COOKED
The modal web developer builds and maintains sites and front-end features — HTML/CSS/JS, CMS theming, responsive layouts, form handling, API wiring, WordPress and Shopify customization — and that is precisely the work current models generate at usable quality in one pass. What persists is not the markup but the accountability: performance and accessibility audits that hold up under a lawsuit, security hardening, and the client conversation about what should be built. Note the split: agency/freelance site-builders are far more exposed than developers who own production systems, auth, payments, and uptime.
Most of this decline happened after 2021 — it is not the pandemic dip.
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
+7.5%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 70,190 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +7.5% 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.
~5,400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
WebmasterWeb EngineerWeb ProducerWeb ArchitectWeb DeveloperWeb ConsultantWeb ProgrammerWeb SpecialistWeb TechnicianWebsite ManagerjQuery DeveloperBack End EngineerNode.js DeveloperTableau DeveloperWeb Site DesignerWebmaster AnalystBack End DeveloperFront End EngineerInterface DesignerInternet ArchitectInternet DeveloperIntranet DeveloperReact.js DeveloperWeb Page Developer
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: liability shield .
Core tasks are already automatable Scaffolding a responsive layout, wiring a REST call, writing a contact-form validator, restyling a WordPress theme, and fixing a CSS breakpoint are all single-prompt outputs now, and since those tasks dominate the modal ticket queue the score sits at 6 rather than 12 — the residue that isn't one-pass is debugging a flaky third-party embed and untangling a decade-old jQuery codebase.
Fully desk- and screen-based The job runs entirely on a laptop over Git and Figma; the 2 rather than 0 covers testing on real iPhones and tablets in a device lab and the occasional trip to a client office or on-site photo shoot for asset capture.
No licence, no signature requirement There is no licensure, no registration board, no continuing-education requirement — anyone can ship production HTML, and when a site leaks card data or fails WCAG the exposure lands on the business owner or the agency's E&O policy, not on your name.
Meaningful discretion You choose framework, state management, and CDN strategy and decide whether a hack ships before Friday, but scope, brand, and budget arrive from a designer, PM, or client — the 7 marks genuine technical discretion inside decisions someone else owns.
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 (6/20 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 (7/20) 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 16 of this occupation's 24 points (67%).
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.
Database Architects EXPOSED
Software Developers EXPOSED
Computer Occupations, All Other 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 39/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift, already visible: the routine tier (markup, CMS theming, responsive layout, form wiring) is generated in one pass, leaving the tier models fail at — reproducing a Core Web Vitals regression in a live system, screen-reader testing against real assistive tech, CSP and supply-chain hardening after a third-party script compromise, and migration of legacy production data without downtime. This raises the score only for developers who own production systems; site-builders have no second tier to fall back into.
Accessibility law hardening: if DOJ's ADA Title II web rule (28 CFR Part 35, WCAG 2.1 AA, compliance deadlines 2026-27) is extended to Title III private commercial sites, or the European Accessibility Act's 2025 enforcement produces named-signatory conformance statements, a human would attest to VPAT/accessibility conformance and carry personal or firm liability for the claim. Similarly PCI-DSS 4.0's client-side script inventory requirements (6.4.3/11.6.1) already name an accountable party for payment-page JS.
If on-call and incident ownership becomes the formal core of the role — named incident commander in SOC 2 / ISO 27001 audits, breach-notification decision authority under state privacy laws — the role owns consequential calls under ambiguity rather than producing artifacts. Insurer cyber-policy underwriting increasingly demands a named technical owner for web-facing assets.
Narrow route only: buyers paying for provenance of code they can be sued over — a human-authored, human-reviewed attestation for regulated sectors (health portals, government procurement, financial disclosure pages). No plausible route for the general small-business site market, where price is the only variable and AI-generated sites are already the default.
The limit. Even with every lever, this stays a low-to-mid score. There is no licensure for web development anywhere in the US, and none is being proposed by any state board or professional body, so liability_shield cannot approach the levels seen in engineering or medicine — the accountability attaches to the firm, not the individual. Embodiment has no route at all. The realistic ceiling is roughly 40-45, and it applies to developers who own production systems, not to the modal agency site-builder described here.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 4,200 | $104,820 +13% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 3,840 | $134,350 +45% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 3,470 | $130,440 +41% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 2,790 | $96,870 +5% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 2,310 | $107,290 +16% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 1,660 | $96,740 +4% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 1,450 | $108,520 +17% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 1,420 | $152,450 +65% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 1,130 | $166,670 +80% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 1,420 | $152,450 +65% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 3,840 | $134,350 +45% |
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 24. 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.