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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?

#41

Post by ironbound »

antonymoose wrote: post #25
deaddodo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m being pushed to use it more and more at work and it’s just not that great. I have paid access to Copilot with ChatGPT and Claude for context. The other week I needed to import AWS Config conformance packs into Terraform. Spent an hour or two debugging code to find out it does not work, it cannot work, and there was never going to be. Of course it insisted it was right, then sent me down an IAM Policy rabbit hole,…

Hats off for trying to avoid leaking tokens, as a security engineer I don't know if we should be happy for the job security or start drinking given all the new dumb issues generated fast than ever xD

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

#42

Post by lopezb »

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…

I can't comment on Zig and Rust, but C is one of the languages in which LLMs are best, in my opinion. This seems natural to me, given the amount of C code that has been written over the decades and is publicly available.

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

#44

Post by elzbardico »

lopezb wrote: post #42
deaddodo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't comment on Zig and Rust, but C is one of the languages in which LLMs are best, in my opinion. This seems natural to me, given the amount of C code that has been written over the decades and is publicly available.

Had the opposite experience using LLMs with C. Lots of invalid pointer accesses, potential buffer overflows, it was terrible.

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

#45

Post by Quothling »

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 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 it very specificly, but if you do, it can spit out a configuration in two seconds. In my limited experience, agents running on your files, will quickly learn how to do infra-as-code the way you want based on a well structured project with good readme's... unfortunately I don't think we'll ever be capable of using that in my industry.

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

#46

Post by elzbardico »

rramadass wrote: post #29
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...

Both Fortran and COBOL will be here long after many of the current languages have disappeared. They are unique to their domains viz. Fortran for Scientific Computing and COBOL for Business Data Processing with a huge amount of installed code-base much of it for critical systems.

Don't know about COBOL, but FORTRAN and Ada definitely would survive an Extinction Level Event on earth.

Plenty of space based stuff running Ada and maybe some FORTRAN.

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

#47

Post by nativeit »

Wuiserous wrote: post #17

I see it as a complete opposite for sure, I will tell you why. it could have been a threat if it was something you cannot control, but you can control it, you can learn to control it, and controlling it in the right direction would enable anyone to actually secure your position or even advance it. And, about the COBOL, well i dont know what the heck this is.

Dunning-Kruger is gonna need a bigger boat.

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

#48

Post by elzbardico »

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.

And I do a lot of top level design when I use it. AIs are terrible at abstraction and functional decomposition.

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

#49

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

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 unfamiliar with. So we are back to trusting AI as a research assistant, if not a “vibe coding” assistant.

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

#50

Post by hmaxwell »

edarchis wrote: post #6

Not COBOL but I sometimes have to maintain a large ColdFusion app. The early LLMs were pretty bad at it but these days, I can let AI write code and I "just" review it. I've also used AI to convert a really old legacy app to something more modern. It works surprisingly well.

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 idiot, you need to be the architect and the person to lead the LLM into writing performant and safe code. You can't expect it to turn key one shot everything. LLMs are not at the point yet.

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