An AI capable of delivering fully automated luxury gay space communism is more achievable than an AI capable of replacing legacy COBOL.
Not kidding.
Not kidding.
Reposted from
makena kelly
SCOOP: DOGE wants to rebuild SSA's codebase in months, risking benefits and system collapse, sources tell me.
The plan is to migrate all systems off COBOL quickly which would likely require the use of generative AI.
www.wired.com/story/doge-r...
The plan is to migrate all systems off COBOL quickly which would likely require the use of generative AI.
www.wired.com/story/doge-r...
Comments
Are they perfect? God no. But non-trivial to replace. They would have replaced them years ago if it were.
It's that they haven't internalized that the huge codebase is an accretion of undocumented business logic--or rather, the code is the documentation, and rewriting means capturing all that for reimplementation.
I've done several projects where we replaced large legacy codebases. You don't need to reimplement everything, but to know what you can drop, merge, or evolve, you need to at least know...
"Generative AI" will get you those two tables, "users" and "questions", and then the rest is still on you.
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Looking after ppl would be a bridge to far though..
But who are we kidding, they don’t have the discipline to do testing. Let alone actually contribute with new needs/requirements discovery, etc.