AI makes us faster, but does it make us better engineers, or just more dependent?
As a follow-up to my post on the The 4 Cognitive Archetypes of Developers Using AI, I wanted to created a quiz as a self-assessment for AI-assisted development habits.
My previous post sparked many interesting discussions and insights. I took some of those elements and put together a series of questions to help evaluate how you are using AI as a developer.
The 4 Archetypes include:
AI Architect: owns the problem, uses AI as leverage
AI Balancer: productive with AI, still protects judgment
Autopilot Builder: fast, but may accept output too quickly
AI Passenger: lets AI do too much of the cognitive work
This assessment scores answers across dimensions:
- ownership
- reflection
- dependency
- leverage
- verification
- speed bias
The questions are based on everyday engineering decisions:
- debugging production issues
- reviewing AI-generated code
- writing tests
- refactoring
- working with unfamiliar libraries
- explaining AI-assisted PRs
- documenting complex changes
Here is my Cognitive Archetype for example:
Each results page also displays a breakdown of associated strengths and weaknesses and recommended actions to improve your cognitive score.
Here are my results:
I want to clarify that I am not collecting or persisting any user data as part of this project. It's just a small tool I wanted to share to keep the conversation going and hopefully inspire some of you.
You can take the quiz here and share which archetype you got!


Top comments (4)
Hey Cool, now we know what how we do things, 😀 :
I got AI Architect on the AI Cognitive Archetype Quiz.
You use AI as a system partner without giving up authorship.
Take the quiz: ai-cognitive-quiz.vercel.app
You show the strength and the weakness of AI. It is great article, Julien
Thanks Ben :)
What result do you get with the Quiz?
99%. It is great quiz to test your knowledge