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firefoxd 2 days ago

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.

crote 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

internet_points 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

YeGoblynQueenne a day ago | parent | next [-]

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?

internet_points a day ago | parent [-]

> that doesn't mean other kinds of AI are not AI

I kind of agree, though I find "AI" to be an almost useless term, in particular these days. I dislike the current state of discourse where AI is used to mean inhumanly large models, so I tend to use a specific term like LLMs instead of AI. But the point here wasn't whether this or that form of ML is in fact AI. The term "AI" was almost never used in mainstream media until a few years ago, when it suddenly it was all over the place https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=AI,Biden... and nearly without exception referring to very large generative text/image models. So when a news article in 2026 talks about AI without specifying that it's nothing to do with ChatGPT etc. (and in fact using a very different method requiring no large pre-trained model and no dependence on large companies), I find it highly misleading.

red-iron-pine a day ago | parent | prev [-]

yeah but you'd need skills to operate the 10 year old laptop. probably have to copy and paste and understand excel and maybe whatever the hell a confidence interval is

this allows said middle managers to do the analysis themselves and feel mostly confident in the results.

sandeepkd 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I can for sure say that this kind of statement is exaggeration if not a blatant lie. It may work for PR but it gives a wrong impression/ideas. Now engineers should be ready to be questioned by their management for all the rewrites that they have been estimating in months if not years.

cpinto a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 it this way" and it worked. Perfect example of ditching sunk-cost and starting from scratch. Great outcome for them.

Volundr a day ago | parent [-]

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 off Enzyme, our aging testing library, and onto React Testing Library (RTL).

Your telling me they had a full team of engineers at Asana, doing nothing but rewriting tests for 4 years until AI came along and did the last year in a couple days? I'm extremely doubtful. I don't doubt for a minute they were one-track to take 5 years, but not because it was 5 years of engineering effort for humans.

Far more likely they finally cleared up some tech debt they had been plugging at off and on for 4 years, then a PR flack got ahold of it and it became a breathless "AI did 5 years of work in a couple days".

NorthSouthNorth a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

Volundr a day ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure I agree with the extremely easy to verify part. How do you validate that your new test suite covers the exact same edge cases as your old?

But yes, LLMs are great at tests. I'm not doubting that an LLM migrated some legacy tests, or that it was a task taking a long time. I am doubting the way it was presented in the article, that this was taking a full team of engineers dedicated to nothing but this, 5 years to accomplish (and presumably already spent 4 million working on this, since the total estimate was 6 million, and they've been at it for 4 year).

I think some PR flack got ahold of the fact that an LLM wrapped up migrating some legacy tests that a team had been slowly chipping away at for 4 years, between their normal feature work, and were on track to finish in 5, then wrote it up like it was that teams entire focus instead of a piece of tech debt.

That makes far more sense to me than spending millions for a team of engineers dedicated to nothing but rewriting an existing test suite.

kelnos 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Migrating a test suite is exactly the kind of work that LLM's excel at beause it's extremely easy to verify

I don't think that's true. All you see is all the test pass. You don't know that the tests still cover everything that they used to.

LLMs excel where there is an excellent test suite, and you ask them to modify the thing that the test suite tests, and forbid them from changing the tests.

Supermancho a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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...

kelnos 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How is it bad faith to question corporate marketing blog posts? That's not bad faith, that's table stakes for critical thinking.

We absolutely should be skeptical when an AI company makes big claims. The fact that the company the AI company is talking about also claims the same thing doesn't change that. OpenAI is getting awareness and marketing out of this, and I'm sure Asana is getting something out of it too.

And I'm not even saying OpenAI or Asana are necessarily lying. Asana might not find out for months or years that some tests had been rewritten poorly, and don't sufficiently test the thing they were supposed to test anymore. For example. If they truly had 5 years of work, then I find it hard to believe that in two weeks of the LLM churning, they had the time to review all the new tests. They spot-checked, at best.

Maybe everything is great. Maybe the LLM did a wonderful job, and this was awesome for Asana. But we have no idea, and we're unlikely to ever find out. Unless, of course, it's in Asana's interest from a marketing perspective to tell us.

(Not sure what the URLs you posted in your comment are supposed to prove. They're unrelated to the issue at hand.)

Volundr a day ago | parent | prev [-]

The comment I was replying to said

> But you _can_ verify if you had bothered

I think pointing out I can't is indeed fair.

tossandthrow 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

greggoB 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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"?

tossandthrow a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh, I did notice t introduce the typo. The commenter corrected after quoted.

vkazanov 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Or 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.

selcuka 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Exactly. You can simply close all open tickets with <WONTFIX> and claim that you've cleared 5 years of engineering work in 5 minutes. It doesn't mean anything.

kelnos 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I'm not sure why these types of news are still coming out when we all have AI at work.

Because "we all" is a bubble, and many people do not have AI at work, or at least not the level of usage that many people here have the budget for at their company.

chanux 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> people will work very hard in the background to fix it, with no fanfare.

This. It looks like AI companies have managed to use this for their advantage. Can't really blame them.

camillomiller 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s just sales claims. Do you see that “contact sales” button? You’re not the target of that. Deranged AI-psychotic C-suites with a two-digit IQ and too much confidence are the target.