COOKED
The bulk of this job — wireframes, mockups, responsive layouts, component variants, hero images, HTML/CSS front-end assembly, design-system upkeep — is exactly the screen-and-pattern work generative tools now produce at usable quality and near-zero marginal cost. What resists is upstream: framing what the product should do, running usability research on real users, arbitrating between stakeholders, and owning conversion or accessibility outcomes. The modal worker here is a production designer on a marketing or product site, and that tier is compressing fastest; the strategy/research tier is smaller than the current headcount.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
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.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+7% 128,900 → 137,900 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +7% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
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.
~9,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
DesignerWebmasterGamemasterGame MasterGame TesterWeb DesignerWeb EngineerWeb ProducerGame DesignerGame EngineerWeb ArchitectConcept ArtistGame DeveloperLevel DesignerWeb ConsultantWeb ProgrammerWeb SpecialistWeb TechnicianWorld DesignerContent CreatorContent ManagerDesign DirectorMotion DesignerWebsite Manager
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Producing a Figma mockup, generating component variants against an existing design system, hand-coding a responsive landing page from a comp, and cutting image assets are all now single-prompt or near-single-prompt operations, which is why this lands at 8 rather than mid-teens — the residual defensible work is moderated usability sessions, information-architecture decisions from ambiguous business goals, and WCAG remediation that requires testing with a screen reader on real content.
Fully desk- and screen-based Everything happens in Figma, a browser, and a code editor; the only physical acts are handing a laptop to a participant during a usability test or checking a layout on a physical phone or tablet, which is why this is 2 and not 0.
No licence, no signature requirement There is no licence, no registration board, and no statutory sign-off — a client can hire an unlicensed contractor off a marketplace for the same deliverable, and even ADA/Section 508 accessibility exposure lands on the site owner or the agency's contract, not on the designer who drew the screen.
Meaningful discretion Choosing a navigation model, deciding what gets cut from a checkout flow, or trading visual polish against page weight are genuine calls with revenue consequences, but they are made inside a brief, a brand system, and a PM's priority stack, and get overruled in review — real discretion, bounded scope, so 10.
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 (8/20 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 (2/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (9/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (10/20) 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 21 of this occupation's 31 points (68%).
Embodiment (2/20) 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.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to web and digital interface designers on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
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 47/100 — EXPOSED.
Dark-pattern and consent-design liability landing on the designer of record: FTC's ongoing dark-pattern actions (Amazon Prime 'Iliad' case), the EU DSA Art. 25 ban on interface manipulation, and California's CPRA consent-UI rules. If firms respond by designating an accountable reviewer for consent flows, pricing screens and cancellation paths — the way a DPO is designated under GDPR — that decision ownership sits with a senior designer.
Pure task-mix shift, no law needed: this occupation genuinely has two tiers. If production output (mockups, component variants, responsive layout, CSS assembly) is fully absorbed, the residual role is discovery framing, moderated usability research with real participants, stakeholder arbitration and conversion/experiment ownership — work models do poorly. The score rises for whoever remains; headcount falls at the same time. Watch job postings shifting from 'Product Designer' to 'Design Lead / Researcher' with no IC production listed.
Accessibility enforcement that names a responsible human: the European Accessibility Act (in force June 2025) plus DOJ's 2024 ADA Title II rule adopting WCAG 2.1 AA create audit obligations. If a certification regime hardens — e.g. procurement contracts or an insurer's cyber/media liability policy requiring a named IAAP-certified (CPACC/WAS) individual to sign the conformance statement (VPAT/EN 301 549 declaration) — a subset of designers gains a countersignature role AI cannot hold. Today VPATs are signed by vendors, not licensed individuals; the change to watch is a licensed or certified natural person on the attestation.
Narrow but real: brand-identity and editorial design work where clients pay for an authored point of view and named credit. If provenance labelling (C2PA Content Credentials, now in Adobe and Google tooling) becomes a client procurement requirement for brand assets — 'human-authored, credentialed' — a premium tier persists. This does not reach the modal production designer on a marketing site.
The limit. Realistic ceiling roughly mid-40s, and only for the strategy/research/accessibility-attestation tier. No licensure body exists or is being proposed for interface design, so liability_shield cannot reach the levels seen in engineering or medicine, and embodiment has no route at all. Any gain here is concentrated in a minority of current headcount; the aggregate occupation can decline while individual survivors' scores rise.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 14,990 | $119,190 +15% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 10,330 | $133,760 +29% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 9,220 | $106,550 +2% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 6,630 | $163,810 +58% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 4,400 | $201,260 +94% |
| Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN | 2,500 | $63,510 -39% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 2,380 | $104,150 +0% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 2,330 | $122,270 +18% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 4,400 | $201,260 +94% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 6,630 | $163,810 +58% |
| Boulder, CO | 360 | $139,900 +35% |
Warhorse Studios · Microsoft · Yield Guild Games
Blood in the Machine reports interviews with Xbox workers describing layoffs and management's push toward AI tooling within Microsoft's gaming division.
Yield Guild Games reported cutting 35 staff and closing its game publishing arm as it refocuses on AI, per TradingView.
A developer who worked on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 said publicly that their role at the studio was replaced by AI, as reported by The Express Tribune.
Polygon reports that a developer on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 says they were dismissed and their work replaced by AI at the game's studio.
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.