The Augmented Engineer

The Augmented Engineer

Share this post

The Augmented Engineer
The Augmented Engineer
How Zapier measures AI fluency for engineers

How Zapier measures AI fluency for engineers

Companies are starting to include AI fluency in performance reviews - here's Zapier's rubric

Jun 07, 2025
∙ Paid

Share this post

The Augmented Engineer
The Augmented Engineer
How Zapier measures AI fluency for engineers
Share

I’m on the fence about whether requiring the usage of AI for engineers is actually good. We’ve already seen that Shopify is requiring good usage of AI tools for engineers as a baseline expectation, but it seems Zapier is taking an even stronger stance.

The Zapier CEO recently shared that they’re requiring new hires to be “fluent” in AI, then followed it up with how they measure AI fluency for engineers.

In fact, he shared this rubric for how they measure AI fluency across a number of roles. Regardless of how you feel about this, it’s a really strong data point that can tell us two things:

  • A big company’s perspective on how to use AI well

  • A big company’s perspective on how to stand stand out in an AI-first world

In today’s edition, we’ll dig into each piece of this rubric, focusing on the engineering section.

What Zapier considers unacceptable AI usage

Even if you don’t want to use AI for your work, you probably want to stay out of this category.

This post is for paid subscribers

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2025 Jeff Morhous
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture

Share