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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?

#81

Post by egorfine »

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.

You'd be surprised...

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

#82

Post by mickeywhite »

mkw5053 wrote: post #39

If I were using something like Claude Code to build a COBOL project, I'd structure the scaffolding to break problems into two phases: first, reason through the design from a purely theoretical perspective, weighing implementation tradeoffs; second, reference COBOL documentation and discuss how to make the solution as idiomatic as possible. Disclaimer: I've never written a single line of COBOL. That said, I'm a progra…

You may want to give free opensource GnuCOBOL a try. Works on Mac/Linux/Windows. As far as AI and Cobol, I do think Claude Opus 4.5 is getting pretty good. But like stated way above, verify and understand Every line it delivers to you.

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

#83

Post by egorfine »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #77
egorfine wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#84

Post by kelvinjps10 »

Quothling wrote: post #45
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…

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

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

#85

Post by egorfine »

refneb wrote: post #37
eps wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye. AI is also great for learning specifics of poorly documented APIs, e.g. COM-based brainrot from Microsoft.

Hey now, that COM based rot paid for my house and kid’s college expenses.

Not anymore. AI actually does this part much better.

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

#86

Post by rubyfan »

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?

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

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

#87

Post by egorfine »

hnlmorg wrote: post #49
egorfine wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unfami…

> as long to review AI output as it would have taken to write that code myself

That is often the case.

What immensely helps though is that AI gets me past writer's block. Then I have to rewrite all the slop, but hey, it's rewrite and that's much easier to get in that zone and streamline the work. Sometimes I produce more code per day rewriting AI slop than writing it from scratch myself.

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

#88

Post by ufmace »

hmaxwell wrote: post #50
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…

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.

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

#89

Post by maxsilver »

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

It's kinda okay at JS + React + Tailwind. (at least, for reasonably small / not-crazy-complex projects)

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

#90

Post by pezgrande »

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

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.
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