Tim BrayFeb 24

IBM crashes because we’re gonna YOLO a replacement for banking and credit-card back-ends, replacing billions of lines of COBOL with vibe code. Uh…

https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/ibm-crashes-11-as-anthropic-threatens-cobol-empire

IBM Crashes 11% as Anthropic Threatens COBOL Empire

Anthropic's AI disrupts IBM's mainframe business, sending shares down 11% on threat

Show threadFranklin Delano Stallone

@timbray I asked it to write me a function in Cobol to get the contents of a URL. It just shells out to curl to do the real work.

I don't know Cobol and it might work but I'm guessing that's not the correct solution. I can see if you search google there is at least one message board comment where someone admits to not knowing much but suggest calling wget or curl. I think the old folks writing Cobol are going to be fine.

Feb 24 at 10:54pmWeb
Show threadtuban_muzuruFeb 25

@fds @timbray

I was teaching novice coders Java and lost count at 70. Teaching people to code is not hard. Teaching people to care about the users, care about quality, that's harder.

Show thread0px autoFeb 25

@fds @timbray I had COBOL as part of my curriculum. Granted, getting information from an external webbased end-point wast not yet 'the new thing', it was getting closer by the day.

The way I would solve this to do the fetching in parallell. Have a cron+curl job fetch the data at regular intervals, do any pre-processing on the data to make it more palatable to COBOL, throw in a freshness indicator, and then suck into the actual application the way you would do with other input files.