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If you think migrating off COBOL is bad, imagine how bad moving off COBOL with AI generated code slob will be.
Ah, but you see: that's somebody else's problem. He's not going to be the sucker left dealing with an unmaintainable pile of brittle slop, so it's totally fine /s
This. And it’s not like it’s Python or something with a bunch of online / open source content that the model can be trained on. COBOL is probably the least open sourced or publicly talked about language.
Not just migrate, but quickly. Move fast and break things crowd demands it.
And use AI to do it, this is going to end well
I just hate that nothing will happen to musk or trump in any US court.
Not with that attitude
Only way either will end up in court is if we begin blending billionaires, and I have little faith in that happening in the near term
Not with that attitude
It's like they desperately want to prove how awful their 'innovations' are.
Yeah this is the software management equivalent of invading Russia in the winter
Great metaphor.
Don’t worry, we’ll throw the COBOL through an LLM. I’m sure LLMs are great at cobol, since there’s an abundance of content online about COBOL for it to have been trained on /s
"I don't understand this code, but I can make it better!"
That's the sound of humiliation getting ready to visit.
Oh look, even more proof he has no idea what he's doing.
These systems are so ancient that their bugs and edge cases are expected behaviors for downstream services and applications. Properly replacing it would take years of effort, testing, validation, and communication... and this numbnuts is going to have his college interns quickly replace it by "vibe coding" something into existence with AI and flipping a switch.
I expect the goal is to break it so badly that they can justify getting rid of social security as a whole, but if I take it at face value as DOGE trying to make things more "efficient"... that change is going to cause so many problems that it would cost a magnitude more to fix the damage they did than just leaving it the fuck alone.
Don't ever think they don't know what they're doing.
exactly. they want to ruin it.
"which would likely require the use of generative AI". Why? Why does it "likely" need that? Have developers become stupid? Have decent analysts fallen off a cliff?
As someone who was part of a team that moved a company off of a mainframe into the modern world of technology (about ten years ago). It takes years.
I guarantee that this is going to go badly. It's going to take much longer than they think. And it's going to be very expensive.
But I also guarantee that they don't care. It seems they're more than happy to weaken the US in pursuit of profit and to help Putin for some reason.
I've recently started working in a company that uses old tech, and there is a minor interest from me to actually follow the COBOL onboarding. It seems like a pretty cool language construct to know, alongside my years of OOP experiences with stuff like C# and Java.
And there are still courses being offered, as it's far from eradicated (although everyone wants it gone).
It's not a dead language. And while I don't care much for it, only move if it makes sense. The reason the company I worked with moved, was because the servers were getting very costly to keep up, and the parts were becoming rarer. So they were concerned they might be in a situation where they'd be unable to work for up to three weeks. And they had already done some work moving several of their systems and apps to C# and virtual servers. And it still took years in order to do it with minimal disruption to business operations.
But since the Department of dipshit doesn't actually care about disrupting services that affect the working people, I bet they'll do it and be like, oops, our bad, Biden made us do it.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAA HOLY SHIT, the sheer fucking hubris of delusion!!!!
Wow, I mean, holy fuck… someone’s definitely lacing his k with something
Hahaha ooooh shit 🍿
if it ain't broke don't fix it
They don't intend to fix it..
So many people are missing this!
This isn't about "fixing" anything, it is an excuse to dismantle the SSA ...
It's a common business tactic. I've done it myself at work.
You go in to "fix" something. You shuffle shit around, complain how complex and expensive it is, fail too fix it, then use the added expense and time wasted to justify shutting it down.
Last time government people tried to mess with Social Security...
Disregard programming! Acquire BSG references!
One semi safe approach to this is that almost all languages can be written line for line replacement "like COBOL". There will be COBOL built in functions that need to be reimplemented. There may be internal representation differences that matter.
In the end, there is the same unmaintainable line count code base, and it runs slower, though it may run on faster hardware to offset. This approach introduces the fewest bugs with no real advantage. Rewriting application from modern language perspective is sure to break it much harder.
Except COBOL has completely different number handling, so one-on-one migration will cause data corruptions.
Might not mean much on infrequently used systems with hundreds of interactions per year, but on fundamentals like SSNs, this will kill people.
Good programmers usually commit to ethics codes, cowboy AI "developers" usually don't.
That's going to be one hell of a prompt to write.
"Sorry Dave, I cannot do that"
Rule 1 assumes goal is not to break it.
Someone should stop these DOGE people.
Luigi.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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