The Pulse: We need to talk about migrations with AI

Asana completed a testing framework migration in two weeks, that they would have delayed for years more, and they’re not alone. Also: AI startups could make Gartner much less relevant, and more

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups.

Today, we cover:

1. More on the “great engineering leader career break.” The industry is changing fast, and the VPE and CTO roles also need to adapt. And don’t forget that these are the roles from which you can drive change that reorganizes engineering in ways that work better.

2. We need to talk about migrations with AI. Asana needed to migrate off testing framework Enzyme, but it meant doing a massive rewrite of test cases. With AI, the project was completed in two weeks: without AI, this work would surely have been kicked down the road. Airbnb and Uber share similar stories, and AI seems like a superb fit for framework migrations.

3. Are AI startups making the Gartner Magic Quadrant irrelevant? Gartner ranked AWS, Microsoft and IBM above Anthropic, Cursor and OpenAI in their “AI code modernization tools” ranking. This is most likely because the first three pay large sums of money to Gartner, but AI labs and vendors refuse to pay this “Gartner tax.”

4. Industry Pulse. Another hours-long GitHub outage, GitHub alternatives are here and fighting for market share, Slack launches Slack Code, text generated by Claude to be watermarked, and Uber open sources SubmitQueue.

Before we start: apologies for the numerous typos last week. My editor, Dominic, was on vacation, and numerous typos made it through the spellchecker. A reader asked for cute puppy pictures to accept my apology, and so I updated the post with pictures of our 3-month old puppy.

1. More on the “great engineering leader career break”