Grab Your Custom AI Learning Path + Share Your AI Score with the FIRST Public AI Cred Platform—Get a Custom Test, Custom Learning Path, Share Your Profile, and More + Grab a Substack discount!

The bad news is you don’t really know how good you are at AI.

The good news is no one else really knows either.

I don’t know about you, but that won’t stop folks in my family from sharing their opinions on AI fluency around the Thanksgiving table.

The fact is we’re long on opinions and short on useful, objective AI skill assessments.

Until now.

I know everyone’s LinkedIn says “proficient in AI” or “AI certified in X tool.”

The phrase has become meaningless. Hiring managers can’t tell who’s competent and who’s just good at ChatGPT + buzzwords. Job seekers can’t prove what they actually know. And so you and I—even if we use AI every single day—have no reliable way to gauge where we’re at or show what we know.

And that’s a big problem, because this is the most monetizable skill of the decade, and it keeps changing fast. Someone who can keep up (even kinda) with the model drops is going to be 10x more useful in most organizations than someone who last checked their ChatGPT model number way back in the spring. But they both might be “ChatGPT certified” or whatever.

It’s a massive problem, and it translates into a huge career advantage that is MIA, because it’s impossible to train for, show, or measure.

Don’t get me wrong: the difference on the ground is real. The gap between a competent AI user and an advanced one isn’t subtle when you watch them work.

I am estimating very conservatively based on working with hundreds of folks over the last year or so: an advanced AI user gives you an extra ten to fifteen hours of productive output per week, minimum. I’ve seen cases where it’s much higher.

That’s not hype—that’s the gap between having documented workflows with specific prompt patterns versus winging it every time. False confidence is expensive. You think you’re leveraging AI effectively while leaving massive value on the table, and you don’t even know it because there’s never been a way to check.

Meanwhile, most AI courses are teaching you the wrong thing. OpenAI certifications. Gemini badges. Claude training modules. Every one of these organizations does good work teaching you the tool. And that’s the problem.

But tool certification is not AI competency—especially in a world where Gemini 3, Opus 4.5, and ChatGPT 5.1 all launched in the last two months. Betting your career on mastering one model is a losing strategy. The skills that matter are the ones that transfer across models and don’t expire when the next release drops.

Some readers may remember I first wrote about this back in October.

So TLDR; I built a framework for measuring AI fluency across five dimensions that sit above any particular tool—strategy, prompting, workflow integration, critical evaluation, and ethics.

I published the assessment prompts, the scoring system, and a 90-day development plan generator (still there in the post if you want them!)

The response was overwhelming. Hundreds of people took the test. They wanted to know where they stood. They wanted to track their progress over time. They wanted something that felt real, not another certificate to staple to the wall.

One reader went further: Jonathan Edwards—a filmmaker out of northeastern Pennsylvania who got hooked on AI while building workflows for video editing—saw that post and thought: this should be an app.

So Jonathan reached out, and we spent a few weeks going back and forth asynchronously, refining the vision, pressure-testing the assessment, building something that could actually deliver on the promise.

So we built it. It’s called AI Cred, and it’s live today.

Why AI Cred? Pretty simple:

• AI Cred lets you build an AI profile you can share with an externally validated leaderboard, score, and assessment of your AI competencies

• AI Cred goes farther than the original post in some important ways:

  • I took the time to curate and add hundreds of AI resources that the model can directly pull from when recommending custom learning for you on AI

  • AI Cred also has more power than a prompt: it can course-correct and adjust its custom recommendations over time as you grow and change in skills

  • And unlike the original, AI Cred can track your profile and AI skill growth over time, so you can show your growth to others

  • AI Cred also has shareable and searchable profiles, so you can share your own skill profile and search for others!

  • AI Cred generates FREE additional custom lesson plans for you as you grow and iterate your skills based on your initial test result

  • AI Cred also stops the bragging rights problem on LinkedIn—the AI-powered summary in your profile reflects your actual test results, and that means others can trust it’s real

  • And by popular request, AI Cred has a leaderboard, so you can actually compete and earn a place of pride right on the homepage

Pretty cool right?! But that’s not all, we have more in here…

• My take on the five AI skills nobody’s teaching you—strategy, prompting above the tool level, workflow integration, critical evaluation, and ethics as product design—and why they matter more than any certification

• The story of how we built AI Cred—yes, we built it with zero meetings and lots of AI-powered tools, so you’ll get some honest takes on Codex vs. Claude code in here for an actual AI-powered application

• A deep dive on measurement philosophy—why I crafted the assessment the way I did, how I’m thinking about keeping it up to date (including bringing in Opus 4.5 this week), and how I’ll continue to improve it over time

• A chance to share your feedback—AI Cred is a labor of love, and we’re opening up a work slack channel to work directly with us to give feedback and prioritize what matters for all of you

Plus (of course) there’s a deep discount for the Substack community—40% off for a test, and 60% off for a pack of 3 tests so you can track your learning over time.

AI Cred literally grew out of my Substack chat, and our first alpha testers were in the chat too, so we want you all to get a special welcome—scroll on down for that discount code!

I think you get the idea. This is the simplest way I can come up with to solve a major problem in the industry: how to tell how good you are at AI, and how to tell others about it. If you’re interested in knowing where you stand, jump in. There’s room on the leaderboard for you!