#technical_debt

Asana used OpenAI's Codex to remove Enzyme, an outdated testing framework blocking frontend modernization, in roughly two weeks of engineering effort.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.

Asana used OpenAI's Codex to remove Enzyme, an outdated testing framework blocking frontend modernization, in roughly two weeks of engineering effort.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.