alt Hacker News> But what if you have an established app with real users?
I recently used GPT 5.5 "extra high" running nearly non-stop for about a week to upgrade a legacy ASP.NET Web Forms app to ASP.NET Core on .NET 10.
This was considered "too hard" (too expensive) for human developers because it is a wholesale rewrite of every web page template. Not to mention that the dependency injection mechanism is totally different, async is more pervasive, etc.
Worse still, the old app was split into a bunch of components with a variety of web API protocols in between them, had stupidly complex Oracle stored procedures, and a whole series of hidden land mines in the codebase. It was an undocumented, unmaintainable mess full of dead and spaghetti code.
I would have estimated 6 months minimum for a human developer to uplift it, but 12 months is more realistic.
Doing the same in a week feels like tapping into some sort of forbidden black magic. It feels like I can't admit this to anyone, lest they think I dabble in the dark arts.
I don't work in coding, but I do a lot of complex tasks that can be automated to some extent. In 2019 I spent more than a month painstakingly building an autohotkey script that would interact with a design app to build a Chinese language workbook with proper formatting, and create indexes. When the script was finally running on its own it felt like magic. Nowadays I use a mix of Claude code /codex/antigravity (I have the 20 Usd sub for each) to build very specific "one use" tools that save me countless hours. I can even be very specific about how to design those scaffolds so the flow just feels intuitive for me. It's insane. It feels like a cheatcode. I think the best use for Ai in a company is to build tools for the humans, not to replace those humans