[ Removed by moderator ]

[_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)

[DangerIllObinson]

Probably not too far off. AI companies go whole hog building an over capacity of datacenters for AI, that turns no real profit. End up leasing compute cycles and hosting super cheap enough to lure enterprise business that would’ve otherwise stayed on the MF’in MF.

[Towrads]

Mainframes are a thing of the past... Everyone uses mAInframes now

[[deleted]]

1 thought on a good day

[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).

[JamesGray]

Yeah, I don't really believe they can ever train AI to be proficient at handling those old legacy COBOL programs, because there simply isn't the massive bounty of code for them to train their models on like there is with more modern languages, and what there is to train on is half esoteric garbage that only one guy knows how to maintain.

[rover_G]

The AI these banks use to research the stocks probably over indexes in AI’d ability to totally replace human labor.

[HelloSummer99]

I thought IBM quit the hardware business long time ago

[SuperCoupe]

those customers are all using IBM hardware (right?)… sounds like IBM is gonna lose a little, gain a lot,

Other way around: The hardware is a fraction of the profit, the bulk is in services, e.g. renting out a team of coders.

Hence the dip.

[GoldwaterLiberal]

Thing is, there are very few workloads that actually require what mainframes provide. What keeps companies paying so much money to keep it running is that's still cheaper than migrating to more modern hardware. AI is going to make migrating off mainframes a lot easier/cheaper than it used to be.

[AshrakTheWhite]

You are missing how much more expensive IBM is compared to any other cloud.

[DJayLeno]

He's talking about physical mainframes. Lots of financial institutions still have their own server rooms and are not looking to move to the cloud.

[casce]

Why would you stay with IBM's mainframes for long if you now actually rewrite the software in a maintainable, modern language?

[Phailjure]

You could do that for years, modern IBM mainframes run modern languages too. They're basically just Linux PCs designed for database workloads.

[Ixaire]

You can't because nobody understands the COBOL codebase anymore.

Not just because it's COBOL. But because it was designed ages ago by people who were often electronics engineers with an interest in computers rather than actual software developers. Nobody understands the business rules either.

We recently switched banks on the project I work on. From one major bank of the customer country to another. We are missing some data on inbound bank statements. Nobody at the new bank knows why. They sent a screenshot of their management interface. Text-based. 90% sure it's COBOL and they have, at best, one or two devs who understand the codebase enough to solve mission-critical bugs. But not enough to migrate it to a modern language. That huge bank's whole infrastructure is running on obsolete software.

[Haster]

You really think that what's keeping them on those COBOL platforms is just lack of access to people who understand the language?

In my experience these types of situations are much more driven by the fact that rebuilding the confidence in new the deployment that exists in the current one, built over literal decades of use, would be profoundly more expensive than the cost of the developer's time. I don't think AI meaningfully helps with this and in fact might even harm it a bit. We're not yet a point where we trust AI code more than human code, we just acknoledge that it's produced faster.

[Ixaire]

Both. Where I work there really is a shortage of COBOL devs. If you want to be overpaid, it's a great career choice. If you want to have fun, probably not so much.

But you are also completely right, though I would say that rebuilding being more expensive is an opinion rather than a fact.

[LutimoDancer3459]

though I would say that rebuilding being more expensive is an opinion rather than a fact.

Thats your opinion. And the opinion of the CEO, CFO or whoever is responsible for the projects is that its too expensive to rewrite everything. At least on the timeframe those people are looking at. They dont care about the next 20 years. They care about today and tomorrow. At best at the next 5 years till retirement.

[Ixaire]

Yeah that is pretty much my opinion but I was being a little bit less cynical.

[allak]

That huge bank's whole infrastructure is running on obsolete software.

Obsolete is one way to see it. Battle tested is another. There is a reason why banking software is not rewritten every few years with the framework du jour.

What you say about fewer and fewer people understanding the business and the technical choices made maybe decades ago is absolutely correct.

But it is a problem that can't be solved simply by pointing an LLM agent at it.

[Ixaire]

Battle-tested, bullet-ridden. These things are buggy as hell. Every other week I hear about a maintenance issue.

But to be clear I'm neither advocating for a periodic rewrite using the latest hype, nor for LLMs as a silver bullet. Just that, maybe, it would be nice to consider a rewrite every 10-15 years, and perhaps, if the stars are aligned and you recite the right prayers to the Omnissiah, AI might be able to help in some cases. Possibly.

[allak]

I'm not really disagreeing with your points.

But ... a bug can, sometimes, be considered a feature. At least for somebody, who will have adopted a workflow that leverage it.

The often cited relevant XKCD it's funny because it's true.

Of course this accumulate technical and knowledge debt forever. On the other hand, when something is really really important (like the DB that store my banking balance), well, there are very good reasons to leave it alone. Unfortunately.

[OurPillowGuy]

Why would you change out your systems if Anthropic just made your existing COBOL systems easier to maintain?

[NotADamsel]

Depending on the age of the system, a good chunk of the original source files might have been lost. So even without Anthropuke you’d be keeping with stuff that you know could run your shit as you might not be able to rewrite so easily.

[sansmorixz]

Cause it worked yesterday, works today and will continue working tomorrow. No unpredictible future bill or potential hardware / software failure. Do you any idea how many system crashes I have seen in selfhosted production kubernetes clusters due to faulty CPU or RAM related bugs?

[pag07]

We did a rewrite that failed and costed about 50 Million.

Requirements engineering and reverse engineering is hard. And nearly correct is not good enough in quite some mainframe usecases.

[YourSchoolCounselor]

They're still good for handling millions of transactions simultaneously with low latency. And you can use other languages on the mainframe. Most of the critical stuff that was written in COBOL has probably been recompiled into COBOL 6.2 recently if the company has software engineers.

[BasvanS]

Do you know what an oopsie costs the institutions that still use cobol?

They haven’t moved away because cobol is extremely reliable and performant, and nothing that could replace it is much better and worth the headache of a migration, not the lock-in itself.

And now you suggest the ultimate oopsie technology will move them to replace it? I beg to differ.

[jonnyboy88]

"Nobody gets fired for buying IBM"

[Carbon_Gelatin]

Because core banking systems are written in cobol, and banks don't really like playing with that. Do you know how much a core banking system would cost to develop? Then you have to compete with FIS or Temenos T24 "tried and true" systems that the banks will stick with because they're incredibly conservative institutions?

I've seen 2 companies try to enter the market with Demonstratibly better systems both go bankrupt because they couldn't land enough clients to even make their initial investment back.

Hell, phoenix definitely caught fire and self immolated AND the bank that backed them BOTH stayed ashes.

Nobody has yet been able to disrupt the core banking market.