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What Kind of AI-Assisted Developer Are You? Take the quiz.

DEV Community [Unofficial] June 22, 2026
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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!

Discussion in the ATmosphere

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