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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

#71

Post by red-iron-pine »

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…

yeah 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

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

#73

Post by Supermancho »

Volundr wrote: post #69
cpinto wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you _can_ verify if you had bothered: https://asana.com/inside-asana/migrating-off-enzyme-2-weeks Key statement: > But at the rate we were going, we were still roughly five years from finishing. Everyone has seen how this sort of thing comes about: it's meaningful work for engineering but never business/product critical so it just drags along. Seems like this time around someone just went "I wonder if we could do…

This doesn't "verify" anything. I can't see the code before, I can't see the code after. I can't verify they do the same thing. It won't be updated if there's a long churn of issues and breakage coming from this work plaguing the team for years. The only thing it verifies is that Asana did indeed make the claim, which I don't think anyone was doubting. > Back in 2022, we set out to migrate Asana's frontend test suite…

> I can't see the code before, I can't see the code after. I can't verify they do the same thing.

The ultimate bad faith interpretation. "Unless I can verify the results that contradict my worldview, I don't acknowledge them."

> https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2026/08/19/hacking-with-cla...

"I haven't done this, so this doesn't prove it."

> https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyq011414eo

"I haven't seen the paper trail, so this doesn't prove it."

on and on...

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

#75

Post by NorthSouthNorth »

Volundr wrote: post #69
cpinto wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you _can_ verify if you had bothered: https://asana.com/inside-asana/migrating-off-enzyme-2-weeks Key statement: > But at the rate we were going, we were still roughly five years from finishing. Everyone has seen how this sort of thing comes about: it's meaningful work for engineering but never business/product critical so it just drags along. Seems like this time around someone just went "I wonder if we could do…

This doesn't "verify" anything. I can't see the code before, I can't see the code after. I can't verify they do the same thing. It won't be updated if there's a long churn of issues and breakage coming from this work plaguing the team for years. The only thing it verifies is that Asana did indeed make the claim, which I don't think anyone was doubting. > Back in 2022, we set out to migrate Asana's frontend test suite…

Migrating a test suite is exactly the kind of work that LLM's excel at beause it's extremely easy to verify (I mean that is the nature of them lol).

With enough budget this seems a rather reasonable and fun task.

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

#77

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

internet_points wrote: post #60
crote wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Decision tree learning is a form of machine learning and machine learning is subject of AI research. Same for clustering. Why are you saying they "were" called AI? They still are. Maybe everyone now synechdochically calls LLMs AI but that doesn't mean other kinds of AI are not AI.

AI research is not over yet. If OpenAI and Anthropic fail to bring on the Singularity, what are we going to call the continuing research on AI? Are we going to call it something else than "AI" because that was taken by LLMs? Does that make any sense at all?

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

#78

Post by owebmaster »

pjmlp wrote: post #27

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

There 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.

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

#79

Post by owebmaster »

starcast2026 wrote: post #55
camillomiller wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the point, you can solve your curiosity problem without posting ai slop to this forum

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

#80

Post by amluto »

I 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.

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