated wire-cutting and crimping cells, AI vision inspection, and offshoring already absorb the high-volume tiers, and BLS has this occupation shrinking for years. What persists is low-volume, high-mix, prototype, and rework assembly where fixturing a robot costs more than a technician's hands, but that tier is smaller than the current headcount and carries no license, no signature, and no client relationship.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Populating through-hole boards and dressing a harness by hand still defeats a pick-and-place line at lot sizes of 20, but SMT reflow, automated crimp presses, and AOI already own the volume work you used to do, which puts this at 12 rather than 16 — the manual dexterity holds, the demand for it doesn't.
Some physical or field component. You are standing at an ESD bench under a magnifier with hand tools, torque drivers, and test fixtures — physical, but in a climate-controlled, lit, fixtured cell where parts arrive in kitted trays, which is why this sits at 10 and not with the field technician crawling through a machine room at 16.
No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence gates this bench; IPC-A-610 or J-STD-001 certification may be required by your employer's customer, but the QA engineer or DER signs the acceptance and the company's AS9100/ISO cert carries the exposure, not your initials on the traveler.
Anonymous artifact production. The assembly ships in a box with a serial number and a test report; the customer never learns which operator built it, and swapping you for the operator on second shift changes nothing they can detect — the 2 reflects that your lead knows your yield rate, and no one else does.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. You work to a build print, a bill of materials, and a written work instruction with rev control, and when a part doesn't fit or a board fails test the call goes to the engineer via a nonconformance tag — the 3 covers the real discretion you do have in solder rework and troubleshooting a bad joint before escalating.
Has AI actually changed your work?