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Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

234 points _false | 1 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

COBOL legacy systems in finance and government are somewhat of a meme. However, I've never actually met a single person who's day job is to maintain one. I'd be curious to learn what systems are you working on?
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42lux ◴[18 Jul 25 13:31 UTC] No.44604467[source]▶
Bank.
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a3w ◴[18 Jul 25 13:40 UTC] No.44604541[source]▶
Can LLMs do Cobol?
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the_af ◴[18 Jul 25 14:27 UTC] No.44604994[source]▶
> Can LLMs do Cobol?

I imagine it's the one place where LLMs would absolutely shine. COBOL jobs are usually very verbose, lots of boilerplate, but what they do is mostly very straightforward batch processing. It's ripe for automation with LLMs.

The flip side is that banks are usually very conservative about technology (for good reason).

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accrual ◴[18 Jul 25 14:44 UTC] No.44605212{3}[source]▶
IMO the ideal path to working on COBOL without having decades of experience would be to spend a few days groking the syntax and writing toy programs for practice, then collaborate with a large LLM to understand the current code and gradually make changes.
replies(1): >>44605639 #
1. macintux ◴[18 Jul 25 15:17 UTC] No.44605639{4}[source]▶
Have you worked with COBOL? My understanding is that the language itself isn't the real problem. Mainframes, control languages: everything around COBOL is very different from most Windows/UNIX people have experienced.