Reverse Uno

There’s a moment in every game when you realize the meta has changed.

You’re holding the cards. You’ve got the build. You’re three steps ahead — until suddenly you’re not. The game moves. The system adapts. And the strategy that has been working so well gets turned against you, packaged better, and sold back to your clients for half the price.

That’s what just happened.

You were winning.
Then OpenAI played the reverse card.

Codex: More Than Just a Model

Let’s talk about what OpenAI just released.

Codex isn’t just some warmed-over Copilot with more RAM. It’s a strategic deployment, a purpose-built dev assistant that lives inside your codebase like a full-stack junior team that doesn’t sleep or get blocked on Slack.

You give it context, and it gives you documentation, refactors, bug fixes, test coverage, and actual explanations. Not hallucinated summaries. Not vibes. Not a chatbox hoping to guess what you mean. Just functionally scoped help, delivered where the work happens.

Google’s Gemini 2.5 already hinted at what was possible. It’s great. The difference is that OpenAI didn’t release another general-purpose sandbox. They made a targeted tool, one that displaces helps programmers.

You Built the Tools; Now the Tools Are Building Themselves

I saw that copywriting will be obsolete, so I became a prompt engineer.
I stitched together a workflow, an agent. Productivity much, hell yeah.

And just when the pieces started clicking? OpenAI dropped a product that simplifies all that. Now anyone can deploy a SaaS so much more easily

It’s not just copywriting; it’s marketing, sales, CRM, analytics, and more.
And there’s no point pretending this won’t happen in every other vertical where the work can be defined, decomposed, and delegated to a model.

The first ones out will be the ones doing repeatable, single-skill labor.
The next ones will be the ones automating that labor with half-baked wrappers.

To be fair, if you’re building workflows and agents, you’re well ahead. But given the rate of development, one must never get complacent. Stay nimble.

Productivity Upsized.

On a macro level, this is progress. No question.

Productivity will rise. Costs will drop. Companies will grow leaner, tighter, and faster. If you’re in the top 10%, you’re about to become lethal. You’ll move faster, think broader, and plug into systems that multiply your leverage at every layer of output.

But if you’re on the other side — if you’re the one doing work that can be absorbed, synthesized, or scripted — this moment should feel like the ground just moved under your feet.

And this phenomenon isn’t slowing down. Because Codex is just the start. When more and more people see the possibilities, the productivity gains, the ability to automate work and outsource it to the AI, the workforce will change. Drastically.

Let’s be clear: using AI isn’t enough.
Everyone’s using AI now.

You’re not safe because you wrote a clever prompt.
You’re a little better off if you know when not to trust the output, if you can design systems around models. But heck, even if you can use the AI skilfully, never assume you’re safe.

There’s currently an arbitrage for those who can manipulate the AI tools. But that advantage will dissipate quickly if you get complacent.

The Card’s Been Played

Codex is a signal.

Not just of what’s possible, but of what’s coming.

You can tell yourself this is just for coders.
But that would be a mistake.

When anyone can build tools, the next one that gets disrupted are the analysts. The marketers. The managers. Everyone.

And if you’re still playing last quarter’s playbook, thinking your clever GPT stack will hold the line? You’re already holding the wrong card.