Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

hypercubic.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#41

Post by whattheheckheck »

sai18 wrote: post #26
goatlover wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the lack of supply drive up wages until more new talent is incentivized?

That is the current landscape today. Mainframe engineers are in high demand and good ones are paid quite well. I've heard from a global bank, they have one mainframe developer in the team who is past 70. She manages a critical credit card service and gets paid in the upper end of 6 figures to work 20 hrs a week. She's the only one who knows that system. Lots of stories like this.

Maybe they should pay her to mentor someone lmao

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#42

Post by drBonkers »

sai18 wrote: post #26
goatlover wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the lack of supply drive up wages until more new talent is incentivized?

That is the current landscape today. Mainframe engineers are in high demand and good ones are paid quite well. I've heard from a global bank, they have one mainframe developer in the team who is past 70. She manages a critical credit card service and gets paid in the upper end of 6 figures to work 20 hrs a week. She's the only one who knows that system. Lots of stories like this.

Would she consider taking on someone interested in learning COBOL to support her and the team?

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#43

Post by sharts »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #23

> Mainframes still run a surprising amount of critical infrastructure: banking, payments, insurance, airlines, government programs, logistics, and core operations at large institutions. Many of these systems are decades old, but they continue to process enormous transaction volumes because they are reliable, secure, and deeply embedded into business operations. It saddens me when companies abandon them, it takes so m…

You can run kubernetes on mainframes. They’re not as old/out of touch that most people think

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#44

Post by sai18 »

le-mark wrote: post #27
sai18 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that people who understand these systems are all retiring. Majority of the devs are over 60 and there's simply not enough new talent coming in to replace them. So the real challenge companies are facing is will there be enough people to safely maintain these systems in the next decade. If they do not, it means failures in credit card systems, airline reservations, insurance claims and more.

> Majority of the devs are over 60 and there's simply not enough new talent coming in to replace them. Yawn this tired old yarn, again. Mainframe development was offshored from the US decades ago. These retiring cobol programmers simply don’t exist in numbers that matter. The market could be to the companies doing the offshore work, but they’ve been throwing bodies at this problem for a long time, maybe there’s a mar…

Throwing bodies has been the primary way to approach mainframe modernization and a majority of them do end up failing (https://softwaremodernizationservices.com/insights/mainframe...).

Now bringing in AI agents that are incredibly good at software engineering into the modernization lifecycle can completely change the landscape. That's the vision we're building towards at Hypercubic.

Previously you might need 50 engineers and 5+ years to modernize a mainframe application, now with Hypercubic, we can compress that down to 1/5th of those estimates.

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#45

Post by ofrzeta »

sharts wrote: post #43
giancarlostoro wrote: post #23

> Mainframes still run a surprising amount of critical infrastructure: banking, payments, insurance, airlines, government programs, logistics, and core operations at large institutions. Many of these systems are decades old, but they continue to process enormous transaction volumes because they are reliable, secure, and deeply embedded into business operations. It saddens me when companies abandon them, it takes so m…

You can run kubernetes on mainframes. They’re not as old/out of touch that most people think

Can you provide more info / examples on that?

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#46

Post by ryandrake »

sai18 wrote: post #9
650REDHAIR wrote: post #7

US banks and creditors desperately need this yesterday.

That’s what we’ve seen with our customers. Some have only one or two COBOL developers left in some teams, and they are often the only people with the operational knowledge needed to keep these systems running. They are either past retirement or about to retire in the coming years.

Oh, great. Nobody left who knows the language + vibe coding + banking and financial transactions. What could possibly go wrong...? Good luck!

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#47

Post by cess11 »

cube00 wrote: post #40
dang wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've already been HN rate limited and have no desire to make that worse, so I wasn't sure if I should risk a reply Your account isn't rate limited. Are you talking about a different account? if not, what made you think it was?

It was this account, I only have the one. I got the "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." error last month when I hadn't made any more then a few replies, and not in quick succession. I got the error after writing out a detailed reply (which I lost as a result since the error is on posting not loading the form) so I couldn't have been fast enough to trigger a regular rate limit. I thought it was unusua…

I run into that all the time during periods of more intense posting, I just hit the back button or Shift-H for the same from Vimium to get back to the form with my text in it, and if I really want to post it I send it the next session I'm around.

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#48

Post by cess11 »

ofrzeta wrote: post #45
sharts wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run kubernetes on mainframes. They’re not as old/out of touch that most people think

Can you provide more info / examples on that?

Here's a new hot topic from IBM in 2024:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-hot-topics?topic=new-kuberne...

As a rule of thumb, if there's something in computing you've heard about, expect IBM to also have heard about it and made something like it for their machines. Sometimes they lag a bit but eventually they converge towards having their own of all things computational.

Re: Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL

#50

Post by le-mark »

sai18 wrote: post #44
le-mark wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Majority of the devs are over 60 and there's simply not enough new talent coming in to replace them. Yawn this tired old yarn, again. Mainframe development was offshored from the US decades ago. These retiring cobol programmers simply don’t exist in numbers that matter. The market could be to the companies doing the offshore work, but they’ve been throwing bodies at this problem for a long time, maybe there’s a mar…

Throwing bodies has been the primary way to approach mainframe modernization and a majority of them do end up failing ( https://softwaremodernizationservices.com/insights/mainframe... ). Now bringing in AI agents that are incredibly good at software engineering into the modernization lifecycle can completely change the landscape. That's the vision we're building towards at Hypercubic. Previously you might need 50 eng…

Failure at 1/5 the price is still failure.
Post reply on HN