Kasra Kyanzadeh, a 33-year-old engineer, left OpenAI just two months after starting, citing burnout and loneliness as the nature of development changed. He said the complete automation of AI code writing had robbed the profession of team collaboration and the joy of architectural thinking.
Kasra Kyanzadeh, a 33-year-old engineer, left OpenAI just two months after starting, citing burnout and loneliness as the nature of development changed. He said the complete automation of AI code writing had robbed the profession of team collaboration and the joy of architectural thinking.
The engineer spoke about this in an interview with Business Insider and in a post on his page on the social network X (Twitter).
Kyanzadeh joined OpenAI in June 2026 to develop the Codex desktop application. However, in mid-August, he decided to leave the commercial software industry and pursue his long-standing dream of becoming a film director. The developer emphasized that his decision was not related to the atmosphere at OpenAI, which he considers a strong business, but to the new realities of coding.
Kyanzadeh previously worked on the early teams at Airtable and Watershed, and in 2024 he created the AI app Lightpage. He nostalgically recalls the era when artificial intelligence only supplemented the work of a programmer through system autocomplete.
“This saved us a lot of the tedious pattern-building when writing syntax, but we still thought about the code and architecture,” the engineer said.
According to him, with the mass implementation of autonomous AI agents, one engineer can independently implement entire functions, which has practically destroyed interpersonal interaction in teams. In addition to isolation, Kyanzadeh noted a change in the very nature of the workload: instead of deep immersion in the project, developers have to juggle 5–6 parallel agent processes or spend most of their time testing the generated code.
"For me, developing commercial software is no longer enjoyable. Most people never enjoyed code reviews, but now this routine takes up the lion's share of time," Kyanzadeh noted.
