Create maps
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
Producing the draft is the single thing current models are best at, and it needs no integration at all: a prompt and a couple of reference documents are enough. A person still edits it and takes responsibility for what goes out.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Drafting and content production |
| Jobs that do it | 9 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Thinking Creatively (4.A.2.b.2) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 9 occupations that perform it.
- Prepare site plans, specifications, or cost estimates for land development.
- Revise existing maps and charts, making all necessary corrections and adjustments.
- Prepare and maintain sketches, maps, reports, and legal descriptions of surveys to describe, certify, and assume liability for work performed.
- Draw maps, diagrams, and profiles, using cross-sections and surveys, to represent elevations, topographical contours, subsurface formations, and structures.
- Analyze proposed site factors and design maps, graphs, tracings, and diagrams to illustrate findings.
- Produce or update overlay maps to show information boundaries, water locations, or topographic features on various base maps or at different scales.
- Develop soil maps.
- Select and mark trees for thinning or logging, drawing detailed plans that include access roads.
- Participate in the planning or development of mapping projects.
- Determine map content and layout, as well as production specifications such as scale, size, projection, and colors, and direct production to ensure that specifications are followed.
- Establish fixed points for use in making maps, using geodetic and engineering instruments.
- Determine scales, line sizes, or colors to be used for hard copies of computerized maps, using plotters.
- Delineate aerial photographic detail, such as control points, hydrography, topography, and cultural features, using precision stereoplotting apparatus or drafting instruments.
- Trace contours or topographic details to generate maps that denote specific land or property locations or geographic attributes.
- Prepare and alter trace maps, charts, tables, detailed drawings, and three-dimensional optical models of terrain using stereoscopic plotting and computer graphics equipment.
- Prepare topographic or contour maps of land surveyed, including site features and other relevant information, such as charts, drawings, and survey notes.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for drafting and content production, and what it costs.
Drafting needs no tools, no integration and no platform. One $20 assistant and two reference documents beat any agent builder here, and every extra thing in this stack is cost with nothing behind it.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
9 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Create visual designs or displays”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.