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.

[nlowell@zirk.us]

@timbray

What could possibly go wrong.

I worked on those COBOL systems for much of my programming career. Made good living maintaining 60s and 70s spaghetti code (literally. the comments were all in Italian. I'm not kidding).

Having AI guessing what the code might look like should give chills to everybody who uses money.

[ivor@social.ivor.org]

@nlowell @timbray I see stuff like this and say to myself "nobody can be that stupid"... but then I'm frequently proven wrong.

[nukleos@mendeddrum.org]

@nlowell @timbray I love the “Italian connection” !

[worik@mastodon.social]

@timbray

> COBOL systems are so old that any viable alternative becomes immediately attractive.

A tech journalist said that. We're doomed, if we cannot build IT infrastructure that can last for decades.

Good news is we can.

Bad news is there is more profit in new crap than in maintaining the existing infrastructure

Software, generally, socks mostly for that reason. And they are laying off all the computer programmers...

[theorangetheme@en.osm.town]

@nlowell @timbray First of all, thank you for the work that you did. I'm sure it benefitted countless people.

At this point, I'm just trying to be resilient for when the system collapses. If the people running society are hellbent on ruining it, all we can do is try our best, and coordinate with each other for when it happens.

[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.