OpenAI engineer quite coding for filmmaking: Here's why

Kasra Kyanzadeh had spent over a decade chasing rooms full of smart people, from Airtable's fourth hire to Watershed's first employee to his own startup.

Joining OpenAI's Codex team in June felt like the natural next step. Two months later, he walked away from software entirely.

Kyanzadeh, 33, revealed to Business Insider that the problem was not the company, but the workers were smart, the perks were typical for tech companies, and happy hours were there. It was his routine programming with AI that tired him, which had become a lonely process and not a team effort anymore.

He can pinpoint the exact moment when the change happened. Until 2024, AI technologies only completed tabs and removed the tedious syntax, but the engineers thought through the architecture together.

By December, he says, coding had "slipped" into something else entirely; one person, backed by a handful of AI agents, could own an entire feature alone, cutting the collaboration that used to force people to solve problems as a team.

The mechanics of the new process were as annoying to him as the loneliness. An AI-assigned task lasted a few minutes each, neither long enough for him to enter a flow state nor short enough to make him want to start a second one.

Thus, he would be working on five or six tasks simultaneously or switching to Twitter while he was waiting. Code reviews, which he said no one had ever liked, were taking an increasingly large portion of his day because writing became faster.

Business Insider has reported on developers describing similar paralysis under AI-heavy workflows, and Anthropic engineering leader Fiona Fung has said AI agents left her company's own programmers feeling lonelier on the job. For Kyanzadeh, the read on his own experiment was blunt: "It turned out, I don't feel like I'm doing my best work anymore."