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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?

#141

Post by hackermailman »

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…

AI copilots and prompts give me massive lines of imperative OCaml and the interface for that code always requires changing to properly describe the data it will receive when I can write it myself in a few minutes. I can however write a simulation of some hardware quickly with Java or C using claude code and then run my hand written programs in there for testing. An example is mimicking the runtime environment of some controller

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

#143

Post by fortran77 »

rramadass wrote: post #66
fortran77 wrote: post #27

I'm in an adjacent business (FORTRAN) and it hasn't hurt me at all.

Do you mean you are using LLMs for your Fortran work?

Very little. A lot of Fortran today is converting old Fortran to Python+Numpy or Matlab. I've tried Claude and Copilot and it's pretty sketchy on this. I do use it for "print" statement formatting, etc.

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

#145

Post by Quothling »

pezgrande wrote: post #90
kelvinjps10 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, OP bar seems super high. Because it isn't entirely perfect in order to allow a non-dev to create apps that doesn't make them "pretty bad" imo.

It's terrible. The biggest issue is dependencies, but we've solved it by whitelisting what they are sllowed to use in the pipelines along with writing the necessary howtos.

The thing I should have made clearer is probably that I think the horrible code is great. Yes it's bad, but it's also a ton of services and automation which would not have been made before LLM's, because there wouldn't have been enough developer time for it. Now it being terrible code doesn't mean the sollution itself is terrible for the business. You don't need software engineering until you do, and compute is really cheap on this scale. What do we care their code runs up €5 a year if it adds thousands of euros worth of value?

It's only when something stops working. Usually because what started out as a small thing grows into something where it can't scale that we take over.

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

#146

Post by Quothling »

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

Maybe I should have made it more clear, but it's pretty good if you know how to work with it. The issue is that it's usually faster to just read the documentation and write the code yourself. Depending on what you're working on of course. Like with the yaml, a LLM can write you an ingress config in a second or two from a very short prompt. It can do similar things with Python if you specify exactly how you want something and what dependencies you want.

That's being bad at programming in my opinion. You can mitigate it a lot with how you config you agents. Mine loads our tech stack. The best practices we've decided to use. The fact that I value safety first but am otherwise a fan of the YAGNI philosophy and so on. I spent a little time and build these things into my personal agent on our enterprise AI plan, and I use it a lot. I still have to watch it like a hawk, but I do think it's a great tool.

I guess you could say that your standard LLM will write better Python than I did 10 years ago, but that's not really good enough when you work on systems which can't fail. It's fine on 90% (I made this number up) of software though.

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

#147

Post by to11mtm »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #138
apaprocki wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I would not expect a model to output perfectly formatted C++. I’d let it output whatever it wants and then run it through clang-format, similar to a human. Even the best humans that have the formatting rules in their head will miss a few things here or there. If there are 40 years of undocumented business quirks, document them and then re-evaluate. A human new to the codebase would fail under the same con…

With C++ formatting is optional. A better test case for LLMs is Python where indention specifies code blocks. Even ChatGPT 3.5 got the formatting for Python and YAML correct - now the actual code back then was often hilariously wrong.

I can't even get Github Copilot's plugin to avoid randomly trashing files with a Zero No width break space at the beginning, let alone follow formatting rules consistently...

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

#148

Post by sothatsit »

to11mtm wrote: post #147
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With C++ formatting is optional. A better test case for LLMs is Python where indention specifies code blocks. Even ChatGPT 3.5 got the formatting for Python and YAML correct - now the actual code back then was often hilariously wrong.

I can't even get Github Copilot's plugin to avoid randomly trashing files with a Zero No width break space at the beginning, let alone follow formatting rules consistently...

> Github Copilot

Well there’s your issue!

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

#149

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

to11mtm wrote: post #147
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With C++ formatting is optional. A better test case for LLMs is Python where indention specifies code blocks. Even ChatGPT 3.5 got the formatting for Python and YAML correct - now the actual code back then was often hilariously wrong.

I can't even get Github Copilot's plugin to avoid randomly trashing files with a Zero No width break space at the beginning, let alone follow formatting rules consistently...

I am the last person to say anything good about CoPilot. I used CoPilot for a minute, mostly used raw ChatGPT until last month and now use Codex with my personal subscription to ChatGPT and my personal but company reimbursed subscription to Claude.

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

#150

Post by tomcam »

christophilus wrote: post #131
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...

First of all, that conference is right down the road from me, and I never knew about it. So, thanks for sharing! My first job was working at a credit union software company. I designed and built the front-end (windows applications, a telephone banking system, and a home-banking web thing) and middle-tier systems (VB.NET-based services). The real back-end, though, was an old COBOL system. I remember helping the COBOL…

How did you call COBOL from VB.NET? Was it just a matter of shelling to COBOL and writing out text files that VB.NET consumed, or COM interprocess calls, or what?
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