Unfortunately, this is the type of statements we can't verify. I'm not sure why these types of news are still coming out when we all have AI at work.

Whenever someone does such a huge drastic change like this, it's by ignoring a large chunk of code that most people were afraid to touch for good reasons. Now, that code is gone, AI is celebrated, things will break, people will work very hard in the background to fix it, with no fanfare.

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

― Woody Allen

Phrased this way, my aspiring product leader hat activates: that 5 years of work cannot be of much value to a company worth billions because a 5 year estimate is the lowest possible qualification you can make. Its a “will never happen” shelving.

all work is stack ranked against other opportunities. no matter how many teams help to parallelize, leadership basically comes down to ranking the stack correctly. Valuable work will be at the top by any means necessary. “mvp”, probes, task forces, code yellows, and so on.

edit: it’s even a backhanded compliment to agentic coding. Asana a public company considers a $12k outlay for something they’d never spend real resources on worth a case study =|

If you ask Sol or Claude how much time it will take to implement a plan they just came up with, they usually advise a timeframe in the weeks or months - assuming, I suppose, that human programmers will be building it. And then you ask the model to just "do it" and it takes an hour or two. I always find this entertaining.

From the article:

> For comparison: the previous plan was expected to take at least five years and estimated to cost roughly $6M.

If that's an estimate from an LLM, those have always been way off for me. I'm constantly amazed whenever something that an agent estimates would take weeks ends up being completed in an hour.

Is this the react test framework enzyme? To me, $6 million and 5 years seems like a very high estimate for this even without any automation (AI or otherwise) for even relatively large applications. How could they possibly have a test suite this large?

The more tangible example for me around LLM enabling what's previously long if not impossible tasks: pgrust. https://github.com/malisper/pgrust

They probably meant 1 employee part time for 5 years on a project that was never a priority.

The British government cleared a large chunk of 5 years of the NHS (hospital) waiting list by, in part, just removing people from it if they'd been waiting too long.

The headlines feel similar

"Their old testing tool, Enzyme, had fallen out of active maintenance and was becoming a blocker to modernizing Asana’s frontend stack"

Non prod code, good use case.

So clearly it doesn't need the workforce required to delivery 5 years man work, as per project estimations, thus brace for impact.

I don't trust anything OpenAI says anymore.

People may think it’s an overstatement. But I think it’s not.

This kind of projects are where AI is most helpful. Long tedious and highly testable projects like ports or legacy system replacements where humans have to grind through millions of lines of code without really thinking are the perfect target for AI.

I once did a C to C# port of several math libraries, and while I was able to automate most of it, it still required a ton of manual work. I bet if I had Claude, I could do what I did in 3 months in a day or two.

Cant wait some open model guys doing the check on this work from the security point of view.

I would love to know the responsible people at Asana who approved this joint PR. Like, do you not get the blatant second degree negative implications of what’s stated here, albeit manipulated and hyperbolic, for a project management software?

You see, I call bs on that. Not on the part that agents are an accelerator, they might be, but at the part that it was a 5 year project.

We engineers, had the power to dictate how our days will look, and we were able to give ballooned timelines to give us room to braeth.

This has changed. The power is no longer in our hands, for good or bad.

I suspect it as a two month project without agents. Max.

> An engineer checked progress twice a day and reviewed every proposed change.

It doesn’t sound like that much changed. If one engineer can really review all the changes in under two weeks, the original estimate of 5 years of engineering work has to be waaaaaaay off.

When everything is “estimates”, anything sounds amazing.

The impressive thing here is that Asana has such a poorly run engineering org that replacing their testing framework was estimated to take 5 years and $6 million.

Pretty big self-own

"An engineer checked progress twice a day and reviewed every proposed change. Simpler instructions worked better than a more elaborate setup."

Oh dear, poor Asana customers...

I believe this about as much as the claim that the Bun rewrite cost $165k

When "5 years of work" take two weeks, you know two things. The estimates were wrong, and nobody will need a project management tool soon.

5 years? Bruh. There’s no way from scratch it would take 5 years.

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Comparisons such as 5 years and $6M are meaningless. Instead, they should compare with other AI, such as how much it would have cost using self-hosted open-weight models, or using a API that offers open-weight models etc.

It is a good PR for Asana. I checked this with Gemini & here is what Gemini said - https://share.gemini.google/B8nocObwgiih

Summary: The Takeaway Did an AI generate 5 years' worth of highly creative, novel software features from scratch in two weeks? No.

Did an AI complete 5 years' worth of tedious, widespread code-migration technical debt in two weeks? Yes.