The AI Compass
The AI Compass is a 29-question political compass-style quiz about AI and AI ethics that assigns users one of 30 archetypes. The author, Simon Willison, took the quiz and was categorized as "The Garage Tinkerer," which they found fitting. The quiz is built as a single-page React app without a build step.
Background
- This is a blog post by Simon Willison, a well-known Python developer, open-source contributor (Datasette, Django co-creator), and vocal commentator on AI tools and culture. The post is not reporting news — it's sharing a fun, interactive quiz he came across.
- "The AI Compass" is a web quiz (29 multiple-choice questions) that maps your views on AI into one of 30 "archetypes", displayed on a 2-axis chart: GOOD vs BAD (your view of AI's impact) and OVERHYPED vs TRANSFORMATIVE (your view of its significance). Think "political compass" but for AI opinions.
- The "Garage Tinkerer" archetype (which the author got) describes someone who enjoys building small, practical things with AI locally, ignores the heated public debates, and finds joy in tinkering for its own sake. Its "patron saint" is Simon Willison himself — so the quiz creator playfully made the author the embodiment of that type.
- The post also notes a technical curiosity: the quiz is built as a single HTML page using React's "Babel" transpiler in the browser (via `<script type="text/babel">`), which lets developers write JSX without a build step — handy for small projects but unusual in production.