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@Derek Ross 1771942462

This article from Anthropic hit close to home. At my old job as a sysadmin running a student information system, COBOL was everywhere in the financial backend. We struggled to find COBOL developers. We literally re-hired retirees to come back for COBOL projects.

95% of US ATM transactions still run on COBOL 😂 That's just wild.

My point is, that people who built these systems are gone, and the knowledge mostly left with them.

This is an interesting scenario here. AI isn't replacing programmers here. AI is filling a gap humans literally can't fill anymore. The experts that built these legacy systems have retired. So, AI can read what they left behind and build upon it. That's a really interesting use case.

https://claude.com/blog/how-ai-helps-break-cost-barrier-cobol-modernization

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One of my wife's friends worked for Bank of America. He wanted to retire, but said he needed to train people how to write COCOL first. That's one of the first things I thought about when Vibe coding first became popular.

ภ๏รtг๏ภคยt · 2w

Neat. So, agents can earn money knowing and understanding COBAL is what I'm hearing?

Moreover, those legacy systems have prevented modernization. My last job was at a very large insurer and they tried a couple times to re-develop those legacy systems but gave up every time. Will be interesting to see if this allows for that. On the flipside, this also speaks to just how rock fucki...

Punk Science · 2w

I once left a job because they told me they needed me to do three months of COBOL debugging. Those were the good old days when people still needed programmers and you could just leave and go somewhere else.

Symbiolosopher · 2w

I did a job in CLIPS, I bet I could handle COBAL.

solipsist · 2w

To believe marketing article from the creators of the tool itself is not the most credible source I would say. https://blossom.primal.net/66c7e37163c9b09ac0ea09cc78fe70d155f6a9710b794a12135219e89ca24da9.jpg

solipsist · 2w

Next question, who will supervise the code produced by AI, written in COBOL? Having no people proficient in such language can result in a clusterfuck, that nobody on Earth can solve due to the lack of knowledge.

Oberon Ohana · 2w

I'm generally not on board with much of the AI hype, and roll my eyes at some of your vibe posts, but I have to admit when I read about the COBOL stuff I thought, OK... that is a great use case. We could have used this to prepare for Y2K as well (I was one of those that took extra money as Y2K roll...

Big Barry Bitcoin · 2w

How often did they hire their retirees to help convert or migrate to something new vs just to keep the ship running? This is a self inflicted wound and AI is just letting them kick the can down the road. Eventually even AI will struggle with this because they will be trained to be more current too....