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Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

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Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#101

Post by akhil08agrawal »

alexpham14 wrote: post #98

Compliance is usually the hard stop before we even get to capability. We can’t send code out, and local models are too heavy to run on the restricted VDI instances we’re usually stuck with. Even when I’ve tried it on isolated sandbox code, it struggles with the strict formatting. It tends to drift past column 72 or mess up period termination in nested IFs. You end up spending more time linting the output than it take…

Nuances of a codebase are the key. But I guess we are accelerating towards solving that. Let's see how much time will this take.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#102

Post by rbanffy »

ufmace wrote: post #88
hmaxwell wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like people who can't get AI to write production ready code are really bad at describing what they want done. The problem is that people want an LLM to one shot GTA6. When the average software developer prompts an LLM they expect 1) absolutely safe code 2) optimized/performant code 3) production ready code without even putting the requirements on credential/session handling. You need to prompt it like it's an…

That's just the thing though - it seems like, to get really good code out of an LLM, a lot of the time, you have to describe everything you want done and the full context in such excruciating detail and go through so many rounds of review and correction that it would be faster and easier to just write the code yourself.

Yes, but please remember you specify the common parts only once for the agent. From there, it’ll base its actions on all the instructions you kept on their configuration.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#103

Post by foxmoss »

null_deref wrote: post #15
0xCE0 wrote: post #13

I really wouldn't want any vibe-coded COBOL in my bank db/app logic...

Does the use AI always implies slope and vibe coding? I’m really not sure

Because the question almost always comes with an undertone of “Can this replace me?”. If it’s just code search, debugging, the answer’s no because a non-developer won’t have the skills or experience to put it all together.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#104

Post by pixl97 »

brightball wrote: post #8

Heard an excellent COBOL talk this summer that really helped me to understand it. The speaker was fairly confident that COBOL wasn't going away anytime soon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7Q7u0pZyQ&list=PLxeenGqMmm...

In my experience working with large financial institutions and banks, there is plenty of running COBOL code that is around the average age of HN posters. Where as a lot of different languages code is replaced over time with something better/faster COBOL seems to have a staying power in financial that will ensure it's around a very very long time.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#105

Post by pixl97 »

shevy-java wrote: post #72
0xCE0 wrote: post #13

I really wouldn't want any vibe-coded COBOL in my bank db/app logic...

How many banks really use COBOL? Here in central Europe it seems to be Java, Java, Java for the most part. Since many years actually.

As others have said, US banks seem to run a lot of it, as in they have millions of lines of code of it.

This is not saying that banks don't also have a metric shitload of Java, they do. I think most people would be surprised how much code your average large bank manages.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#106

Post by aschobel »

rubyfan wrote: post #86
BrouteMinou wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with all those languages listed in this thread,it explains why I don't trust or use AI when I code. That's basically all the languages that I am using... For the AI fans in here, what languages are you using? Typescript only would be my guess?

Yeah that list has left me wondering, then what is it good at? HTML, CSS and JavaScript?

It’s been amazing for me for Go and TypeScript; and pretty decent at Swift.

There is a steep learning curve. It requires good soft eng practices; have a clear plan and be sure have good docs and examples. Don’t give it an empty directory; have a scaffolding it can latch onto.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#107

Post by federicoserra »

deaddodo wrote: post #22
OGWhales wrote: post #12

I've not found it that great at programming in cobol, at least in comparison to its ability with other languages it seems to be noticeably worse, though we aren't using any models that were specifically trained on cobol. It is still useful for doing simple and tedious tasks, for example constructing a file layout based on info I fed it can be a time saver, otherwise I feel it's pretty limited by the necessary system…

AI isn’t particularly great with C, Zig, or Rust either in my experience. It can certainly help with snippets of code and elucidate complex bitwise mathematics, and I’ll use it for those tedious tasks. And it’s a great research assistant, helping with referencing documentation. However, it’s gotten things wrong enough times that I’ve just lost trust in its ability to give me code I can’t review and confirm at a glanc…

Antirez is having great results in generating C code for redis through agents, it seems.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#108

Post by worksonmine »

egorfine wrote: post #24
0xCE0 wrote: post #13

I really wouldn't want any vibe-coded COBOL in my bank db/app logic...

vibecoding != AI. For example: I'm a senior dev, I use AI extensively but I fully understand and vet every single line of code I push. No exceptions. Not even in tests.

> Not even in tests.

This should be "especially in tests". It's more important that they work than the actual code, because their purpose is to catch when the rest of the code breaks.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#109

Post by brandonmb »

BrouteMinou wrote: post #79
Quothling wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is pretty bad at Python and Go as well. It depends a lot on who uses it though. We have a lot of non-developers who make things work with Python. A lot of it will never need a developer because it being bad doesn't matter for what it does. Some of it needs to be basically rewritten from scratch. Over all I think it's fine. I do love AI for writing yaml and bicep. I mean, it's completely terrible unless you prompt…

with all those languages listed in this thread,it explains why I don't trust or use AI when I code. That's basically all the languages that I am using... For the AI fans in here, what languages are you using? Typescript only would be my guess?

I’ve found it to be quite good at Python, JS (Next + Tailwind + TS type of things), and PHP. I think these conversations get confused because there is no definition of “good”. So I’m defining “good” as it can do 50-80% of the work for me, even in a giant code base where call sites are scattered and ever changing. I still have to do some clean up or ask it to do something different, but many times I don’t need to do anything.

As someone else mentions, the best working mode is to think through your problem, write some instructions, and let it do it’s thing while you do other work. Then come back and treat that as a starting point.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#110

Post by brightball »

pixl97 wrote: post #104
brightball wrote: post #8

Heard an excellent COBOL talk this summer that really helped me to understand it. The speaker was fairly confident that COBOL wasn't going away anytime soon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7Q7u0pZyQ&list=PLxeenGqMmm...

In my experience working with large financial institutions and banks, there is plenty of running COBOL code that is around the average age of HN posters. Where as a lot of different languages code is replaced over time with something better/faster COBOL seems to have a staying power in financial that will ensure it's around a very very long time.

I wasn’t aware of this until that talk, but COBOL essentially being both the logic and the database together makes it very sticky.
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