Product moves Aug 19, 2026

Today · event date 08-18

A cleanup project scoped at five years finished in two weeks — and the legible part is the staffing.

The project management software vendor Asana used OpenAI's Codex to remove Enzyme, an unmaintained testing framework that had become a blocker to modernising its frontend. The method is described concretely. From a five-sentence prompt, up to four coding agents worked in parallel, each in its own copy of the codebase. One engineer checked progress twice a day and reviewed every proposed change. The work took 1.5 weeks of engineering effort spread across two calendar weeks, at roughly US$12,000 in model and infrastructure costs, against a previous staffing plan estimated at five years and roughly US$6 million (OpenAI's customer story, 08-18). It reads interestingly against item 1 of Also happened: the time this code spent waiting for a human is close to zero, because one engineer was assigned to walk in twice a day, every day. That is what moving review attention from random allocation to a rota looks like — and it needed no prioritisation tooling at all. ⚠️ Discount it fully: OpenAI published this customer story itself, the sample is one project at one company, and the "five years and US$6 million" comparison is Asana's own earlier estimate, so that control group can never be verified. Removing an old framework is also mechanical work with a clear specification and an unambiguous finish line, and Asana's chief technology officer said as much himself: "Not every years-long project will collapse into weeks."