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GeneralTier 1 source5 min readTue, 18 Aug 2026
Learn AI card: Asana replaced 5 years of engineering work with $12,000 in AI coding agents

Asana replaced 5 years of engineering work with $12,000 in AI coding agents

OpenAI News

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Originally published as “Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex

Highlights

  • Codex eliminated 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks
  • Reduced $6M project cost to $12K using AI agents
  • Parallel coding agents accelerated legacy framework removal significantly
  • Technical debt now feasible with AI-assisted engineering approaches

Asana used OpenAI's Codex to remove Enzyme, an outdated testing framework blocking frontend modernization, in roughly two weeks of engineering effort. The project cost approximately $12,000 in model and infrastructure fees, compared to an estimated $6 million and five-year timeline under the previous staffing plan. Asana's approach involved running up to four coding agents in parallel on separate codebase copies, with engineers reviewing proposed changes twice daily. This success has shifted the company's view of which long-running technical projects are now feasible to tackle, and the team plans to apply similar AI-assisted approaches to other migrations, rewrites, and performance improvements.

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