Sam Altman’s admission about feeling sad as he watched the incredible advancements of artificial intelligence tools including those of his own company has struck a nerve across the tech world. A new kind of workplace anxiety has crystallized: feeling obsolete not in spite of your skills, but because your tools have become too good. And as stories of panic attacks, disorientation, and quiet grief over disappearing skills pile up, it is increasingly clear Altman is far from alone.
In a recent post on X, OpenAI CEO Altman described building an app with Codex, the company’s new AI coding agent, as “very fun” at first. The mood shifted when he began asking the system for new feature ideas and realized “at least a couple of them were better than I was thinking of.”
“I felt a little useless, and it was sad,” he added, a moment of vulnerability that quickly ricocheted around the developer community.
Codex, released as a stand-alone Mac app aimed at “vibe coding,” lets developers offload everything from writing new features to fixing bugs and proposing pull requests to an AI agent tightly integrated with their codebase. For a founder whose identity is intertwined with building software and championing AI progress, the realization his own product could outperform his ideas landed with unusual force.
