The terminal of the future

A terminal will be useful for about twenty more years, not 200. At that point AI agents will take care of low level monkey wrenching for us. It’s like talking about designing a slide rule for the next 200 years.

Got some news for you, there will be unix and cobol still running in 20 years from now. No amount of AI will be able to convince bank executives the risk conversion is worth it.

Whatever merit alternatives have, the reality is these make long, like very long migration arcs, these days you will have so much team churn, maintenance rabit holes and regular tech debt and feature requests that its fair enough to say any project that starts to move out of Mainframe tech will never see the finishing line.

You are better off maintaining what already works. Either way why do you want to migrate when things are just working fine as is?

Calculators replaced slide rules because they are predictable and reliable tools. LLM agents will never be that simply by the nature of how they work.

I am sure we'll have something better in 200 years.

And a lot of that COBOL will still be managed with ISPF over 3270 terminal connections.