Ancient language is still the bread-and-butter of mainframe systems
Listen. I escaped learning COBOL by being born in the 1980s. However, since I’m so fucking old now, I understand that you DO NOT FIRE THE WIZARD. The Wizard, the one who knows the incantations because they were there when the spells were written? Irreplaceable. Don’t fuck with them. Pay them whatever they demand and do not ask questions.
If you want to depreciate the Wizard, you cannot use their spells. You must create your own, and you better do it in a language that people under 40 can comprehend. And they have to be as bulletproof as the Wizard’s spells. Good luck getting an LLM to do that. Good luck getting a human to do that.
It’s not hard to learn COBOL. However, the intricacies of the system that The Wizard maintains is another matter altogether.
I would argue that learning those intricaties is a part of learning the language. Otherwise you just know the syntax, somewhat like a LLM.
Warhammer 40K’s concept of Tech-priests is pretty close to the mark.
Anthropic has announced COBOL-specific functionality for its Claude AI bot, and IBM’s investors responded with a resounding 13% drop in stock prices.
IBM’s investors really have no clue what COBOL is or why it’s still in relevant, do they?
Yeah give me an hour or two with the documentation and I could write COBOL, look out IBM stocks! Will it be elegant or even coherent COBOL? No. Will it at least not contain heaps of in-built time bombs in the form of bugs and security flaws? Also no, but I could write it. As the other commenter said, fuck with the COBOL wizards at your own peril.
Yeah all I’m hearing is “IBM stock goes on sale”
The kind of code that is still in cobol is so mission critical that it hasn’t been able to be rewritten by middling managers that want to make a name for themselves. It’s the kind of code ai is least qualified to write.
An AI company makes a wild promise, stocks go nuts, we find out the company was misleading us… Repeat ad nauseum.
Anthropic is gonna fund themselves by shorting stocks and then announcing their AI now does something that company does.
If anyone legitimately thinks that this LLM was funded to write successfully in that language instead of just enough to affect the stocks, etc., they’re simply not paying attention.
This is American capitalism killing American capitalism in real-time, the dumbest way possible.
The buried lede is that it can apparently time travel to write code 67 years in the past /s
(as with others, I don’t see this being trusted by anyone sane… so watch the world burn it shall be)
Weird that this let’s the stock drop since IBM has its own AI that can convert COBOL to Java(?).
And while the drop is big, also look at the price last year. It is around the same price as it was in August 2025.
Haven’t we figured out quantum computing? Surely lithography machines can now be liquidated.
How did they send it back in time 67 years?
