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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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kreetx ◴[18 Jul 25 14:36 UTC] No.44605117[source]▶
I don't think LLMs are anything human language specific, so would they really shine here? I.e, COBOL and SQL may be great for humans who otherwise aren't used to programming languages, but LLMs have seen everything, and thus are able to know any (programming) language, not just ones which are English-like.
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1. the_af ◴[19 Jul 25 04:26 UTC] No.44612588[source]▶
I think it would shine because COBOL is very verbose and the programs written with it (batch jobs) very straightforward but also very boilerplate-rish and boring to write by hand, a situation with little risk and high reward to automate.