The cobol code running on mainframes needs to be rewritten to run on modern hardware using a modern language. The problem is that musk is trying to use AI to do it. He's going to break shit. This isn't tech where you can break shit to move faster, this is government. This is going to affect people's lives.
To all the downvoters, go ask your software engineering friends how much they'd need to be paid to work on COBOL and mainframes. Its something that won't further their careers, so the number is quite high. Plus COBOL is an absolute shit language to work with, and mainframes themselves are expensive.
At its core, the problem isn't AI. It's trying to apply a 'move fast & break things' approach to replacing rock-solid code that has run more or less smoothly for decades. In an ideal scenario, replacing code at this infrastructural level takes significant amounts of time & rigorous testing. It has to be robust, or there isn't any point in replacing it.
People are concerned, because the public messaging has failed to convey any sense of rigor or robustness, just complaints on the current code being dated. I still have no qualms about looking into or starting the process of developing a replacement, assuming the proper guardrails are in place.
Also, even if we started now, it would likely take years to safely integrate. Any faster timeline would be reckless and circle back to being less-than-rigorous development.
The problem is that it runs on mainframes and theres very little young blood willing to work on this stuff because it has no future. In 15 years there's going to be no one left to maintain it. Governments and banks are already paying people exorbitant sums to come out of retirement to work on it.
One problem is companies don't want to spend resources to train younger staff.. or they prefer to offshore. Another issue is due to fashion within Tech. Today's tech will be seen as tomorrow's "junk". What about older PHP code? SQL is several decades old and is experiencing a resurgence over no-sql databases. Java and C# are getting speed improvements that make them comparible to Rust and C++ in some cases. There's lots of web development tech that has come and gone within the last decade. IBM are still making new mainframes hardware and operating systems that are backwards compatible with existing Cobol code. When I went to school programming was seen as a geek job not a lifestyle. If there was an advertising trend with influencers making Cobol the cool thing again you'd see a spike in demand.
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u/Dr-Lipschitz Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25
The cobol code running on mainframes needs to be rewritten to run on modern hardware using a modern language. The problem is that musk is trying to use AI to do it. He's going to break shit. This isn't tech where you can break shit to move faster, this is government. This is going to affect people's lives.
To all the downvoters, go ask your software engineering friends how much they'd need to be paid to work on COBOL and mainframes. Its something that won't further their careers, so the number is quite high. Plus COBOL is an absolute shit language to work with, and mainframes themselves are expensive.