[HN Gopher] IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on...
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IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL
Author : gradus_ad
Score : 66 points
Date : 2026-02-23 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zerohedge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zerohedge.com)
| petcat wrote:
| Surprised IBM and Oracle have not started on their own frontier
| models. Or maybe they have?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| At the end of the title, you see this bit: (zerohedge.com) ?
|
| Click it.
| htrp wrote:
| Granite is not very good
|
| Oracle is trying (and mostly failing) at frontier model
| training
| htrp wrote:
| "After all, if Dario Amodei had bought puts on IBM, and the
| dozens of companies that have plunged more than double digits in
| recent weeks, he would have made billions, certainly enough to
| fund his company for months if not years. "
| piker wrote:
| Feels like a rip from Matt Levine who has been saying the same
| thing for a while now.
| sincerely wrote:
| It's not so original an idea that we need to be worrying
| about who came up with it, I think.
| mosura wrote:
| Next up:Epic and MUMPS
| levocardia wrote:
| Anthropic put out another blog post about modernizing/migrating
| away from COBOL several months ago IIRC, it is surprising that
| this was not priced in already
| ENGNR wrote:
| Banks remain with COBOL because it's unsexy and stable. And then
| they say... let's just YOLO some vibe code into the next release
| sight unseen! Logic checks out.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Banks remain with COBOL because they have a fuckton of COBOL
| code and 4 people can write it. There's nothing more to it.
|
| Now, 4 million people can write it.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I don't think learning how to write COBOL was ever a problem.
| Knowing that spaghetti codebase and how small changes in one
| place cause calamity all over the place is. Those 4 people's
| job is to avoid outages, not to write tons of code, or fix
| tons of bugs.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I would say more significantly, 4 million people can _read_
| it. The changes required for any given quarter are probably
| miniscule, but the tricky part is getting up to speed on all
| those legacy patterns and architectural decisions.
|
| A model being able to ingest the whole codebase (maybe even
| its VCS history!) and take you through it is almost certainly
| the most valuable part of all.
|
| Not to mention the inevitable "now one-shot port that bad boy
| to rust" discussion.
| happycube wrote:
| You also need "make no mistakes"
| Jare wrote:
| Run both systems side by side for 9 months. Banks have
| patience.
| SirFatty wrote:
| It's got to be a lot more than 4. Global Shop (ERP) is
| written in Visual COBOL.
| a456463 wrote:
| I would have you nnowhere near my production
| a4isms wrote:
| Or production for the bank with my savings.
| themafia wrote:
| They stick with COBOL because it runs well on the mainframe.
| The mainframe and sysplex architecture gives them an absurd
| level of stability and virtualization that I don't think the
| rest of the market has nearly caught up to yet. Plus having a
| powerful and rugged centralized controller for all of this is
| very useful in the banking business model.
| Betelbuddy wrote:
| This is the reason. IBM Mainframe business grew 60%. The
| modern mainframe is the best state of the art platform for
| computing, in both reliability and efficiency.
| ArmandoAP wrote:
| Relevant to Colombia's payment infra fragility: Bancolombia
| outage blocks transfers to Nequi/other banks since Feb 22 (IBM
| machine failed in maintenance). ~70% of national txns (100M+
| /6mo, 600K interbank/mo). Daily USD flows: $50M+ A la Mano +
| Nequi peaks $100M+. Single-vendor risk in billion-scale retail
| payments? Details:
| https://www.bloomberglinea.com/latinoamerica/colombia/caidas...
| chasd00 wrote:
| Step 1. sell your shares Step 2. freak out retail investors Step
| 3. buy the dip Step 4. back to Step 1.
|
| this has been going on all Feb.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| COBOL is the perfect language for LLMs because it looks just like
| the English text they were trained on to begin with.
| cromka wrote:
| It's quite the contrary, the less interpretative the language,
| the better. And no, LLMs were not trained on English to begin
| with. And they don't perform best in English.
| artifaxx wrote:
| Interesting, where do you think LLMs perform the best?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| SVGs that represent birds on foot powered conveyance
| devices.
| ordersofmag wrote:
| Please expand more on the idea that LLM's are not trained on
| English to begin with. Not sure what you mean by this as
| clearly many LLM's are trained on data that contains a lot of
| English. For instance GPT-1 seems to have been trained on a
| purely English corpus.
| keyle wrote:
| Context window required grows though.
| Insanity wrote:
| That's not how it works. Being trained a ton of human text
| doesn't mean you can complete the next token for a program that
| needs to be logically coherent.
|
| Imagine all your data is Reddit threads and now I ask you what
| follows "goto", how would Reddit help you?
|
| The opposite is likely true - there isn't a ton of publicly
| available cobol code compared to e.g React, so an LLM will
| degrade.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Blog post influencing this: https://claude.com/blog/how-ai-helps-
| break-cost-barrier-cobo...
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47127565)
| frogperson wrote:
| LOL, anyone who thinks an LLM is smart enough to untangle 50+
| years of cobol spaghetti has obviously never worked at a bank or
| insurance or railroad or.....
| llbbdd wrote:
| Off the shelf, sure. On the other hand, I wonder if domains
| that require the strictest rigor may have retained a high
| degree of good change documentation and tests that could be
| included in training.
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| What are you implying 5 years of experience as a Product
| technical delivery architect influencer and some basic web
| development skills don't transfer to writing critical software?
| dlev_pika wrote:
| Jesus Christ the comments on that Zero Hedge blog
| jibal wrote:
| The site is junk and the comments are racist.
| sincerely wrote:
| It's not even "Our product can write COBOL", it's "Our product
| can analyze your COBOL codebase and generate a plan for migrating
| to a new tech stack".
| K0balt wrote:
| Finally!!
|
| I'm porting my whole codebase to cobol!
|
| I write SAAS suites for archeological sites.
| ks2048 wrote:
| "Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every
| day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and
| government."
|
| That number sounds enormous. If the same code runs on 10,000
| ATMs, are they counting that 10,000 times?
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| No.
|
| Cobol is an extremely verbose programming language, and it was
| used in an era when the practice of programming was much less
| developed. Calls into libraries were often not used, and
| instead any re-used code was copied, essentially inlined by
| hand. (With all the obvious problems that caused.)
|
| The combination of automating complex processes, requiring
| embarrassing amounts of code to do simple things, re-use by
| copy and the fact that it was dominant in it's field for such a
| long time (4 decades!), the amount of COBOL code that exists
| out there is just staggering.
| snowhale wrote:
| the COBOL migration part is probably the least of IBM's moat tbh.
| what's sticky is that the actual risk of a migration is 5%
| technical and 95% organizational -- regulatory sign-offs, audit
| trails, test coverage for systems that haven't had tests written
| in 40 years. AI can generate the Rust/Java equivalent but it
| can't own the migration project. that's still IBM consulting's
| territory for a while.
| sakopov wrote:
| I think I've seen 2 initiatives to move off of AS/400 to a
| something else in my lifetime and neither one completed. One was
| at a bank another at an insurance company. Not to mention that a
| typical COBOL programmer is more interested in retiring than
| learning to vibe code. At this point I think the software stocks
| have reached peak panic and hysteria. There is just no rhyme or
| reason for sharp declines like this.
| Insanity wrote:
| Yeah it's exhausting. Part of me wants the bubble to pop but
| another part realizes a lot of my stock is now tied up in it
| lol
| layer8 wrote:
| It does seem like a good time to buy IBM stock.
| brianjlogan wrote:
| So curiously I wonder if it's not that Anthropic/Claude can do
| this magically. More like can individuals at IBM who are heavy
| hitters just leave and create their own company and effectively
| provide these services because AI gives them the productivity to
| do so?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This seems to make the classic mistake that everyone makes when
| they conflate two things as the same - programming and business
| logic/knowledge (and I'd also throw in complex systems knowledge
| there too).
|
| Often, understanding the code or modifying it is the easy part!
| I'm sure a decent amount of people on this website could master
| COBOL sufficiently to go through these systems to make changes to
| the code.
|
| However, if I understand from my own career enough, knowing _why_
| those things are there, how it all fits together in the much
| broader (and vast) system, and the historical context behind all
| of that, is what knowledge is being lost, not the ability to
| literally write or understand COBOL.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Sure yet admin vs engineering in terms of jobs ... one is now
| on the decline either slowly or quickly. Now it requires 1/4 to
| 1/2 of the engineers once employed in the profession. I dont
| see how that's a good thing for any economy.
| habinero wrote:
| I call it the "how hard could it be" fallacy.
| labrador wrote:
| > knowing why those things are there
|
| I'm pretty sure they're talking about converting COBOL to
| Python or Go and that is the benefit. That doesn't require
| knowing the architecture and system design. I'm not familiar
| with COBOL and COBOL systems so I could be wrong... but Python
| programmers who can then study the system are easy to find.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is fintech - I've not worked in banking specifically,
| but fintech (or fintech adjacent) most of my career, and from
| my POV these things can get insanely complicated in very
| unintuitive ways because the financial world is messy and
| complicated.
|
| I've never worked on COBOL systems specifically, but just
| going from my experience working on fintech problems in dense
| legacy stacks of various languages (java is common), that are
| extremely hard to understand at times, the language itself is
| rarely if ever the problem.
|
| "Just need to convert it to Go or Python" is kind of getting
| at the fallacy I am trying to describe. The language isn't
| the issue (IME). I do have my gripes about certain java
| frameworks, personally, but the system doesn't get any easier
| to understand from my POV as to simply rewrite it in another
| language.
|
| Even let's say it was this simple in the case of COBOL -
| these are often extremely critical systems that cannot afford
| to fail or be wrong very often, or at all, and have complex
| system mechanisms around that to make it so that even trying
| to migrate it to a new system/language would inevitably
| involve understanding of the system and architecture.
| ctoth wrote:
| > knowing why those things are there, how it all fits together
| in the much broader (and vast) system, and the historical
| context behind all of that, is what knowledge is being lost
|
| How big is your context window? How big is Claude's context
| window? Which one is likely to get bigger?
| re-thc wrote:
| RAM had been sold out so...
| vpribish wrote:
| zerohedge is absolute trash, do not look to it for information.
| jtrn wrote:
| Code is less and less the scares resource.... Good documentation
| is.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| This makes no sense. If IBM supposedly gets a significant amount
| of revenue from COBOL (a dubious proposition) then wouldn't this
| actually help them as COBOL programmers are getting rarer and
| rarer?
| xienze wrote:
| IBM makes a lot of money selling mainframes to companies that
| have COBOL codebases dating back to the 70s or earlier. The
| main reason said companies still buy mainframes to run said
| COBOL programs is because it's too risky to try to port them to
| more standardized, cheaper platforms. THEORETICALLY, a COBOL-
| proficient Claude could make it feasible to port these old
| COBOL codebases to something more modern that can run on bog-
| standard x86 servers, and it's unlikely customers would buy
| them from IBM.
|
| IF, and it's a big if, Claude make it possible to migrate off
| of COBOL, this would be a massive blow to IBM.
| barchar wrote:
| Plus it's not like there aren't cobol environments for more
| commodity hardware. Hell GCC just got a new cobol frontend last
| year!
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| I have a close relative at one of the biggest COBOL shops in the
| US, and something tells me we're about to find out how we take
| the stability of our payments infrastructure for granted.
|
| Their company no problem grinding older developers into
| retirement for the sake of padding their quarterly numbers, work-
| life balance is hell there. They refuse to try to compete with
| the modern developer market, senior level pay tops out around
| $125k. Despite what you may have read about experienced COBOL
| developer pay, know that is not the average experience. The
| talent pool was not replenished because they did not want to pay,
| overseas contracting firms also stopped training COBOL developers
| because their contractors could earn more building modern infra
| on AWS, so now they're between a rock and a hard place.
|
| I have little doubt that we are going to see a massive payments
| infra failure as a result of this. Not because the AI is
| inherently bad, but because the promises of the tech combined
| with terrible management practices will create the perfect
| conditions for a catastrophe.
| asciii wrote:
| > how we take the stability of our payments infrastructure for
| granted.
|
| I was about to comment we should all closely watch those bank
| statements and balances...
|
| While I'm OK with the use of AI to understand the COBOL
| codebase, I understand it's a single prompt away from
| transformation and production. Just one executive approval away
| ha.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| What's so difficult about COBOL anyway? How come in these
| conversations there's never any examples?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| In the last month:
|
| Feb 13: _IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits
| of AI adoption_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009327
|
| Jan 28: _IBM Mainframe Business Jumps 67%_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46802376
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(page generated 2026-02-23 23:01 UTC)