IBM crashes because we’re gonna YOLO a replacement for banking and credit-card back-ends, replacing billions of lines of COBOL with vibe code.

[pizzademon@mastodon.online]

@timbray

[dank@jorts.horse]

@nlowell @timbray

this jokers me every time it comes up. every single bank and many large corps that do similar settlement processes have looked at this every five to ten years. for fifty years.

the architecture is specialized to perform huge numbers of tiny processes. every single time something new is stood up they find the same thing: COTS hardware and "modern" languages significantly underperform what's already in place.

i wish this lesson stayed learned.

[sandorspruit@mastodon.nl]

@nukleos @nlowell @timbray The original Italian Job without the cool Mini Coopers

[michaelormsby@mastodon.art]

@timbray I wonder if there are deeper issues not mentioned in the article? I have heard anecdotally that one of the problems of the COBOL culture is that the practitioners are literally dying off without fresh talent replacing them. Which leaves billions of lines of rock solid but terribly obscure and hard-to-maintain COBOL code. Not to mention the proprietary nature of the underlying hardware architecture.

[atleagle@mastodon.online]

@timbray the a ary bit is that Claude "understands" available code, in whatever language is popularly used amd available. So its not ever going to know cool and collect any collective solutions. This will cause the owners of the code to have Claude convert working old stuff that costs money to maintain into new vibe slop that the stupid AI can "debug" and "fix"

Everything will suddenly become average to bad python

[billseitz@toolsforthought.social]

@timbray

[zbrown@floss.social]

@worik @timbray there are plenty of real problems with COBOL, including how increasingly unviable it has become to maintain these code bases.

The problem with the statement is the implication if not assertion that ‘AI’ is ‘a viable alternative’.

[seindal@mastodon.uno]

@michaelormsby @timbray

The main probe with Cobol is that it takes at least three years just to get into Environment Division.

[mike805@noc.social]

@zbrown @worik @timbray Last time they laid off all the COBOL programmers, Y2K happened and they had to go hat in hand to the retired people. A lot of older programmers got a serious upgrade to their retirement.

The fact something lasted decades is good, not bad. If software is going to be infrastructure then it needs to be built like infrastructure.

What are the AI vibe coders going to do when they have to maintain a code base and the AI model that "wrote" it is discontinued? 1/2

[mike805@noc.social]

@zbrown @worik @timbray Everyone is worried about programmers losing their jobs to AI. From what I am seeing (and I support both kinds of code) there is going to be lots of work for humans fixing what the AIs broke.

One of the basic problems with this technological era is that production is automated and efficient. Repair is still a medieval craft. Look at current generation cars which are nearly unfixable if they get in an accident. AI is making programming like making cars. 2/2

[andymoose@fedi.aiga.rocks]

@nlowell @FknHannu @timbray What I want to know is how these models could possibly have been trained on enough COBOL to be even slightly correct. Are there mountains of public repos of COBOL I’m not aware of?

[deadinside@but.still.drinkin.coffee]

@timbray Yes. Let them.

Do. It.

[dckc@social.coop]

@timbray how many COBOL codebases have good test suites? I suspect none.

How well do LLMs do without tests / types / guardrails?

Best practice AFAIK is to run in parallel with prod. I guess they could try that, but it would take like a monthly billing cycle or a quarter to test one change.

[mainframed767@infosec.exchange]

@timbray finally ending the shackles of evil big COBOL

[capeta@ursal.zone]

@ibboard @timbray Oh so that's what people meant when they said Artificial Intelligence is just a bunch of IF statements.

if it's able to """"""understand""""" the code
if it's able to maintain it
if it's able to modernize it
if it's able to replace it
if a bunch of other stuff it's not able to do
...
and most important of all

if my grandma had wheels, she would've been a bike.

[changemewtf@mastodon.online]

@scruss @brooke @timbray

E.C.O.N.O.M.Y. — Estimated Count of Newly-Ordered Multimillionaire Yachts

[cratermoon@zirk.us]

@timbray wtaf

[helge@mas.to]

@timbray I wonder how much of this is "now they are going to have to divert resources to deal with this nonsense" instead of it being a realistic competitor.

Kinda like, this DDoS of management attack will degrade their performance.

[aristot73@infosec.exchange]

@brooke @timbray
vibe trading vs vibe coding 1-0

[jc0f0116@infosec.exchange]

@timbray webdev vibecoders and llm industry have one thing in common: they're both at the very end of a massively complex and fragile network of interdependant components/processes, and have seemingly no understanding of its complexity. that's how you get "we're just going to build a million datacenters in a year and then the agi will just rewrite everything in rust, simple "