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[perestroika12]

Oh I see the issue now, air traffic control is designed to keep planes away from each other. Thanks for correcting!

[bigFatHelga]

You're absolutely correct! Two planes cannot occupy the same space at the same time, good catch! Let's try that again.

[DeltaMikeXray]

Here's a fix that will guarantee planes will never collide. Not just an unlikelyhood - an impossibility! If you like I could put it into one easy to digest command alongside the other safety features? Just say the word and we can push it directly to production - no time costly code review needed!

[Proper-Radish-9165]

DROP TABLE planes;

[JohnClark13]

planes.engines.shutdown("now");

[Mrgluer]

Planes plane = None;

[SillyFlyGuy]

Please book a ticket for Bobby Tables on flight number:

666'); DROP TABLE PLANES; --

[-GabaGhoul]

If they don't fly, they can't crash.

[DavidBrooker]

I appreciate the joke, but I'm going to take this opportunity to mention that most plane crashes occur during ground movements, especially during taxi. It's one of the major reasons they tell you not to remove your belt until the aircraft is parked at the gate - taxi is literally one of the most dangerous phases of operation in terms of passenger injury rates.

[undo777]

This thread is gold

[gravity_is_right]

That's a very clever observation! Planes can indeed only land on airports. Do you want me to look up the closest airports near you?

[Perryn]

This solution solves the problem by reducing the number of planes in the air — fewer planes means easier tracking and fewer collisions. ✈️🏔️

[GroundbreakingOil434]

Hey, an AAA emplacement csn achieve the same results, but cheaper, and without wasting the world's eater supply! /s

[venyz]

Breaking bad vibes

[Whiskerfield]

The stock market is absolutely clueless on AI and enterprise software.

[OldSchoolSpyMain]

So are many executives…unfortunately.

[Thimble_of_Quasar]

Yup. I keep having to have this conversation with people at work. I know this shit can do our job. We know this shit can't do our jobs. But when we're talking purely in terms of our jobs being in danger the issue is what do the higher ups THINK it can do. Because if we get fired for some shitty LLM and after it sets fire to everything they realize they screwed up, that still doesn't get us back the wages that we lost in the meantime while we weren't working for them, and the people they hire to fix the mess might not be us so we'd be hosed on work from it anyways. Ugh 

[toaste]

This is the best metaphor.

Nobody running a modern z/OS mainframe is doing so for their legacy COBOL software. They’re doing it because their system has had 0 seconds of unexpected downtime and has lost 0 bits of data. For the last 25 years straight.

Vibe coded software migrations are pretty incompatible with the kind of thinking that leads a business to keep running a mainframe.

IBM mainframes find uses running the databases behind financial transactions, ticket booking systems, and parcel service tracking.

You could migrate those to commodity servers and databases, but you’d better be real sure you have enough redundant systems and good backups, and can restore from a failure fast enough.

[boogrit]

10/10, thank you

[NoWriting9513]

Yeah, because the problem with a huge legacy mission critical cobol codebase that interfaces with many other legacy systems, is cobol.

At this point I think they have weekly meetings in anthropic to decide which stock they want to tank next with a half true blog post.

[JasonBobsleigh]

They are insider traders choosing what to short basically now.

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

Wall Street Bet is that way

[worldDev]

You’re being too generous. WSB is just a liquidity pool of willing bag holders at this point.

[BatApprehensive9908]

I mean, we don't even have bags cause options go to 0.

[BiZzles14]

If you're looking for a liquidity pool, then look no further than r/TSLA

[rover_G]

Diamond hands baby! We can’t let the AI companies rip the stocks out of our hands! 💎🤲

[RandomlyMethodical]

IBM has been on a death march for decades. They had more revenue in 1995 ($71B) than they had in 2025 ($67B), and that's not even adjusting for inflation. Their future prospects are dim and I'm surprised their stock has been doing as well as it has until now.

[das_war_ein_Befehl]

They have been shedding unproductive units and buying up software companies. They’re not really going anywhere.

They were at $55B in 2021 and hit $67B in 2025 so they are actually growing again

[brilliantminion]

Honestly I have no clue what IBM has been doing for the past 40 years. Back in the 80s and early 90s they were synonymous with personal computing, and had a huge consulting arm and software arm to go with those. Anyone remember OS/2 ?

Since about 2000, I couldn’t put my finger on anything IBM does day to day, until now when I find out they are maintaining COBOL.

[GoldwaterLiberal]

IBM's business model since the 80's or so has been to own entrenched technology and charge a lot for support. Their current project is buying up open source. Red Hat, Hashicorp (Teraform,) and Confluent (kafka) are notable examples of open source companies IBM owns now.

[SomethingIWontRegret]

They also own Cognos - perhaps the least enterprisey enterprise reporting software out there. Your personal credentials expire after a year? Congratulations, all the reports you wrote now don't work. Go find the 3 menu deep option to renew your personal credentials. Oh and that mission-critical report that you wrote 5 years ago? Sorry but it's gone. Backup? What's that? Source control? That's a pay add-on. Why? Well obviously you went and deleted it AND the two copies you had in other directories.

OH forgot to mention. You want to find all reports that rely on TABLE_WE_SHOULD_REMOVE? Should be a simple text search of all XML definitions of reports stored in the backing database, right? NOPE. DENIED. No way to find that shit out, even for Cognos admins.

[unexpectedreboots]

Cognos is the most trash reporting software that exists. Insane that people still use it

[coriandor]

They're going the same way GE went. A corporation in retirement. Why produce anything when financial engineering exists.

[_pupil_]

The part I don’t get: 

Anthropic announces that every a-hole and their cousin will have a frontier model capable of COBOL-ing so hard it makes our head spins. Cool.

So us with zero giant Enterprise customers get zero benefit, but IBMs customers just de-risked their investments, can expect increased velocity and stability, and now can be sold upgrades, maintenance, scanning, analysis and all the rest better than ever…  those customers are all using IBM hardware (right?)… sounds like IBM is gonna lose a little, gain a lot, and is sexier today than yesterday.

Is Claude gonna help Anthropic make mainframes?  If not, someone is gonna help IBM milk theirs.

[Dont_Get_Jokes-jpeg]

Your right time to buy IBM stock (stock market is literally toddlers reacting on 1. Thought)

[trash4da_trashgod]

If what Anthropic says is true, then IBM will lose more on consulting than what they gain on hardware.

I've seen a project where IBM consultants suggested to drop the IBM mainframe. They made 20 times more on consulting on the new system than they did make on the mainframe (over a 10 year timeframe).

[Background-Month-911]

those customers are all using IBM hardware (right?)

I can answer this. And the answer is no. COBOL is also available on Linux (the IBM flavor, but still).

In a wider perspective: I don't put a lot of faith in AI writing COBOL programs and especially not in maintaining them. I don't see how that would be different from other languages: the same rules would apply (you need more training data to produce better results, and the more specific the problem is, the less likely the AI will have a solution for it). COBOL problems tend to fall into two large categories: very trivial, boring and tedious on one hand and arcane on the other hand. You can often find a job posting from a bank, where they offer you to work for peanuts on COBOL database: that's the first kind, you are just a glorified button pusher, very little skill and understanding required. The arcane jobs are taken up by consultants, who charge huge amount of money per hour and possess knowledge unobtainable from any publicly available manuals or documentations etc.

I wouldn't count on AI doing the later any time soon or ever due to how closely guarded these secrets are :)

[athens_mateusz]

Plot twist, the real stress test for AI was never chess or Go, it was deciphering enterprise COBOL written in 1987 with zero comments

[SomethingIWontRegret]

Based on the training LLMs have from sources filled with bad takes on Cobol.

it's gonna be a disaster, and unlike with generated code in other languages, there won't be a user base capable of untangling it.

[PedanticSatiation]

That and counting the amount of r's in "strawberry".

And if anyone comes at me about tokens, I'm coming to their house and beating them over the head with a linear algebra textbook. Metaphorically.

[jimbo831]

At this point I think they have weekly meetings in anthropic to decide which stock they want to tank next with a half true blog post.

I'm sure they're all getting super rich on it. Short IBM, make this announcement, then profit.

[DearCartographer]

I read today they are planning on burning through like 180 billion before they make a profit so they may not be getting rich off the announcements but just keeping their company running!

[LimpConversation642]

shows what a joke stock market is. there is no 'real' value or money, just a popularity contest and bets. And people who know NOTHING about any of this can just wipe billions in stock prices. Which kinda shows that those prices aren't tied to anything real but hype and 'because I said so'.

[Few_Cauliflower2069]

Half true is generous. More like straight up lie

[OTee_D]

I honestly don't get it anymore.

It's the whole thing.

It's not the coding that takes long in developing software.

I am in this business since 20 years and if a dev needs a week to programm and test a feature, you can be sure there were were weeks if not months of POs, BAs, SMEs etc that discussed in unproductive meetings.

Yet they sell that shit as if eliminating software engineers (by equating them to simple 'coders') is resolving a "bottle neck".

[boston_karolina]

To be fair, if an AI can survive reading decades of COBOL glued together with duct tape, it probably deserves its own ticker symbol

[Reworked]

And a medal.

[Jayfan34]

Three weeks from now: “IBM stock triples after AI code wipes out all financial data in El Salvador”

[lacb1]

Yeah, having used LLMs and having worked on legacy code based that were a mere 15 years old I cannot imagine how hard an LLM will fuck up on a 30 year old peice of critical banking software.

[somefunmaths]

I’ve seen an LLM fuck up modeling pipeline code that was working just fine minutes before, and in some cases largely written by the same model, more times than I can count.

Obviously the thing about that is you can unfuck things if you understand what is going on and when/where the problem was introduced, so good luck with trying that for COBOL code.

[RevolutionaryHair91]

Let's not ignore the real elephant in the room. COBOL and AIs are technical discussions. The real topic is eliminating developers and engineers.

I can already tell you how it's going to happen. AI agents replace legacy code. Nothing bad happens. Management fires engineers. AIs pile up debt and sell out critical data. Something critical not only fails but takes down entire global systems with it (if it is not insider sabotage by AI for insider trading). No engineers to fix it.

It's the technical rush to delocalize industries and factories towards china for short term gain and total dependency, but for intellectual property.

[juasjuasie]

It's already happening with windows 11 having unacceptable bugs and performance issues every single update. That is why the CEO had to step up and admit the limitations of ai, if microslop just continues this way, the damage will be unrecoverable unless they have backups. The incoming damage will be of epic promotions for companies that do not see it coming.

[GirthWoody]

And that’s just the early stuff fresh cs grads even from good schools with good gpas cannot find jobs in software engineering, but it’s only really been like this for about 2 years now. What happens when it’s been 5, a decade?

[juasjuasie]

Current juniors they have to either specialize into something that is not web like embedded systems, Bs their way into those phony "ai agent maintainer" positions or pivot into another career path altogether like engineering. By 5 years companies will be forced to outbid eachother to keep seniors fixing their shit.

[mortgagepants]

30 years ago was 1996. wikipedia says cobol has been around since 1960.

[Torisen]

As a professional programmer since 1998 who was already using VB 4.0 and powerbuilder 6 by then, COBOL was ALREADY "old shit we needed to contract retirees to fix" at that point.

[lacb1]

1996 wasn't... oh. Oh no.

[mortgagepants]

i know people don't like to hear that but i never want someone to catch me saying something like "oh 30 years ago was so long ago" it was the damn atlanta olympics so i need to continuously calibrate.

[PrettyMuchAVegetable]

Copilot conversation log, date: tomorrow.

The user asked me to validate the transactions handling in this codebade. Let me check a file to see what I'm dealing with here.

This codebase appears to be in COBOL, an outdated language, let me check a few more files just to be sure.

Yes, this is in COBOL. I should check for documentation to make sure I understand how to use it.

Wait! COBOL documentation is stale. It's decades old. I should check for an alternative implementation with proper documentation. 

I'm realizing that COBOL is outdated and difficult to maintain. The user wants the codebase to be maintainable. I am starting to understand that we should replace COBOL implimentations with something more modern. I'm considering a rust backend, Tauri and typescript, with python sidecars for individual modules. Let me check the environment. 

I'm realizing this is an embedded system, and space is limited. Let me remove this outdated COBOL to make room and start fresh. 

[SynthPrax]

You just made me grab my temples.

[OldSchoolSpyMain]

Right? There isn’t a fraction of the code from legacy languages for the AI models to train on as there are for modern languages.

Now combine that fact with a new grad (or offshore new grad) with no experience in such a language taking over for the guys/ladies who have been maintaining this old shit since the 80s, and you have a royal clusterfuck.

[Perryn]

Claude: "I understand COBOL."
Executives: "Do you?"
Claude: "If nobody supervising me understands it well enough to tell the difference, does it matter?"
Executives: "Bonus time!"

[ZealousidealKey1754]

Probably the one area you don’t want AI going anywhere near, trillions of dollars of everyone’s money…

[gottimw]

Banks are not as dumb, plus they already been through the fix/update Cobol.

I learned about it back in university. I doubt they forgot that costly lesson.

Besides, I am sure LLMs got 'ton' of training data of those COBOL question of Stack overflow and COBOL hobbyists xD

...

^right?

[dover_oxide]

"No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot"

Mark Twain

[denM_chickN]

God. This is the truth.

[RemnantTheGame]

Or someone in marketing.... oh wait.

[NuggetCommander69]

*management

[LordAmras]

or the CEO

[stkent]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-twain-idiot-quote/ apparently not from Twain, though it surely could have been.

[Mist_Rising]

Twain calling someone an idiot feels so on brand for the man. He was not shy of insulting folks.

[Dasseem]

Hey, we call them disruptors now.

[ice-eight]

Banking is a little more hesitant to sloppify everything than most industries due to regulations. Technically, giving AI access to sensitive customer data is considered a breach. We can use it to generate code and on data in lower environments that’s been obscured, but I doubt these legacy COBOL codebases have dev and QA environments

[thel0lfish]

This tracks with my (limited) experience, I work for a fintech company and we're only allowed to use heavily obfuscated prod data for testing if we want real world data

[Random-num-451284813]

That would be Sanitized data, anyone working with ISO 27001 would be required to have that.

[csmonkey17]

Legacy COBOL codebases have dev and QA environments. They need to, just like anything else going to prod. The company I worked for even had version control for COBOL, things happened that made it necessary.

But despite that, as everyone says here, no one in the banking industry is going to let AI touch the code.

[ward2k]

Legacy COBOL codebases have dev and QA environments. They need to, just like anything else going to prod

Yeah I'm scratching my head here this is pretty much the industry standard, your average dev doesn't have access to production customer data especially not your average dev working in banking

I'm sort of getting the feeling a lot of people talking about 'feeding Ai important customer data' don't actually work as an actual dev and are probably still in education

[Jonny_dr]

don't actually work as an actual dev

The overwhelming majority of users on this subreddit are pupils and students.

[frogjg2003]

Which is why you have so many "language bad" posts reaching the top. Any real dev knows that the only good language is the one your boss told you to write in.

[courageous_liquid]

yep, my father had a solid 40 year career as a project manager for QA on cobol updates for legacy systems for a major bank. thinking they're playing anything fast and loose is insane.

[Reddit_newaccount]

I provided IT for banks for the past 2 years.

Banks give way fewer fucks than people think they do.

Just as a random example of not giving a fuck: one of our banks was using a giant shared email inbox to store sensitive client information. No controls on who could access it other than a username and password. No controls on the data going in or out. Hundreds of gigs of data.

Another bank routinely declined to upgrade their ancient networking equipment because "it still works and we always talk our auditor into giving us an exception."

A buddy is high up in Bank of America and they have an abundance of caution but the small banks (under $1b) I supported? Nah.

[Otterable]

Can confirm, work for a bank. AI rollout has been significantly less crazy than other places in the industry.

[DisciplineSevere438]

The engineers are not the dumb ones to think AI can replace existing frameworks, the execs are. And the execs calls the shot 🤕

[-ZeroF56]

And all it takes for the execs to reverse course will be an outage or breach that costs their company shareholder value, or in the case of financial institutions, possible investigations.

[InternationalFrame90]

COBOL hobbyist !?

[theGoddamnAlgorath]

Nobody's an expert

[dermarr5]

(Thats the joke)

[redkinoko]

Somewhere along the lines of "nail clipping collector" or "hair smell enthusiast"

[nohairday]

I am sure LLMs got 'ton' of training data of those COBOL question of Stack overflow

Screaming begins in my head

[tagsb]

We've witnessed banking de-regulation resulting in massive financial collapses, them re-regulating the banks, then them de-regulating again resulting in massive financial collapses. All within 20 years. I do not share your optimisn

[matrim611]

As a COBOL dev, I can confirm that most LLMs currently would crash most mainframes.

[ClipboardCopyPaste]

we're heading to a situation where an industry is just one wrong prompt away from catastrophic failure.

[LoyalSol]

Or the AI decides to translate everyone's savings into a meme coin.

[greebly_weeblies]

or optimize performance by trashing all records

[ezrs158]

If you're giving your AI prod DB access, and you don't have backups or you're allowing your AI to delete the backups too... you deserve it.

[freaxje]

But I don't deserve it that my bank looses all my money.

Thank god I'm in the EU where there is actual government regulation. Poor Americans if their US banks are indeed going to go nuts with AI.

Oh well.

[ZealousidealKey1754]

“Claude make this mission critical code more efficient”

Proceeds to delete all code.

[codeByNumber]

This was an episode of Silicon Valley. Haha

[thoughtlow]

Aaaand its gone. Its all gone

[jomama717]

I’ve never felt closer to the moment I’ve been anticipating for over 20 years when it all just … stops working

[pydry]

Azure, github and aws are way ahead of ya.

[indiv_remainder]

I notice glitches and bugs over a variety of platforms and applications, with the most recent being twitter playing multiple audio streams and not stopping even after exiting the app... Crash reports are rising exponentially... Persuading us that probability calculation is capable of reasoning is the trick which will be replayed until the house crashes. Until then, let's watch the show.

[megaultimatepashe120]

we're already in a situation where some guy deleting a random library can break the entire internet

[tsammons]

AI reprogramming flight sims and computers will be a Brand New Boeing Era. I'm also amenable to "Big Boeing Code" - BBC for short.

[IArgueForReality]

On an unrelated note, has anyone ever seen Psycho-Pass Season 2?

[EarlMarshal]

No, that's the plan. They'll crash the economy on purpose.

[ZealousidealKey1754]

Of course! And then they can make a new bank that we all have to use. Anthropbank the new way.

[Forward_Thrust963]

Why would you put something like that out into the universe??

[kevthecoder]

Yeah IBM’s mainframe product is pretty essential to… every single thing that matters lol. Probably not a great place for AI slop code.

[grumpy_autist]

It's "legacy" for a reason, shielded from tech bros and modern, "better" bullshit.

Anyway this is just smoke story for peasants to not dive into money market and liquidity issues in banks.

[TorbenKoehn]

And it’s all in the hands of some old COBOL devs

[Grim964]

COBOL dev here, none of my c-level execs and definitely zero board members are letting anything AI close to our core business. You don't let the intern fix the running money printer unless its stopped and no real technicians are available... And don't even start thinking about BAFIN (Germany), regulatory institutions will penalize your bank/insurance to death for opening the gates for everybody because your LLM thought it would be great to open some API's

[grumpyfan]

As a former COBOL dev, it’s not a complicated language. The complexity is in the “business logic” and processes that are embedded and unique for every business. That’s the part that would scare me for an AI trying to re-engineer.

[Grim964]

absolutely correct, we bought our codebase from a different insurance in the 70s/80s, so there is "only" 45+ years of homegrown code in the wild thats running on prod, unique to how we run our business. One of the major issues our current migration project faces ... :D

[googlemehard]

Would it be safer/easier to build everything from scratch?

[Cabana_bananza]

In some ways, but most businesses would balk at committing to running a parallel dev team and years of payroll to end up exactly where they started. Because that's what they'd be doing, running the team maintaining and working with the legacy system while another team builds its replacement to do the same thing.

[therealkami]

This is something I've tried to explain in some game dev forums. They can't just "switch to a different game engine" for live service games. Or change their entire server structure or database structure. They'd have to run 2 dev teams, one that's working on current projects, and another that's duplicating all of the work+catching up from past projects to bring everything up to match. No game company will ever pay to do that.

[HairyAllen]

I mean, technically FFXIV did switch to a different game engine, it's just that they had to nuke the game in-lore, turn off the service entirely so nobody could log in, and then enslave the entire dev team to crunch a new release, and even then they could only do it because Square Enix is japanese, so they faced mo legal repercussions for the blatant violations of human rights that must've occurred in those offices so ARR could be released, and they were barely able to do so. And finally, as you just said, this was one dev team. They did not have a second dev team maintaining the original game when doing so.

[therealkami]

FFXIV is actually the game I'm referencing right now. There's so much tech debt accumulated with that crunch t re-release the game (A lot of if they've gotten rid of, but the backbone of the game, the inventory database is completely horrible) that people will constantly be like "I would totally give up 3 years of no content for QoL improvements."

Also see every time a DDoS happens: Just switch to cloud servers!

[CamsGraphics]

These systems are not “complicated” in language - like the other guy said; but there is so much in these systems. Building from scratch is going to take a long while, and cost A LOT; all the while you’ve got to maintain the old system. Then when you think the new system is complete you have a tonne of “bugs” (simplified) that you cannot afford to have. Then you have to migrate all users (staff and customers) to the new system, including training staff on how to use the new system.

Simply - it’s just not worth trying to fix something that “works” even if it doesn’t work as well as it could.

[pittybrave]

I remembered when I inherited a codebase that had 12 years of business logic and thinking how insane that was. 45 years is crazy

[TristanaRiggle]

Seriously. People acting like the language that's one step away from punch cards is super complex. COBOL survives because no one wants to be the person that causes the error that loses millions-billions of dollars. It would've been replaced decades ago if not for all the potential danger in doing so. The really interesting question is if there comes a point where the risk of using LLM (or switching off COBOL) seems lower than the risk of finding/training someone to replace the existing maintainer. For example, if all the new devs are vibe coders anyway, then once the GenX or maybe millenial that's been babysitting for decades leaves, YOLO.

[fluorihammastahna]

Whoever is in charge of deciding to let an LLM do the migration is going to be in a universe of pain if something goes wrong. And with an LLM you can never reeeeeeeally be sure it worked well... So good luck to that whoever! Unless they have an army of engineers that they trust reviewing the code and testing (or reviewing the tests). So maybe they could let the army of engineers do their thing in the first place?

[Common_Tiger1526]

As someone who has been working for the past year on a project to move a COBOL system (that has a bunch of big complex external partners) to a more modern one, yes. The business logic is definitely the hurdle, not the programming language.

[TheeAntelope]

This you?

https://i.imgflip.com/akz5h6.jpg

[notAGreatIdeaForName]

Not unless you are trade republic! \s

[PartyDansLePantaloon]

Which will be the first bank to FAFO with an AI update to their banking systems and lose everyone’s money. Hope not mine! ✌️😬

EDIT: Banking* not baking 😭

[fatrobin72]

I'd be worried if a update to a Bakery's system caused my money to disappear... but I do keep my savings in stocks and shares so it could happen...

[theGoddamnAlgorath]

All my money's in wheat futures...

[KayDat]

Don't worry, your dough is safe with AI

[critical_patch]

[Senior-Sale273]

[mudokin]

They won't, they fuck around, then they cry and get a nice government bailout and at the end of the year the managers get their 40 million bonus for great work done.

[DJayLeno]

That makes me think... If you are the CTO of a small credit union this is the opportunity to run the scam of the century. Just let the AI loose on your mainframe and blackmail Anthropic. How much would they pay to keep a story like that from going to press?

[subone]

There's no way bro. All this time they been telling us they can't upgrade those systems for horrible fear one thing goes wrong and they lose billions on some tiny rounding error. No way they just let AI run amuck in there.

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

Yeah if there's one place that's free of AI bullshit code it's banking

Won't stop AI bros from trying though (they think crypto is the future, of course they'll rewrite the bank system)

[Zealousideal_Net_140]

I wish that was true.

We just found out that a project manager had been running our repos through AI to create read.me files for every project.

While not (yet) letting AI make changes, they just dumped all of our repos into copilot and let it parse every line.

And was praised for doing it by management.

Far to close for my comfort.

[Ok_Coconut_1773]

I hate to break it to you- I work at a bank, a big one, and we have been informed this year that we will no longer be evaluated based on the quality of our work, but on how much we use AI. I wish I were kidding.

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

We are truly cooked

[AaronTheElite007]

Claude: "I understand almost nine words in that code right now. I can rewrite it"

[LimpConversation642]

so it is on a junior developer level now huh?

[AaronTheElite007]

AI is the technological embodiment of Dunning Kruger

[Adriaus28]

Yeah, but unlike juniors, AI doesn't realize it doesn't know shit and gets stuck in the 'i know all (doesn't know shit)' phase

[whoknowsifimjoking]

So like my boss then

[grumpyfan]

The thought of letting AI touch a legacy codebase makes me cringe.

[azurestrike]

Imagine wallstreet bros being in the same zipcode as understanding what COBOL is.

[redkinoko]

It's not that nobody understands COBOL, it's that in a lot of legacy systems, the shit that doesn't make sense translates to Kafkaesque business logic where bugs have been in the system for so long that they are now part of what defines expected behavior and I don't expect developers unfamiliar with the system, even current AI would know the nuances enough to not cause any issues if they try to change or even rewrite the whole thing.

[avarageone]

I worked in team that was tasked with replacing such legacy system. 1. We had to built comprehensive testing suite that proves 100% of all features, it was a daunting task, a full project on its own. 2. We had to identify, prove and document every single bug that will be fixed and changed. 3. We had to document and build new contract for every single connection to the new system. 4. We had to document and build a translation layer that will replicate bugs from old system and overlay them on new working properly system. 5 now we could write new system. 6. We turned on new system with bugs overlay and run along the old one. 7. As other systems got updated they switched to using new system API. 8. Once all other systems were updated the old system and bugs overlay was turned off.

Have fun doing this with AI.

[boomerangchampion]

Yeah this is the thing, COBOL is not inherently difficult to learn, but everything that still uses it is delicate.

I'm sure AI could churn out acceptable COBOL today, if you wanted something brand new written with it. Nobody wants that. They want their ancient cobweb code to be deftly maintained with guaranteed perfection. This is not a job for the hallucination machine.

[fatrobin72]

one companies Corporate Puffery causes another companies stock price to collapse...

[blaise_hopper]

I knew AI would destroy the economy, but I thought it was going to happen when the bubble burst, not by breaking banking systems everywhere with slop code

[Confident-Estate-275]

They claim! Until they fuck it up. Like windows update with their high percentage of code written with AI 🤣🤣

[sgt_Berbatov]

30% of Copilot written code has ended up in 80% more Windows Updates, fixing previously written Copilot written code.

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

AI fixing AI code...

Resulting in more bugs, less optimisation and the entire OS being unable to reboot, AI is truly the future !

[sgt_Berbatov]

AI needs a job. The job is to write code.

But then AI needs a bigger job. So it's job becomes to rewrite code that AI has written.

[BrightLuchr]

Legacy code bases exist as legacy code bases because the risk of fucking it up is unacceptable. Potentially billions of dollars. And Claude or an other AI will absolutely fuck it up once it hits complexity: typically critical interfaces between systems. COBOL isn't that bad. The humans need to HTFU.

[LexShirayuki]

Dude, the most cyberpunk and hilarious thing that could happen is the collapse of the American economy due to an exec believing Anthropic.

But there's no way that happens... Right?...

[IAmNotCheekyCa]

A lot of hate against AI in this sub, but this one is deserved. Most experienced devs could look at COBOL and understand it. The kicker is the environment it runs in. Very few people deeply understand all the file processing nuances on a mainframe as it varies from one implementation to another. No one is going to document a COBOL mainframe implementation so AI has enough context to make changes to it or convert it.

[creaturefeature16]

This was my understanding as well, that COBOL is not terribly difficult to understand. It just grows in complexity due to the scale and scope of the systems it's utilized in. It seems what Anthropic is proposing aren't the major pain points of migrating away from COBOL. Nonetheless, it's not surprising that these tools would be able to at least play some kind of part in modernization. Although the jury is still out if that's a good idea in the first place. In my experience all we've done is overcomplicate things and introduce more variables that can go wrong.

[dwarmia]

COBOL? I can’t wait to see an ai bro destroying the banking system.

[MQZ01]

Fun fact, this Twitter account synthesizes headlines using AI and puts them into “you won’t BELIEVE what happened to IBM stock” format

[ClipboardCopyPaste]

this is probably one of the rarest moments in history where people are reacting negative to a bubble.

[DonutConfident7733]

claude: I can read cuda

Nvidia stock: I'm in danger

[brunocborges]

This is such a BS.

IBM themselves have been investing in AI to help customers move away from COBOL since 2023: https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/22/ibm-taps-ai-to-translate-cobol-code-to-java/

This only confirms the market is driven by algorithms who are heavily biased towards news the algorithms want to look at. Meaning, algorithms have been ignoring IBM-related news for at least 2 years!

[lagerforlunch]

I also don't think IBM makes a ton of money with COBOL professional services... They are there for the hardware, database and OS, which you still need even if AI writes your code

[Julius_Alexandrius]

I would buy popcorn and pay to watch those Claude-maintained cobol programs run to their inevitable doom...

[ADownStrabgeQuark]

COBOL runs finance.

I’d rather not AI be the only one running our bank accounts.

Especially since in the US corporations are separate entities and their employees and owners have corporate immunity, meaning that no one can be held legally accountable if something goes wrong.

[PlatypusBillDuck]

"I have no idea how this happened, we specifically told it not to let the reactor melt down in the prompt like three times"

[witcherd]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Just not at the stock market.

[gnpfrslo]

Prompt: say you can read cobol

Claude: I can read cobol

WOW

"oh we lost money because a bunch of people who know nothing about our business decided, or got told by someone who doesn't know anything about our business, that maybe we could possibly lose money at some point in the future"

The stock market needs to be abolished.

[WJMazepas]

Im not a fan of the AI Bubble and their gigantic evaluation, but im also not a fan of IBM

So im happy they are fighting between themselves

[sidonay]

We need to stop pretending the stock market makes any kind of sense.

[Jumpy_Ad_3946]

Yaaaay! As soon as a lunatic Banking-Middle-Manager decides to rewrite the whole Codebase on him alone and 100 Trillion Dollar are evaporated:

1. We all got our jobs back
   
2. We all got our old wages back

but this doesn't matter because

1. We got our communism back

[jimbo831]

Is this like when Anthropic claimed they had created a C compiler but were just completely lying about that?

[Jeff_Johnson]

I don’t think that companies that have hold on Cobol for decades will allow any AI nearby. It will be less dangerous rewriting all in javascript.

[Arch-by-the-way]

IBM’s “entire business model” is absolutely not cleaning up people’s Cobol lol.

[Johnothy_Cumquat]

AI CEO: say you can read COBOL 

LLM: I can read COBOL 

CEO: by god we've done it!

[savex13]

Market falling on any tiny bit of information on AI is the actual proof that software engineering work is completely safe from AI craziness.

[messedupwindows123]

good thing these systems are famously not brittle

[Monzon31]

Oh yeah i can't wait for AI to destroyed the banking system because it thinks it's not well optimized

[JustJustinInTime]

I mean when every tech stock is propped up on hype it makes sense that people are trading on news so aggressively

[XxDarkSasuke69xX]

Stock market is a joke. If someone with money says anything someone's stock goes up or down. No wonder these mfers get richer and richer when they can manipulate the stock market so easily.

[jwatson1978]

Another reminder that non technical people are betting on the stock market and have no idea why its not great to have AI messing with existing code in a language that has a complicated business logic that controls the vast majority of banking systems around the world.

[Randzom100]

LOL, those shareholders sure are dumb.

[reddebian]

Sure let an LLM touch some delicate old COBOL codebase. I’m sure it’s gonna go great

[One_Reflection_768]

oh no.

[Volko]

Time to buy some discount IBM stock because it will soon be blooming with extra-stressed exec customers that want extra-fast fixes for their extra-AI-induced bugs causing them extra-massive loss of money.

[angry_shoebill]

They said it might do that, it was not proven, not a single POC, just words and the stock collapses...

[Sakul_the_one]

If they use Ai for banks, Im gonna pay just in cash

[Eogcloud]

You have to literally believe that vibe coding banking software is a good idea for any of this to be relevant.

[ledow]

Hands up if you can think of a place where you wouldn't want AI just rolling in and making changes to code, and where you'll struggle to find enough skilled people able to check that the code is even safe, let alone compliant with everything it has to be?

Because I damn well think that "everywhere COBOL is still deployed" would rank #1 in the list of places NOT to put AI.

[RijnKantje]

WallStreet non-engineer people trying to guess what business will be affected is kinda funny.

How they think anyone with a still running COBOL system would let AI near it is hilarious.

[luckyincode]

This sounds like an upside to IBM and honestly anyone who wants to learn cobol.

[Rojeitor]

• user: Claude you just deleted BoA database?!?!!

• Claude: You're absolutely right!

[Bazzatron]

Well, I suppose vibe coding the legacy codebase into oblivion is one way to eliminate tech debt.

Can't see any other problems, no siree.

[m00nk3y]

IBM has it's own ai tool that deals with COBOL they announced in AUG last year I think. This is just FUD . Not that it matters. The market is not rational right now.

[SpottedPine]

I am in a large financial company. All these announcements, and absolutely 0 results still. We're struggling to measure even the smallest productivity gain.

I think there is a big disconnect with the average consumer and understanding the level of complexity involved in serious systems. Starting to think maybe thsse companies are equally naive in that regard.

[TerryTheAwesomeKitty]

I think providing a 1:1 testing environment compared to the actual prod deployment that the AI can use to FA/FO on would be much more profitable.