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.

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.

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

― Woody Allen

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 where 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.

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

There just 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.