Now, 4 million people can write it.
A model being able to ingest the whole codebase (maybe even its VCS history!) and take you through it is almost certainly the most valuable part of all.
Not to mention the inevitable "now one-shot port that bad boy to rust" discussion.
this has been going on all Feb.
Imagine all your data is Reddit threads and now I ask you what follows “goto”, how would Reddit help you?
The opposite is likely true - there isn’t a ton of publicly available cobol code compared to e.g React, so an LLM will degrade.
I’m porting my whole codebase to cobol!
I write SAAS suites for archeological sites.
That number sounds enormous. If the same code runs on 10,000 ATMs, are they counting that 10,000 times?
Cobol is an extremely verbose programming language, and it was used in an era when the practice of programming was much less developed. Calls into libraries were often not used, and instead any re-used code was copied, essentially inlined by hand. (With all the obvious problems that caused.)
The combination of automating complex processes, requiring embarrassing amounts of code to do simple things, re-use by copy and the fact that it was dominant in it's field for such a long time (4 decades!), the amount of COBOL code that exists out there is just staggering.
Often, understanding the code or modifying it is the easy part! I'm sure a decent amount of people on this website could master COBOL sufficiently to go through these systems to make changes to the code.
However, if I understand from my own career enough, knowing why those things are there, how it all fits together in the much broader (and vast) system, and the historical context behind all of that, is what knowledge is being lost, not the ability to literally write or understand COBOL.
I'm pretty sure they're talking about converting COBOL to Python or Go and that is the benefit. That doesn't require knowing the architecture and system design. I'm not familiar with COBOL and COBOL systems so I could be wrong... but Python programmers who can then study the system are easy to find.
I've never worked on COBOL systems specifically, but just going from my experience working on fintech problems in dense legacy stacks of various languages (java is common), that are extremely hard to understand at times, the language itself is rarely if ever the problem.
"Just need to convert it to Go or Python" is kind of getting at the fallacy I am trying to describe. The language isn't the issue (IME). I do have my gripes about certain java frameworks, personally, but the system doesn't get any easier to understand from my POV as to simply rewrite it in another language.
Even let's say it was this simple in the case of COBOL - these are often extremely critical systems that cannot afford to fail or be wrong very often, or at all, and have complex system mechanisms around that to make it so that even trying to migrate it to a new system/language would inevitably involve understanding of the system and architecture.
How big is your context window? How big is Claude's context window? Which one is likely to get bigger?
IF, and it’s a big if, Claude make it possible to migrate off of COBOL, this would be a massive blow to IBM.
Their company no problem grinding older developers into retirement for the sake of padding their quarterly numbers, work-life balance is hell there. They refuse to try to compete with the modern developer market, senior level pay tops out around $125k. Despite what you may have read about experienced COBOL developer pay, know that is not the average experience. The talent pool was not replenished because they did not want to pay, overseas contracting firms also stopped training COBOL developers because their contractors could earn more building modern infra on AWS, so now they're between a rock and a hard place.
I have little doubt that we are going to see a massive payments infra failure as a result of this. Not because the AI is inherently bad, but because the promises of the tech combined with terrible management practices will create the perfect conditions for a catastrophe.
I was about to comment we should all closely watch those bank statements and balances...
While I'm OK with the use of AI to understand the COBOL codebase, I understand it's a single prompt away from transformation and production. Just one executive approval away ha.
petcat•1h ago
irishcoffee•1h ago
Click it.
htrp•1h ago
Oracle is trying (and mostly failing) at frontier model training