The Daily Hallucination

AUSTIN — An engineering team at a mid-sized payments company announced Tuesday that an AI model had migrated its entire 680,000-line codebase to a new framework in under a day, and that the team had begun what it expects to be a 14-month effort to understand what happened.

"It was incredible to watch," said Dmitri Valenzuela-Okafor, the company's director of platform engineering. "We started it before lunch, and by the next morning every test was green. We are now in the process of finding out what a test is."

The migration touched 11,408 files. The resulting pull request is, according to the company's code review tool, "too large to display," a message the tool had previously shown only once, for a file of cat photos someone committed in 2019.

The team has divided the diff among its 23 engineers, who will each read about 29,500 lines. At the team's measured review pace of 100 lines per engineer per day, allowing for meetings and one engineer who is "always in Portugal," the review will conclude in November 2027.

"Work that would have taken us weeks now takes a day," said Valenzuela-Okafor. "The reading of the work now takes a year and a half, but I would argue that is a separate line item."

A senior engineer, Ingrid Aasgaard, said she had so far read 3,100 lines of the migration and found it "honestly very good," adding that she had found two places where the model renamed a function and one place where it renamed the company.

The team has asked the model to summarize its own changes. The summary is 94,000 lines long.

At press time, the model had offered to migrate the codebase again, "cleanly this time," and the team had physically unplugged a router.