Sam Altman struck a nerve across the tech world when he admitted that he was saddened when he saw the incredible progress made by artificial intelligence (AI) tools after using his own company’s. A new workplace anxiety has crystallized: the feeling of being eliminated, not because your skills are great, but because your tools have become too good. As stories of panic attacks, disorientation, and silent sadness at the loss of skills continue to mount, it becomes increasingly clear that Ultraman is not alone.
in a Recent posts on XOpenAI CEO Sam Altman said building applications using the company’s new AI coding agent, Codex, was “a lot of fun” at first. His mood changed when he started asking the system for ideas for new features and realized “at least a few of them were better than I thought.”
“I felt kind of useless, which was sad,” he said, adding that the moment of vulnerability quickly spread throughout the developer community.
Codex, released as a standalone Mac application, is designed to “Vibration coding“,” allowing developers to offload everything from writing new features to fixing bugs and making pull requests to AI agents that are tightly integrated with their code base. For a founder whose life is intertwined with building software and championing advances in AI, realizing that his product might outperform his ideas is unusually empowering.
“I’m sure we’ll find better, more fun ways to spend our time,” Ultraman added later, “but I miss it.”
Online backlash and reluctant sympathy
If Ultraman expects empathy, then most X offers something closer to anger. His confession became a lightning rod for frustration among workers who say artificial intelligence has eroded their livelihoods. a user, a Anonymous headhunter This person in the technology industry with more than ten years of experience asked him: “How do you think ordinary white-collar workers will feel when artificial intelligence replaces their jobs?”
Others accused him of shedding tears “over a bunch of money” while they adapted to career reinvention talking to chatbots instead of doing the jobs they trained for. A food writer has described having her career “disappeared” as an artificial intelligence system, trained on data obtained “without anyone’s consent”, produced “empty copies” of her work. The responses also served as a rallying point for broader anger over OpenAI’s rapid product shifts, including plans to deprecate older models like GPT-4o, with users pleading for greater stability and transparency.
At the same time, some colleagues also realized that they were uncomfortable with Altman’s position. Aditya Agarwalformer chief technology officer DropboxWrote that a weekend of coding with Anthropic’s Claude left him “filled with wonder and deep sadness.” His conclusion: “We will never write code by hand again. There’s no point in doing it.”
Agarwal describes coding as “something I was very good at” but now it’s “freeing and enriching” and makes him “happy but disoriented…sad and confused.”
From Panic Disorder to “AI Anxiety”
The sentiments Altman and Agarwal describe echo a broader anxiety about artificial intelligence, in which even Silicon Valley veterans are finding their hard-won skills and identities being surpassed by software that is emerging faster than anyone expected.
dialogue narrated Veteran Chris Brockett’s Story Microsoft Researcher chats with Cade Metz about his 2022 book, Genius Creators: The Mavericks Who Are Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Google, Facebook, and the World. Brockett said he was rushed to the hospital after encountering an early artificial intelligence system that could do most of the jobs he had spent decades mastering. He believed he was having a heart attack, later describing, “I had one of those moments in my 52-year-old body where I saw a future that I couldn’t participate in.”
The same work draws on MIT physicist Max Tegmark’s concerns AI may “eclipse the abilities that provide me with my current sense of self-worth and value in the job market,” according to reports from professionals who now see AI “quickly and relatively cheaply” completing tasks on which they once relied for income and status.
A Silicon Valley product manager said bluntly in an interview vanity fair 2023: “We see more AI-related products and advances in one day than we saw in one year a decade ago.”
Designing a future where humans still matter
Despite growing unease, some economists believe the trajectory of artificial intelligence is not destiny. Labor economist David Autor said that if used intentionally, AI could expand “decision-making tasks currently undertaken by elite experts” to a wider group of workers, thereby improving the quality of work and mitigating inequality. In his view, the future of AI work is “a matter of design” rather than an exercise in prediction: Society can still choose how tools like Codex and Claude are deployed and who benefits.
Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli wealth Interviewed for his somewhat contrarian, evidence-based research Dangers of working remotely and The nuts and bolts of AI automationJanuary said there is still a lot of work to be done to implement these tools across the enterprise. He specifically warns against listening too sincerely to the likes of Ultraman or Agarwal, who are not only bemoaning such huge progress but also hyping their products for the market.
“If you listen to technology developers, they will tell you what is possible,” he said. “They’re not thinking about what’s practical.”
Still, no matter how easy these tools are to adopt across the enterprise, Altman’s tweet captures a paradox many knowledge workers now face: The very tools that make them faster, more capable, and sometimes more creative can also undermine the belief that their unique expertise is indispensable. At least for now, even the people who build these tools are grappling with how to feel both impressive in their power and somewhat useless in their shadow.
For this story,wealthJournalists use generative AI as a research tool. Editors verified information for accuracy before publication.
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