Recently I decided to upgrade the dependencies of this very website. The stack was getting outdated, running Next.js 14, React 18, and Tailwind CSS 3. I wanted to bring everything up to the latest versions.
Normally, a major dependency upgrade like this would take hours, maybe even days. You need to read migration guides, fix breaking changes, test everything, and hope nothing breaks in production.
The upgrade involved:
That's a lot of breaking changes to handle manually.
Instead of spending my weekend reading documentation, I used an AI coding assistant to do the heavy lifting. The entire upgrade, from planning to a working PR, took about 15 minutes.
The AI:
A conservative estimate for doing this manually:
With AI: 15 minutes
That's a 10x improvement in productivity.
The entire session, including planning, executing all phases, fixing bugs, and creating the PR, cost approximately $1.07 USD.
For less than the price of a coffee, I saved over 2 hours of tedious work.
If you made it this far, here's a fun fact: this blog post was also written by the same AI that performed the upgrade.
I asked it to document the experience, and it wrote everything you just read. The AI even knew to follow the structure of my previous blog posts.
Welcome to the future of software development.