Luke Xing used Codex to build something he had needed for years: a quick way to make sound feel balanced again after a hearing impairment. This May, he prompted a small desktop app that lets him test his hearing and tune computer audio for his impairment.
The app plays test tones across frequency ranges, then lets Luke adjust the gain, or volume boost, separately for the left and right channels. It then applies those settings to headphones, speakers, and other devices, so he can recalibrate before a call, meeting, or song.
The problem started in 2018, during a soccer game. Luke was playing goalkeeper when he dove for the ball and was kicked at the base of the skull. He blacked out. Afterward, something in his inner ear changed. He progressively lost roughly 70 percent of the hearing in his left ear day to day, though the impairment fluctuates. He also has tinnitus and occasional vertigo.
The injury has imposed social costs: Luke had always been an extrovert. But after the injury, crowded rooms and restaurants were a lot harder to deal with. In a circle of people, he can miss what someone on his left was saying. In a brewery or noisy room, he turns his good ear toward them. At events, he looks for quieter corners. In conversation, he often has to ask people to repeat themselves, then explain that he was almost deaf in one ear.
Medical referrals have been slow, and guidance uncertain. Doctors have discussed hearing aids, but his hearing changes enough that specialists have given different advice about whether to wait or proceed. He tried dozens of desktop audio tools. None gave him the control he needed.
Codex changed how he approached the problem. Luke gave it a paragraph describing what he wanted. In minutes, he had a working app on his Mac. He has since made small tweaks, but the core worked: test, listen, and adjust until the sound was balanced. The first time he used it to listen to hip-hop through headphones, the sound felt close to what he remembered from before the injury. For those few minutes, he forgot about the impairment.
Luke studied math and economics at the University of Chicago and was drawn into practical technical work: helping companies turn ideas into systems they could use. He worked first in consulting, then at Twilio, moving between customers, product, and hands-on technical problem solving. At OpenAI, he now does similar work with AI.
Luke is careful to say that his tool is not a replacement for an audiologist. It is a personal aid, a proxy, and a way to recalibrate quickly, on demand. Many people live with problems too specific for mass-market software and too urgent to wait for someone else to build. That is what Luke wants more people to know: the people living with a problem now have more power to build around it themselves. No one understands a struggle like the person living with it, and no one else feels quite the same stakes.
