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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?

#111

Post by pixl97 »

m3h_hax0r wrote: post #11

I wonder if the OP's question is motivated by there being less public examples of COBOL code to train LLM's on compared to newer languages (so a different experience is expected), or something else. If the prior, it'd be interesting to see if having a language spec and a few examples leads to even better results from an LLM, since less examples could also mean less bad examples that deviate from the spec :) if there…

Most COBOL I know of won't ever see the light of day.

Also COBOL seems to have a lot of flavors that are used by a few financial institutions. Since these are highly proprietary it seems very unlikely LLMs would be trained on them, and therefore the LLM would not be any use to the bank.

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

#112

Post by worksonmine »

egorfine wrote: post #83
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the people who are "pro-AI" are so often because it lets them skip the understanding part with less scrutiny

The good news here is that their code is of such a poor quality it doesn't properly work anyway. I have recently tried to blindly create a small .dylib consolidation tool in JS using Claude Code, Opus 4.5 and AskUserTool to create a detailed spec. My god how awful and broken the code was. Unusable. But it faked* working just good enough to pass someone who's got no clue.

> The good news here is that their code is of such a poor quality it doesn't properly work anyway.

This is just wishful thinking. In reality it works just well enough to be dangerous. Just look at the latest RCE in OpenCode. The AI it was vibe-coded with allowed any website with origin * to execute code, and the Prompt Engineer™ didn't understand the implications.

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

#113

Post by pixl97 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #26

Given the mass of code out there, it strikes me it's only a matter of time before someone fine tunes one of the larger more competent coding models on COBOL. If they haven't already. Personally I've had a lot of luck Opus etc with "odd" languages just making sure that the prompt is heavily tuned to describe best practices and reinforce descriptions of differences with "similar" languages. A few months ago with Sonnet…

> competent coding models on COBOL

Which COBOL... This is a particular issue in COBOL is it's a much more fragmented language than most people outside the industry would expect. While a model would be useful for the company that supplied the data, the amount of transference may be more limited than one would expect.

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

#114

Post by pixl97 »

qubex wrote: post #9
ndr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone understand anything?

Never met this ‘anyone’ person or seen any of this ‘anything’ stuff.

I've seen songs on spottily called "anything" and "Just play anything", so I guess it may be worthwhile if I change my name to "anyone" for when someone asks their LLM to "just hire anyone"

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

#115

Post by qubex »

pixl97 wrote: post #114
qubex wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never met this ‘anyone’ person or seen any of this ‘anything’ stuff.

I've seen songs on spottily called "anything" and "Just play anything", so I guess it may be worthwhile if I change my name to "anyone" for when someone asks their LLM to "just hire anyone"

Appreciated.

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

#116

Post by shermantanktop »

foxmoss wrote: post #103
null_deref wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That undertone is overt in the statements of CEOs and managers who salivate at “reducing headcount.”

The people who should fear AI the most right now are the offshore shops. They’re the most replaceable because the only reason they exist is the desire to carve off low skill work and do it cheaply.

But all of this overblown anyway because I don’t see appetite for new software getting satiated anytime soon, even if we made everyone 2x productive.

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

#117

Post by svieira »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #57
hnlmorg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I agree with your point, I think what sometimes gets lost in these conversations is that reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing code. Personally, and I’m not trying to speak for everyone here, I found it took me just as long to review AI output as it would have taken to write that code myself. There have been some exceptions to that rule. But those exceptions have generally been in domains I’m unfami…

I think the point is in a banking context, every line of code gets reviewed thoroughly anyway.

Would you consider Knight Capital Group[1] a banking context?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group#2012_stoc...

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

#118

Post by chasd00 »

glhaynes wrote: post #93
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…

I'm not a Python programmer but I could've sworn I've repeatedly heard it said that LLMs are particularly good at writing Python.

Python is very versatile so it's probably a case of the dev not preferring the Python the model produced vs their own. I bet a lot of GenAI created C falls into the same bucket. "..well that's not how i would have done it.."

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

#119

Post by soco »

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…

There's such a huge and old talk about the death of COBOL coding/coders that I find it very surprising that nobody trained a model to help with exactly that.

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

#120

Post by accrual »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #84
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…

If it's bad at python the most popular language what language it's good at? If you see the other comments they're basically mentioning most programming languages

I've had good results with TypeScript. I use a tested project template + .md files as well as ESLint + Stylelint and each project generally turns out pretty clean.
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