Show HN: Will AI take my job

Internet freaks out over 5‑second test that says if a robot is coming for your paycheck

TLDR: A viral “Will AI take my job?” site lets people check how vulnerable their work is to automation, sparking a mix of panic, sarcasm, and skepticism. Commenters argue over whether it’s a serious warning to reskill or just a scary toy that ignores real-life bosses, customers, and office politics.

A new “Will AI take my job?” site hit Hacker News and instantly turned into a group therapy session, a roast battle, and a career crisis all rolled into one. The tool is simple: type in your job, hit a button, and it tells you how much artificial intelligence might change your work, based on real government job data. The mood in the comments? Half doomsday prophets, half eye-rolling skeptics.

One camp is posting their results like horoscopes from hell: anxious copywriters and junior coders joking that they’ve been “pre-fired by a website.” Some people say it confirms their worst fears that boring, repetitive office work is going to get wiped out first, with one commenter calling their role “just buttons AI hasn’t learned to click yet.” Others clap back, insisting the tool is more party trick than prophecy, pointing out it only covers 342 official job types and doesn’t know anything about office politics, human trust, or messy real-world customers.

Amid the panic, the comedians showed up: people typing “overpaid middle manager” or “startup founder” and asking where the AI that replaces useless meetings is. A dark running joke: if your job is safe, it probably doesn’t pay well. The biggest fight? Whether this is a wake-up call to learn new skills—or just clickbait designed to scare people who already feel replaceable.

Key Points

  • The article introduces a tool called “Will AI take my job.”
  • Users can type in their job title to see how much AI could change it.
  • The tool returns results in about five seconds after input.
  • The underlying data comes from 342 jobs tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • The article does not detail methodology, focusing on the tool’s purpose and basic use.

Hottest takes

"According to this, my job is ‘highly automatable,’ which is wild because I mostly sit in meetings that should’ve been emails" — @meeting_maxed
"If AI can really do my job, I vote it also has to deal with my boss, my deadlines, and my 3 a.m. Slack pings" — @burntout_dev
"This site doesn’t predict the future, it just tells you if your job is basically copy-paste with a nicer chair" — @bleakChic
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