Wednesday night, I opened a file I hadn't touched in three years
Last Wednesday I was cleaning up Dropbox.
Found a file called "v1.0 - Customer Follow-up SOP.docx", created December 2019. Opened it up — inside was instructions for tracking customers in Excel, copy-pasting email templates, sending payment links via WeChat.
I haven't used that stack in two years. Now I run on Notion + Feishu + automated payments. But the old doc was still sitting there, gathering weight — like that 2015 desktop PC in the corner of the room. You know it's useless, but you don't want to touch it.
You've got "stashed old stuff" like this too: old website copy, old SOPs, old support emails, old Excel customer sheets. They work fine — you just think "fixing them sounds exhausting" every time you remember, then keep procrastinating. I made this exact mistake, dragged it out until my old system broke and I had no choice but to deal with it.
"Migration" used to be a small-team lifeline
Last week I read Pragmatic Engineer's newsletter, and one thing made me pause: Asana, a company with thousands of employees, recently migrated their test framework from Enzyme to a new tool. Done normally, that drags on 1-2 years; with AI, they finished in two weeks. Airbnb and Uber shared similar stories.
Big companies with thousands of people use AI to "move old stuff" for the same reason we do: if the old stuff doesn't move, the new stuff can't land.
For our 1-5 person teams, "migration" used to be unthinkable — no budget to hire outsourcing, no time to DIY. But now there's a new path:
- Feed your 2019 SOP to Claude, have it convert into a Notion template + Feishu multi-dimensional table structure
- Drop 50 old blog posts into ChatGPT, have it rewrite them in your new tone
- Export three years of support emails as CSV, let AI extract FAQs + auto-reply scripts
- Paste your old Excel customer sheet to AI, have it generate CRM field suggestions
Before, you'd rather let these rot. Now a full round runs in two weeks.
I tried it last week with that 2019 SOP. Threw it at Claude: "Help me convert to Notion database structure + Feishu automation plan." Half an hour for the draft, I tweaked for two hours. It worked.
What it costs to replicate today
- Money: ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription, ~$14/month. Free tier works too — slower, but gets the job done
- Time: 2-3 hours for first setup (figuring out how to paste files, how to write prompts), then 2-4 hours per migration after
- Tech barrier: Copy-paste files, write "help me change this to that." Zero code required
- First step: Open your cloud drive or desktop right now, find that old file you've been meaning to update. Copy the content into Claude or ChatGPT, add: "Help me reformat this for a 2024 small team"
Advice by stage
If you're just starting (0 clients / still building portfolio): I'd tell you to skip migration for now. Just make what you're using today work. Old files won't die — handle them when you're busy. This tool isn't for everyone; not trying it now is fine.
If you have 1-2 stable clients: Pick your most painful one and start. Like that customer-tracking Excel sheet — let AI sketch a migration plan. 2 hours to see results.
If you're scaling (multiple clients / product lines): I'd say batch it. Block one afternoon a week as "AI migration day," run your dusty files through in batches. Two months clears 80% of your tech debt.
My own takeaway: migration's hardest part isn't whether AI can do it — it's whether you'll open that old file and actually look at it.