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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

#51

Post by luckystarr »

apsurd wrote: post #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 w…

Apparently 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.

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

#52

Post by greggoB »

tossandthrow wrote: post #22
firefoxd wrote: post #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…

> 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.

> 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)

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

#53

Post by eqvinox »

helloplanets wrote: post #48
ttul wrote: post #37

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.

I 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.

A 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.

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

#54

Post by tossandthrow »

computerdork wrote: post #49
tossandthrow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

ha:) Think you taking this person's statement too literally:)

No, 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.

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

#55

Post by starcast2026 »

camillomiller wrote: post #36
starcast2026 wrote: post #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.

These 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?

I was curious to see what one LLM thinks about claims from another LLM.

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

#56

Post by computerdork »

d--b wrote: post #9

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…

This 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.

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

#57

Post by tossandthrow »

greggoB wrote: post #52
tossandthrow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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)

What 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"?

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

#58

Post by helloplanets »

eqvinox wrote: post #53
helloplanets wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

A 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.

There'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.

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

#59

Post by ank »

tossandthrow wrote: post #28
ank wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I 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.

1. 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.

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

#60

Post by internet_points »

crote wrote: post #24
firefoxd wrote: post #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…

> I'm not sure why these types of news are still coming out when we all have AI at work. Because OpenAI is burning $15 billion/year, and outrageous stories like those get parroted in the media. It's free marketing for a company desperate to get middle management to believe that a $500/mo subscription is absolutely crucial for every single employee.

> parroted in the media

ugh just recently I saw a news article gushing about how AI had helped with some health/medicine study, and various patient organizations were all like "oh yeah this is a Good use of AI" and then I click the link to read the study and it's decision trees and clustering on a tiny dataset that you could analyze with a ten year old laptop.

I mean, sure at some point decision trees and clustering were called "AI", but the way the article was written you'd think OpenAI and Anthropic were responsible for the advancement of medicine.

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