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Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex
- vasco 2mo agoWhen "5 years of work" take two weeks, you know two things. The estimates were wrong, and nobody will need a project management tool soon.
- kreyenborgi 2mo agoIdunno, maybe the point of the project management system was to be able to make grandiose statements about your progress
- devmor 2mo agoWhen 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.
- rightbyte 2mo agoAlso I think the marketing post compares removing a test framework (how is that not trivial?) with replacing it with another.
- mawadev 2mo agoThe fun part is how the article just says they removed "Enzyme" and there is nothing else mentioned that can make you gauge the technical complexity of what was done here
- liyafei 2mo ago[flagged]
- ank 2mo ago[flagged]
- tossandthrow 2mo agoI think there might be a mixup here. You see: normally one reads for recreation or enlightenment. If that same one would approach their job as a recreational activity, or solely for enlightenment, you might not have that job for very long.
- computerdork 2mo agoha:) Think you taking this person's statement too literally:)
- tossandthrow 2mo agoNo, but the parent is a half baked snark of the type that instills a type of false memes. Latently they say that it is a quality of itself to do the work. That is a reasonable statement, however, I am sure they also extend it to harvesting, baking etc. As to not use mechanical help. Heck, if they actually believed their own statement then they'd not even be commenting here, as that require immense amounts of mechanised help.
- 0123456789ABCDE 2mo agoon the other hand if you all you deliver are half-backed products you're bound to create a lot of grief, and move yourself up the corpo ladder.
- ank 2mo ago1. I am not sure what your profession is, but I spend most of my reading time at work, with code, emails and so on. Unfortunately I don't have much time to read for recreation these days. 2. It's a joke! Relax.
- tossandthrow 2mo ago
- camillomiller 2mo agoI 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?
- tehlike 2mo agoThe more tangible example for me around LLM enabling what's previously long if not impossible tasks: pgrust. https://github.com/malisper/pgrust https://github.com/malisper/pgrust
- d--b 2mo agoPeople 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.
- computerdork 2mo agoThis is what I was thinking too. Ports are probably where AI has the one of the biggest time savings over humans. Although also agree, that even if human's did it, they probably would try to automate as much as possible and speed up development, and maybe that original 5 year estimate was if it was done completely manually.
- zkmon 2mo agoComparisons 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.
- starcast2026 2mo agoIt is a good PR for Asana. I checked this with Gemini & here is what Gemini said - https://share.gemini.google/B8nocObwgiih 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.
- brabel 2mo agoThe latter sounds about as attractive to me as the former, actually more because my customers are mostly hoping for their bugs to be fixed , not for the latest novel feature.
- camillomiller 2mo agoThese conclusion can be obtained by any individual adult with a command of the English language and average written text comprehension abilities within 2 minutes. That’s how long it takes to read and understand the case study. So, why did you surrender your cognition to an LLM? Do you have some form of mental impairment?
- starcast2026 2mo agoI was curious to see what one LLM thinks about claims from another LLM.
- owebmaster 2mo agoThat's the point, you can solve your curiosity problem without posting ai slop to this forum
- anon48293 2mo agoWho cares what an LLM hallucinates about it?
- potatoproduct 2mo agoThey probably meant 1 employee part time for 5 years on a project that was never a priority.
- localhoster 2mo agoYou 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.
- structural 2mo agoThe five year project likely represents a bunch of engineers that are stuck in meetings and coordination for 75% of their time, then you staff the project with more people (because you need four times as many) then they all need more meetings to coordinate too. And then they need to write a lot more documentation in the process because in that five years the people working on the project will all turn over at least once if not 2-3 times. Never mind critical people getting pulled off the project to work on other more important things on a monthly basis as is common at large firms. It's entirely possible for a 2-3 month project if one senior person was left the hell alone to do it to take a dozen people five years.
- firefoxd 2mo agoUnfortunately, 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.
- tossandthrow 2mo ago> where afraid to touch for good reasons This appears entirely unreasonable. Normally the reason is not good. The reason is that unit testing is missing or that downstream effects are not entirely mapped out. Exactly activities that traditional software developers are loathing because they are boring and mentally straining.
- vkazanov 2mo agoOr the reason is that something is just unfeasible with the existing architecture, or the reason is that building this would break important technical assumptions... All kinds of things.
- greggoB 2mo ago> This appears entirely unreasonable. Seems a bit strong. Unit testing can get you some of the way, but its not a full-on all-case guarantee. Sometimes the code is encapsulating some particularly complex system/behaviour. Sometimes the reason is interop/compatilibity issues or some kind of politics. P.S. you managed to introduce a typo in your quote (were –> where)
- tossandthrow 2mo agoWhat appears unreasonable is that the reasons must be good. This comes directly after they wrote "statements we can't verify". Why is it that we can not verify the statements, but we can believe the reasons that people will not touch the code base to be "good"?
- 2mo ago
- erentz 2mo ago> 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.
- friendzis 2mo agoA nitpick. While this definitely does not apply to the problem described, some changes are indeed mostly alignment, not implementation.
- apsurd 2mo agoPhrased 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 =|
- luckystarr 2mo agoApparently the task was to remove dead weight. Haven't read what they replaced "Enzyme" with. I did subagent based removal tasks a few times. These were the ones that required the least amount of input or thinking from me, because the requirements are abundantly clear. "Remove this part of the code without breaking any other part or by porting the tests done with it onto another system." In these situations the code acts as the bookkeeping ledger itself, and coordination complexity is almost a no-brainer.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agoyeah this was my read. either it was a hail mary 5 year change-the-market offering, or it was something that staff can "get around to" whenever they have the cycles, and would, at current rates, take like 3-5 years to do. was the tool worth 12k? if it's not a line in capex or opex budgets it's value is $0
- lancebeet 2mo agoIs 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?
- 2d8a875f-39a2-4 2mo ago"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.
- iamflimflam1 2mo agoAlso a very trivial piece of work for an LLM to do - with a measurable end goal. Hopefully a human did give a quick look to make sure it didn’t just delete the tests.
- wolttam 2mo agoPretty big self-own
- pjmlp 2mo agoSo clearly it doesn't need the workforce required to delivery 5 years man work, as per project estimations, thus brace for impact.
- owebmaster 2mo agoThere are countless years man work awaiting in the issues of abandoned projects. Nobody is getting fired because of them. But new people won't be hired if managers believe in marketing stunts like this.
- ValentineC 2mo agoFrom 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.
- aroman 2mo agoThe LLM is reasoning about estimates from its training data... which is to say, from human engineering timescales. I suspect the labs could improve the models such that they are estimating these sorts of things but they don't prioritize doing so (or perhaps RLHF selects it away) because, as you say, it feels amazing to do a week's worth of work in an hour.
- tomlockwood 2mo agoI believe this about as much as the claim that the Bun rewrite cost $165k
- dalton74 2mo ago[flagged]
- ttul 2mo agoIf 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.
- kzrdude 2mo agoFunny but shows how it doesn't have a useful world model
- zombot 2mo agoIt does, assuming "world" is made up of humans (which it is, in its training data). It does however not have any model whatsoever of itself, apart from some superficial "I am a helpful assistant built by $X".
- helloplanets 2mo agoI find that the models have increasingly started throwing out made up amounts of time around, as if they wouldn't be aware that the user is already using Claude Code or Codex. It's like every time they make a plan, there's something about things taking "a week or two", "month of focused work", or whatever. This is something that would've been RL'd out a long time ago if it wasn't great for business.
- eqvinox 2mo agoA model isn't "aware" of anything. It's trained on things, and that training doesn't include time estimates for working with AI because that didn't exist yet.
- helloplanets 2mo agoThere's pre and post training. What I was going after with "aware", is that the actual people working at the companies, training the models, are aware that people aren't mostly going to be implementing the plan by hand, if they've already made the plan in Claude Code or Codex. As for a specific Claude / GPT instance, "aware" would definitely be the wrong word choice there, but the instance does have its stats and environment information in its context window, unless you specifically remove it. Either way: Training does include estimates on working with the model, and adjustments of the model itself based on that. That's literally what RLHF is. It's straightforward to have a portion in post training that aims specifically at the model being able to give better estimates on how long that model takes to complete a certain type of task.
- johnbarron 2mo ago"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...
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo agoI don't trust anything OpenAI says anymore.
- dwedge 2mo agoThe 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
- dev_l1x_be 2mo agoCant wait some open model guys doing the check on this work from the security point of view.
- forrestthewoods 2mo ago5 years? Bruh. There’s no way from scratch it would take 5 years.
- iamleppert 2mo agoIt does when you have a team of 100's of engineers every change has to pass through, 3 layers of management, SRE teams, DevOps YAML engineers, product management and a partridge and a VP.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bbg2401 2mo ago[dead]
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago- wake me up when it can build an 10x faster version of windows 11 in 2 weeks
- mparnisari 2mo ago> An engineer checked progress twice a day and reviewed EVERY proposed change. press X to doubt [x]
- amluto 2mo agoI can easily clear lots of low-priority engineering work quickly using AI. It takes a bit longer if I want to do a good job. But here’s the rub: this is, basically by definition, low-priority engineering work. Those fixed papercuts are nice to have fixed but they do not necessarily add a lot of value. And it’s all too easy to lose value by doing this. For example, current LLMs really really like adding test cases, and a lot of those test cases have basically no value, and carrying them around is not free.
- avgDev 2mo agoIt has it risks too. I've used chatGPT for a feature I am working on. It works, I have already resolved some bugs the it didn't pick up. However, the code quality is odd, I've had some hardcoded types as it is unlikely they will ever change. For some of them chatGPT created enums but only for some. I also realized that review generated code sucks, I can generate a whole app quickly, but I have no understanding of small decisions. It is extremely difficult to wrap your hand around hundreds of lines of code written by someone else.
- amluto 2mo agoIf you mean chatgpt.com, try with a real “agent” harness. The exact same model on chatgpt.com frequently performs much worse than it does with a proper harness, not to mention that the chatgpt.com frontend itself is quite bad. codex-rs, popularly known as Codex or maybe the Codex CLI, is a fine choice.
- avgDev 2mo agoCodex has been renamed to chatGPT.
- amluto 2mo agoSince when? https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/codex/cli https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/codex/cli https://github.com/openai/codex https://github.com/openai/codex Looks like it's still a more-or-less-open-source product called Codex CLI. FWIW, there have been issues with various versions of ChatGPT not knowing what Codex is -- at least in the (IIRC) GPT-5.3 timeframe, there were serious issues with the knowledge cutoff.
- fred_is_fred 2mo agoThere's a 0% chance that an engineer reviewed all code output from 4 agents twice a day.
- calldacopsidgaf 2mo agoOkay, dude.
- kartoshechka 2mo agogood, now I know I don't want to work there
- leemelone 2mo agoAny competent organization better not be able to articulate 5 years worth of work in anywhere close to 2 weeks. What even is this headline? Clickbait
- zeristor 2mo agoOne thing from experience having worked on a project 4 years ago, 2 of us spent a a couple of months investigating and coming up with a solution. I tried it in AI and virtually did it all in a few hours! Magic? Well I had gone through it to explore the problem space, and we had found a working solution which just petered out. But I still remembered the learnt lessons, and I was just eager to see what it would be like to use DuckDB on it. My point being these second passes on projects often skip the hard won knowledge part.
- fdgwhite 2mo agoI did not read the press release, but this made me chuckle remembering 10 years ago when Asana was the 2nd coming, wrote “their own web framework” etc
- wazagabo2010 2mo ago[flagged]
- ulofi 2mo ago[flagged]
- typesafeJ 2mo agoThis is 100% made up. I just replaced all our Enzyme tests with Jest tests about 3 months ago. The process is very straight forward. No way this would ever take 5 years. No matter how big the code base is. It is basically grep + replace.