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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

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.

tossandthrow 28d ago
> 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.
- vkazanov 28d ago
  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.
- greggoB 28d ago
  > 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 28d ago
    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 27d ago
    Oh, I did notice t introduce the typo. The commenter corrected after quoted.
crote 28d ago
> 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.
- sandeepkd 28d ago
  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.
- internet_points 28d ago
  > 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.
  - red-iron-pine 27d ago
    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.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 27d ago
    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?
camillomiller 28d ago
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.
selcuka 28d ago
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.
chanux 28d ago
> 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.
cpinto 27d ago
But you _can_ verify if you had bothered: https://asana.com/inside-asana/migrating-off-enzyme-2-weeks 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 27d ago
  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".
  - Supermancho 27d ago
    > 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-claude-on-a-27-smart-watch.html 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyq011414eo "I haven't seen the paper trail, so this doesn't prove it." on and on...
kelnos 27d ago
> 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.

tossandthrow 28d ago

> 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.

vkazanov 28d ago
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.
greggoB 28d ago
> 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 28d ago
  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 27d ago
  Oh, I did notice t introduce the typo. The commenter corrected after quoted.

crote 28d ago

> 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.

sandeepkd 28d ago
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.
internet_points 28d ago
> 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.
- red-iron-pine 27d ago
  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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 27d ago
  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?

camillomiller 28d ago

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.

selcuka 28d ago

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.

chanux 28d ago

> 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.

cpinto 27d ago

But you _can_ verify if you had bothered: https://asana.com/inside-asana/migrating-off-enzyme-2-weeks 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 27d ago
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".
- Supermancho 27d ago
  > 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-claude-on-a-27-smart-watch.html 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyq011414eo "I haven't seen the paper trail, so this doesn't prove it." on and on...

kelnos 27d ago

> 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.