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Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java

(www.pcmag.com)
127 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 03 Dec 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ufmace ◴[03 Dec 23 17:53 UTC] No.38509082[source]▶
The article title is clickbaity, but the actual point is the proposal of using LLMs to translate large amounts of legacy COBOL systems to more modern languages like Java. Doesn't seem terribly useful to me. I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in Production.

But then all of this has been known for decades. There are plenty of well-known techniques for how to do all that. If they haven't actually done it by now, it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

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rubyfan ◴[03 Dec 23 20:02 UTC] No.38510231[source]▶
> If they haven't actually done it by now, it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

This. Further, it’s a failure to continue to disincentivize roles that will support or port this business critical logic to something else. I worked at a large insurer where they slowly laid off mainframe talent over the last decade. Those mainframe salaries were counter to the narrative they were promoting around cloud being the future. Unfortunately in their haste to create optics they failed to migrate any of the actual code or systems from mainframe to cloud.

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credit_guy ◴[03 Dec 23 20:39 UTC] No.38510542[source]▶
> it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

There are no absolute "management problems". Something that is a management problem when the effort required is 1000 man-years, may stop being so when it's only 100 man-days.

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1. rubyfan ◴[04 Dec 23 12:02 UTC] No.38516240[source]▶
I’m not convinced the proposed solution is that. This pitch has been around for a long time, before LLM it was some unnamed proprietary technology and after LLM it’ll be something new. The reality is this stuff is hard even when 80% can be automatically converted.