EXPOSED
The core of this job — laying out, cutting, shaping, and hand-fitting wood patterns, mockups, and prototypes from drawings — is manual craft that language models cannot touch, and shop work with bandsaws, lathes, chisels, and glue-ups resists robotics. The real pressure is not chat AI but the upstream shift: CAD/CAM, CNC routing, and 3D printing already absorb the drawing interpretation, layout math, and roughing that used to be billable skilled hours, and this occupation is already down to roughly 280 workers nationally. No license protects the trade, and clients buy an accurate physical object rather than a relationship with its maker.
This fall is concentrated in 2020 and has not recovered since.
Median pay $59,260 → $56,550 -23.7% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-4.5%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 280 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Shrinking, but not obviously because of AI
The BLS projects -4.5% by 2034, but at 48/100 this work is only moderately exposed — not the profile of a job current AI can simply do. Occupations shrink for many reasons, and the score does not point at automation as this one's cause.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
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Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Reading a designer's drawing and then hand-fitting a curved hull mockup or furniture prototype — planing to a fair line, scarfing joints, sanding to a feel rather than a dimension — is work no model can do, but the 14 rather than 18 reflects that CNC routing and 3D printing already take the roughing, nesting, and layout arithmetic that used to fill the first days of a job.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You spend the shift standing at a bandsaw, lathe, and bench, wrestling stock that moves with humidity, chasing grain direction and tearout, working around clamps and dust — a 16 rather than 19 only because it's your own shop with fixed machines, not a bridge deck or a crawlspace.
No licence, no signature requirement There is no state license, no journeyman card, no stamp required to make a wooden pattern or mockup; a buyer can hand the same drawing to any shop with a router and no statute stops them, which is what puts this at 1.
Meaningful discretion You decide shrink allowance, draft angles, parting lines, and where to build up versus carve away when the drawing is ambiguous, and a bad call scraps expensive stock or a casting downstream — but the designer owns the design intent and signs off, keeping this in the discretion band rather than the high-stakes one.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (14/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (8/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (9/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 18 of this occupation's 48 points (38%).
Embodiment (16/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Glaziers EXPOSED
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 60/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift as CNC/3D printing absorbs roughing and layout: the residual job becomes final hand-fitting, grain matching, finish work, and reverse-engineering objects that exist with no drawings (historic architectural millwork patterns, museum/conservation replicas, foundry patterns for legacy castings where no model file exists). Watchable marker: shops advertising 'digitize + hand-finish' rather than build-from-drawing.
Provenance-based demand: Secretary of the Interior Standards / NPS Preservation Brief compliance work on historic restoration, and museum conservation contracts that specify hand-worked reproduction rather than additive-manufactured substitutes. Also luxury/marine and instrument prototyping where 'hand-built pattern' is a marketed attribute. Watchable marker: RFPs specifying hand-carved or traditional-method reproduction.
Pattern-of-record responsibility in foundry and tooling work: if the maker is the one who sets draft, shrinkage allowance, and parting lines for a casting that goes into a certified assembly (AS9100 / ASME first-article), the call and its cost of failure sit with them. Watchable marker: first-article inspection documentation naming the patternmaker.
Concentration of remaining work into one-off, non-repeating pieces in cluttered general-purpose shops — species-specific hand judgment on movement, grain runout, and glue-up clamping that fixtured robotics cannot amortize over a single unit.
The limit. With 280 workers nationally and no licensure body, there is no realistic route to a liability shield — no state board is going to license wood patternmaking. Trust premium gains are real but apply to a niche (preservation, museum, luxury prototyping) too small to lift the trade as a whole; the dominant risk here is the occupation shrinking further rather than being scored differently.
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 48. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.