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.
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
The plan is to migrate all systems off COBOL quickly which would likely require the use of generative AI.
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
Comments
We can speak anonymously.
Signal: makenakelly.32
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
That report does not say "generative AI" in it anywhere.
This is simply reckless, and it doesn't have to happen.
If you're actually going to modernize starting from a low level, it can be justified.
in 1968 IBM hadn't finished CICS and our current account used the Halifax Transaction Manager and Assembler code basis
Our 70k mortgages in Java had a 11 hour batch window, Halifax's 18m current accounts had a 30m batch window...
I think there is plenty of instances of management not wanting to spend money on good updates as well, but if you're not going to do it right, don't do it.
Work intentionally, and things improve.
Like no you’re not, that hunk of metal has one job and is so perfectly dumb it will continue to do that one job long after your replacement’s replacement is replaced.
Are you sure you're not dead? Because if you are, that would solve a lot of problems for us here in the Department of Government Efficiency...
How do you trace a failure in GenAI code? There's no intentionality to it. No human knows how it is supposed to work aside from the inputs and outputs.
I'm not against the idea of modernization, but holy shit...
checks must go asap daily from now until then-if Not, no matter how much ‘efficiency’ claimed,it will have Failed-and failed so many-
?accountability
I look at my Vanguard accounts, I can tell the site has been worked on by Infosys or Tata Consulting Services and the previously elegant fluidly functional site is full of crazy jumps, inoperable functions, MS Power Apps which have known errors, not-even-coders without supervision
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJo-ulbIu8I
This is going to kill people and that's the point.
Which is the most likely result of these idiotic efforts, I'm afraid.
Testing needs to be done in one or more copies of the system to ensure it does exactly what it should before it's copied to the real system, because even a small problem could be catastrophic.
Putting together a comprehensive picture of WTF it does and how is no mean feat.
Because it's not in a drawer. They have BEEN working on replacing the COBOL systems for YEARS.
It will instantly fail. And since Elon does not use standard practices, the checks will stop almost immediately.
I'm an idiot
The doge folks don’t care if ssa fails. Its stability and the people it supports are less important than making money.
Could have had humans actually build a solution, but they want infrastructure for free, so they wait for someone else to do it. It's maddening.
So take a captive system and fuck it up and find out.
And people will die cause they have no money as a result.
They used AI on criminal sentencing until it got exposed as racist, and it's been used in red light cameras, license plate trackers. Some people objected, but most Americans just accepted it. 1/2
I wonder how many Americans understand the difference between using AI vs using AI to build a system? We really need some tech literacy outreach.
I don’t think I want to have any of Elmo’s folks fixing anything.
should the system move off of cobol to a wider used language? yes.
can it be done safely in months? no.
This will be a shit show of unbelievable proportions.
I saw a clip of Elon and his guys on FOX, they presented themselves as I expected. Unimpressive.
My parents/in-laws are on SSA and I'm hoping that they aren't disrupted, but I suspect they will be.
just not much more than that. Maybe with their hands being held by people who have actually seen some shit.
It's a death march.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJo-ulbIu8I
He has no idea what he does!
The important thing in the COBOL codebase is the programming which deals with 50? years of solving service needs
Brokerages like Vanguard, simpler than SSA try to "AI" their site, lots of failure over years
It is something that has been reliably worked out over decades of experience servicing accounts that are life & death important to millions of people
Musk not the 1st to imagine transitioning
He is known for 100% deadline failure
Being from NYC, I knew it had to be awful,
But... I am thinking of taking a train to St. Louis
I looked up St. Louis pizza
Being from NYC, I knew it had to be awful,
But... I am thinking of taking a train to St. Louis
10 PRINT "MORE MONEY FOR US FUCK YOU"
20 GOTO 10
In the meantime, time to learn COBOL. I’ll be retiring from a lifetime of enterprise software development in the next few years, but could end up with a second career helping unwind disasters like this.👵
Musk sees everything as a tech solution. LOL. Such a dummy.
He can be spiteful and vindictive.
Using generative AI to analyze and work with existing code bases is VERY new. There are few (zero?) public successes.
https://askflux.ai is working on this problem and Thoughtworks just published this:
https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/claude-code-codeconcise-experiment
I’ve been a project and program manager in IT since 1997 and this is literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen suggested.
If you know someone getting a check from SSA, prepare to help them. They WILL miss checks.
That adds so much time on development and testing.
These idiots are going to do a no bid, single source contract with a bunch of dogebros that will have to use GROK to even understand the basics of COBOL.
If you’re making a meal planning app for ADHD with web scraping for grocery prices? Way different than making sure retirement payments are on time, lights stay on, or planes can land.
Every point you mentioned is critical. To do this right will take much more than months.
Unfortunately, the point is to break it, not do it right. I hope someone is backing up the existing system right now.
Quote from my hubby, developer, business analyst and product owner.
because 1) Elon doesn’t understand COBOL and 2) Elon owns an AI model
It’s not just the language. Before you even think about code ask how existing system is documented. Are there usecases for _every_ single aspect of the system?
Data integrity / migration/ backup. Transaction integrity.
Look up "model collapse" to see why using generative AI on a COBOL base would be a bad, bad,
BAD IDEA
It's like a photocopy of a photocopy of a mimeograph.
If it were that easy it would have been decades ago by much smarter people.
“Fail fast. Fail often.” is not acceptable when it’s literally peoples’ livelihood on the line.
Too inexperienced and cocksure to even begin to know what it is they don’t know.
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/model-collapse
(yes, oxymoron, but damn, just add some christofascist evangelicals with immaculate conception)
Like it's not as if there were no huge DNA-defect & other sicko deficiencies among these psychopaths & sociopaths to begin with.
There's no "what would happen if?"
These shitheads shouldn't be anywhere near that system. This is JUST MORE proof that they're incompetent.
They just too stupid to be able to learn COBOL.
First rule of legacy money-handling systems: don't touch legacy money-handling systems.
It boogles my mind. I work at a large university and it took 2 years just to migrate from one LMS to another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation
Besides everything, of course.
Musk does not care about the possible damage he's going to do, and he's made that clear. It will likely be a disaster.
Musk needs to keep his hands off of SS, as well as everything else. He can shove the chainsaw up his ass.
You cannot trust AI to write correct code and performant code.
It is insane to suggest you don't need to read and understand the existing code to re-implement a system. Not unless you don't care if your new thing breaks a bunch of legacy use cases. See Amazon fucking up Comixology for example.
The base interface with the hardware is different. A mainframe is not equivalent to a server, they are distinctly different.
Will they be able to recover after they break it? Inquiring minds want to know.
Even the people missing their money will still believe it, we're a nation that is incapable of thinking.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240219910/Co-operative-bank-report-reveals-challenge-of-legacy-IT-replacement
To sell and to deny employment to everyone but sycophants.
America has become North Korea.
It's the COMPLETE lack of understanding of the scope of the project, with NO planning for its complexity. We're talking DECADES of patches to a system written in an archaic language!
Beyond the fact that generative AI is NOT up to this task!
What is the issue they're trying to fix? Because, honestly, it's probably cheaper and easier to just train a couple programmers in COBOL.
I'm only familiar with the COBOL based systems I've seen and the older people holding them together! The coding is pretty ugly sometimes.
It has never been successful in quickly migrating a large legacy system before, not to my knowledge. I doubt this is going to be the first successful test case
Months, what a joke, unless of course they just mean time. It will take time, decades of it.
Headline should be “DOGE plans to sabotage SSA IT.”
Be very careful.
You are already igniting the anger of 50,000,000 of your elders.
Make a mess of this and you and your Doge Master will learn the meaning of wrath and vengence.
"Act in the role of an 80 year old expert in COBOL who was part of the development team writing and supporting the SSA system"
If they start there it is guaranteed to go well.
Higher courts, stand your ground! This illegal alien is trying to disrupt our system!
example: it makes sense to ask ChatGPT to write code to replace fly by wire in a plane that is in the air IF your hoped for outcome is a crash that lets you tsk tsk at the tragic wreckage & sell automation of funeral services
It takes a level of self-awareness and humility that the DOGE squad is very obviously fundamentally lacking.
The level of destruction is going to be directly proportional to their arrogance.
It's fine to build a base but a human has to take it across the finish line.
You're the only ones holding on to this bullshit. It hurts your credibility.
https://burningbird.substack.com/p/social-security-why-look-for-facts
(As the untrained & unverified generative ai makes a dumpster fire)
The only people that would agree to be a part of DOGE and this timeline are most certainly desperate, delusional, incompetent or all the above.
Look at this article: COBOL code base in production hits 800+ BILLION lines...
https://www.thestack.technology/cobol-in-daily-use/
Quite apart from the fact that generative AI coding is... not even slightly up to this...
Who wants to be that they're planning to train the generative AI on SSA's COBOL and then use it on... SSA's COBOL.
(For people not into statistical learning — this doesn't work. At all.)
No, this is malicious.
By the time they are done, some of them may have exited puberty and might be less fucking stupid.
I wonder what expected error rate they are using?
And the process will obviously be weighted to prevent erroneous payments and not to avoid missing payments.
Going to be “Bank Run” numbers at Social Security offices including tons of disabled former law enforcement.
Hey maybe the new software scrambles everything on the screen, but, but you can still print!
holy shit what a waste
Americans will realize how important the gov and federal workers are
Joking 🤣
They will blame the government and support privatization and happily take less money
Most Americans are idiots
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-08-22-IBM-Unveils-watsonx-Generative-AI-Capabilities-to-Accelerate-Mainframe-Application-Modernization?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Need a really good plan to even start in on this. Glad I'm over here.
Their overconfidence & arrogance never surprises me.
https://www.cbtnuggets.com/blog/technology/programming/what-is-cobol-and-who-still-uses-it
We all should be very afraid! Because I agree with your valid points!
but I'd rather pound nails in my dick than tackle this project
SSA said, after a 2015 pilot-use of a Linux server, SSA would undertake a multi-year project to migrate away from, and ultimately retire, its proprietary mid-tier UNIX servers to more flexible Linux servers.
SSA maintains more than 60 million lines of COBOL today, along with millions more lines of other legacy programming language
They don't know yet that you can look both ways crossing the street and get hit by an airplane
Amazing what comes out (lose specs, untested edge cases and the like).
A reasonable amount of anxiety over what you DON'T know and CAN'T test is a REQUIREMENT to do this job adequately.
ex: at one time I would have been the person saying 'kill this bill, we can get more than it's been sliced down to' but in 2025 I'm older & I want to use the law to reduce harm
Weren't the checks arriving on time every month to whom they belonged?
It ain't broke, so don't fix it!
But if you just want to bomb the whole thing into oblivion, you might get there a lot faster.
That's probably why we couldn't find your request.
Maybe you are the fraud. Maybe you shouldn't be getting a check. I have some friends at the DOJ that would be happy to investigate.
Everyone else, including the “mother-in-law,’ would understand it just has to be done.
Arrogant incompetence presented as visionary innovation. It's almost certainly guaranteed to fail.
It's not too late to...
https://bsky.app/profile/derringerpax.bsky.social/post/3lagzhyekr42u
GOP CULT ATTEMPTING TO GIVE THE FELON PRESIDENT INFINITE POWER OVER CONSTITUTION
All Information (Except Text) for S.583 - Reorganizing Government Act of 2025
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/583/text
1/2
2/2
He stole the benefits of a man named Jeff Bingham just on Thursday. And that was not the first time Musk stole someone’s Social Security benefits, either.
NOT YOUR JOB, ELON.
We need a licensed, bonded, experienced contractor to do this job.
NOT someone who thinks Social Security is a “Ponzi Scheme” and thinks this benefit should be ended.
SS is a life preserver for millions of people: seniors, children, and the disabled.
This is a monumental task.
And let’s not forget, as is, the system works
What works in the private world does not work in government. This “move fast and break stuff” fundamentally undermines the stability of the nation and the wellbeing of all. So stupid