Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
fastcompany.com
Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#2The problem isn't that they don't know COBOL. The problem is they're not asking questions about things they don't understand. That's very dangerous in legacy code environments.
Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#3[deleted]
Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#4I tested it and it turns out LLMs can follow commands such as "Port the following Python code to COBOL", although it's certainly harder to validate the output is correct.
Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#5I tested it and it turns out LLMs can follow commands such as "Port the following Python code to COBOL", although it's certainly harder to validate the output is correct.
No need to check. It isn't.
Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#6I tested it and it turns out LLMs can follow commands such as "Port the following Python code to COBOL", although it's certainly harder to validate the output is correct.
You don't understand. Your COBOL code may be 99.99999% right and still cause millions of dollars to vanish :poof: in a flash.
If the DOGE team have this bright idea of getting an LLM to mess with the COBOL on mainframes there is going to be widespread chaos beyond human imagination.
Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#7The problem isn't that they don't know COBOL. The problem is they're not asking questions about things they don't understand. That's very dangerous in legacy code environments.
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Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#8I tested it and it turns out LLMs can follow commands such as "Port the following Python code to COBOL", although it's certainly harder to validate the output is correct.
You don't understand. Your COBOL code may be 99.99999% right and still cause millions of dollars to vanish :poof: in a flash. If the DOGE team have this bright idea of getting an LLM to mess with the COBOL on mainframes there is going to be widespread chaos beyond human imagination.
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Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#9The problem isn't that they don't know COBOL. The problem is they're not asking questions about things they don't understand. That's very dangerous in legacy code environments.
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>How many years do I need to wait for Twitter to collapse any moment now, because Musk fired all the "irreplaceable" people?
To be fair, usage has likely dropped commensurate with staffing!
>These government systems by necessity are not very complex
I don't believe this is correct. CMS has a bunch of their source code on their website. The COBOL parts are quite expansive and there is probably a whole lot more out there: https://www.cms.gov/PricerSourceCodeSoftware
Look, I have no issue with wanting to modernize government systems. An organization I used to idolize, the US Digital Service, did this as their full time gig... and most of them were just axed. I'm not sure a few 19 year olds are going to do better than this organization. It's hard work.
Re: Elon Musk's DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL
#10The problem isn't that they don't know COBOL. The problem is they're not asking questions about things they don't understand. That's very dangerous in legacy code environments.
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> These government systems by necessity are not very complex, because the hardware at the time did not have capacity for anything too complex.
This is possibly one of the most absurd takes I've read on HN in a while. I'm imagining someone trying to learn how a PC game programmed in Assembly works going 'how hard could it be, PCs in the 90s weren't that complex'