'I felt a little useless and it was sad': Sam Altman feels obsolete using his own AI tools-and he's not the only one | Fortune

"Sam Altman's admission about feeling sad as he watched the incredible advancements of artificial intelligence (AI) tools after using his own company's AI tools 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 Sam 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 standalone 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."

Advanced AI coding agents are increasingly capable of generating feature ideas, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests, enabling developers to offload substantial work. A founder experienced sadness and a sense of uselessness when the AI produced ideas he judged better than his own, illustrating how tool superiority can erode professional identity. The release of a standalone Mac app for "vibe coding" accelerates this dynamic by tightly integrating AI with codebases. Workers report panic attacks, disorientation, and quiet grief over disappearing skills, while some express anger and fear about job displacement even as others hope for new ways to spend time.

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