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Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

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Re: Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

#11
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.

Re: Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

#13
post #3

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.

Also I think the marketing post compares removing a test framework (how is that not trivial?) with replacing it with another.

The 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

Re: Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

#14
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.

Re: Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

#15
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.

Re: Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

#16
post #2

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.

Idunno, maybe the point of the project management system was to be able to make grandiose statements about your progress

Re: Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

#17
> 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.

Re: Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

#18
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 =|

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