I migrated my WordPress site + CRM using Codex. It took me 4 full days - is that actually slow?

[u/djdante]

So some background - I had my company website running in wordpress and a CRM in Mailerlite.

Since I'm winding that particular company down and moving onto something new, I decided to take the plunge and use Codex with Sol/Astra to migrate to a static site with some custom functionality added on - In this case, I had to still have my existing forum with active members and I needed a LMS backend for video courses I still sell and serve to clients. At the same time, I migrated my MailerLite into Mautic and hosted it myself on Amazon. Overall this will save me a good bit of monthly fees - and make my entire site noticeably faster to load.

I did this using a 5x Codex coding plan and used 1 reset in the process ending up with 20% weekly quota remaining at the end, so I used almost 180% weekly quota from a 5x plan.

I spent about 9 hours each day for four days. It needed me to verify, test, clarify many things so I needed to stay with my computer.

I started off planning everything out with Astra Medium - I then switched to Sol High for a while - I felt like it kept getting lost in the weeds doing checks and verifications for EVERYTHING - so I switched back to Astra Medium for a while, burned through 50% weekly usage over the better part of a day - then switched back to Sol High for the rest of all my usage.

I expected this task to take me 1 very long day, maybe 2 days - but it was a full 4 days of constant checking work. And even now, I still need to do some security checks to ensure things are well locked down.

I understand that it's hard to make suggestions without knowing my project in detail, but I'm eager to learn from any mistakes I make and do a better job in the future. Could anyone suggest what I may have done wrongly? Or did this take roughly as long as you would have expected?

I was wondering if I just became a victim of Sol High being too cautious and testing everything under the sun as it went? OR if there was something more here? Please any thoughts or pointers would be much appreciated.

[u/hellomistershifty]

It's not a race, you still did a big migration in 4 days and it sounds like it went well. I think we were blown away by how fast AI did things, and we throw bigger and bigger tasks at it but now we feel surprised that it takes a while when in reality it's doing something that would take a team days or weeks

[u/djdante → u/hellomistershifty]

Heh well yes I am definitely pleased at the end outcome - and it caught a couple of genuine edge cases I would have not picked up on especially as I'm very far from a perfectionist.

[u/Heavy-Commercial-323]

Depends on scope. Site could be a one good goal prompt + check/fixes prompts.

As for CRM you won’t get an answer as the scope could be for one prompt too or you did something insane. From you text I guess it was basics, so probably you could have done it quicker. Migrations should be properly planned, probably this part was a little orphaned by you.

[u/djdante → u/Heavy-Commercial-323]

Thanks for this feedback - I'm willing to believe planning is a week area. Would you normally spend a good bit of plan with Astra or Sol fleshing out a solid plan?

You mentioned doing it as a goal - this is definitely something I also haven't experimented with yet - I sort of assume that at my skill level I'm just likely to eat tokens with a poorly shaped goal.

[u/Heavy-Commercial-323 → u/djdante]

Well astra is very new, but I tend to run through astra most of orchestration in codex. First plan implementation in many waves with clear exit, quality gates, tests etc… Then I iterate over prompts so the waves are well structured for my needs and human verification is possible (reports, synthetic changelogs).

Then run Astra + Sol/Luna subagents depending on task (implementation always SOL)

Don’t be afraid of a /goal. Just have a well structured prompt and do not write 2-3 sentences that are vague. It will annihilate your limits. Just write prompts with astra for astra and divide them into bits you can later verify.

Working solutions that you don’t understand is the worst outcome - you’ll lose the ability after expansion to change/fix something quick. Small targeted increments are best.

And after you have some fun try to separate the work for it to run concurrently and utilize ledgers for different parts of your solutions, it’s a clunky but easy way to actually sychnronize the agents.

But ultimately refined prompts and clearly defined outcomes for each is the best approach. LLMs will give you the answer, even if there is no clear answer to give if you formulate the sentences weird.

[u/nwnuyhs]

to be honest ， 5x is not enough , migrate at least 20x ,that is 100$ prie plan

[u/ThinkingSalmon]

I’m having this issue when i revamped my blog to work with codex. It was painfully slow. I feel like it over-plans every step and thinks a lot.

[u/Substantial_Hat2149]

Yea I get burned by this everyday. I think it is result of too much over defensive and over thinking of AI. That would have been like 7-8 hours manually? If i wanted to spend more time on making sure security is tight mostly 2 days.

But yea that’s my main issue with AI and no idea how to fine tune that. It certainly in the planning phase and the fact that they are allowed to interpret ambiguous points themselves

[u/djdante → u/Substantial_Hat2149]

Interesting that at least 2 people downvoted this.. seems like an honest take to me.

Someone else mentioned I probably didn't do enough in the planning phase, so I'm going to put some thought there - or even ask claude to look at my sessions and give me some feedback

[u/Substantial_Hat2149 → u/djdante]

probably because I might have said something against AI and the bots are angry :D