11 ms·

Doge Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months

123 points by danso 2y ago

techpineapple 2y ago
Did Twitter ever talk about finishing the rewrite they talked about doing early on?
- ndegruchy 2y ago
  They're still gathering 'everything' so they can be the 'everything' app like Papa Musk wanted.
- ilikecakeandpie 2y ago
  Does anyone actually finish their rewrite?
  - a3w 2y ago
    "one does not simply rewrite vim" is prior evidence to suggest: no, usually you brake of a rewrite unless you have a very good reason and made much better choices the second time around.
  - breakingrules3 2y ago
    [dead]
tocs3 2y ago
I am a care taker for an elderly parent. This worries me some. What sort of things should I get together if we need to reapply or other documents would we need to show that she has been receiving SSA payments (for 40 years of work)?
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Grab their social security statement [1], payment history/schedule [2], and keep the documents mentioned here [3] on hand and ready. [1] https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/statement.html https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/statement.html [2] https://www.ssa.gov/manage-benefits/view-benefit-payment-schedule https://www.ssa.gov/manage-benefits/view-benefit-payment-sch... [3] https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/applying5.html https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/applying5.ht...
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    Thanks!
  - tocs3 2y ago
    Thank you.
techpineapple 2y ago
Do 10x engineers stack? So if you have 10 10x engineers is that 100x or is it 100,000,000,000x?
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  With AI you extend into a complex plane of effectiveness
  - a3w 2y ago
    Up to 16k tokens. Or a million tokens of a code base. After that, effiency goes down to... zero-ish?
  - adrianmonk 2y ago
    Yes, imaginary effectiveness seems like an accurate description.
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      Not effective, not ineffective, but rotated 90º off the plane of effectiveness. Kind of like "not even wrong".
- mentalgear 2y ago
  They certainly stack, how else would you get to Mars other than with a space-elevator-type-ladder of 10x engineers. Certainly not those failing brittle rockets.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    That's not fair. Only about half of the new ones have blown up.
- tootie 2y ago
  What's the old saw? Nine women can't make a baby in one month?
_fat_santa 2y ago
https://archive.is/UvOO7 https://archive.is/UvOO7
hiddencost 2y ago
Now is a great time to download your payment history from SSA.gov
- jppope 2y ago
  how would one go about doing this?
  - daveguy 2y ago
    Post from elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505659#43506099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505659#43506099
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    Login to https://www.ssa.gov/ https://www.ssa.gov/ and click the "Your Social Security Statement" link at the top of your homepage to download a PDF or XML file of your earnings by year and total payments to SS and Medicare.
    - tzs 2y ago
      I'd say download both the PDF and the XML. The PDF is easier to read, but the XML has more information. In particular the XML shows earnings for every year. The PDF shows earnings for several recent years, and then from groups of years before that. I don't know if it is the same groupings for everyone but mine is grouping 1966-1980, 1981-1990, 1991-2000, 2001-2005, then the individual years up to 2024.
      - joshstrange 2y ago
        This 100%, that's what I did. I should have said "and", thank you for calling that out!
mentalgear 2y ago
I'm smelling another hyperloop ...
codeduck 2y ago
Tell me you're an inexperienced developer without telling me you're an inexperienced developer.
jareds 2y ago
As someone who used to work for a Mainframe software vendor I'm tired of COBOL being considered "legacy" and bad. I didn't do much COBOL programming, but IBM is still releasing new compilers and new versions of z/OS for the Mainframe. Just because a language is old doesn't mean it's useless and worth rewriting. Instead of having COBOL be the boogeyman explain what the issues are. Is the system stuck on old COBOL versions do to lack of funding for upgrades, incompetence when it comes to long term maintenance plans, technical issues that make it impossible to move forward with new COBOL versions and would require a rewrite, etc. Are we going to see stories like this in 20 years about some company thinking they should rewrite the Linux Kernel in some new language and throw away all the C code that's been running for decades?
- a3w 2y ago
  Isn't the hard part of programming the requirements engineering and support after the initial release to customers? Which of the unpaid 60+ workhours/week youths that Elon is sending in will stay on the project after shipping 1.0 ?
  - techpineapple 2y ago
    Yeah, I wonder how much tooling their is around the existing app and api's. I remember being on this team managing users in this kinda archaic way using scripts, but the scripts we're really effective, so someone came in and rewrote the whole thing to use LDAP, and like sure it was technically the right choice, but it added like 6 hours per week of overhead because the tooling wasn't there, and, there were no real described tangible benefits other than "lol, bash scripts"
- mattlondon 2y ago
  Might be more prosaic - could just be hard to find COBOL engineers, and the ones they do find might want extortionate rates. Rewriting in something where engineers are cheaper and that can use commodity/cloud servers probably looks quite good on paper Vs paying IBM in blood.
  - 2y ago
ForHackernews 2y ago
Grok, make a node.js program to administer and oversee hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to millions of retirees. VERY IMPORTANT: No fraud or DEI.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > hundreds of millions Millions of millions, even. "The federal government spent $1.35 trillion on Social Security in fiscal year 2023."[0] [0] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-social-security-is-it-sustainable/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-...
jmclnx 2y ago
hahahaha What can go wrong and with the inspection service all fired, who will check for backdoors Again these people need to go, and as others said, save everything you have from SSA on paper and if you can PDFs.
a3w 2y ago
TIL US and A has SSA. *had. Doge will make short work of it.
jpease 2y ago
Years are made of months.
- kccoder 2y ago
  Someone once asked me how long it would be before I arrived to a meeting (wasn't late) and I told them it could be measured in nanoseconds. Same energy.
piva00 2y ago
Not really surprised, it's the usual mistake of any novice engineer, thinking that rewriting a system they don't like is going to solve all the issues they imagine. With the teenagers involved in DOGE under Musk it's just going to be hilarious when they inevitably fail. They just never had the experience to actually go through a complete rewrite of something that's been alive for decades... And never bothered to read "The Mythical Man-Month" because of course they are ninja rockstars 100x developers, and lessons from history and experience don't apply to them. Really sad that their mess will do very real harm to lots of people who depend on this system working...
- wormlord 2y ago
  I don't think this is a case of "Second System Syndrome" I think this is an instance of shock therapy being applied at home. When they fail they can blame woke DEI and just tell everyone they are increasing the limit on 401(k) and IRA contributions so who even needs SS anyways?
- nelblu 2y ago
  > it's just going to be hilarious when they inevitably fail. I won't be surprised if the "failure" is then twisted as the "success". I see tech projects basking in their success when in reality they just make things harder for everyone. In this specific case, let's see what could go wrong? Someone doesn't get paid their social security — but that's not a bug that's a feature. Govt money saved :).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bananapub 2y ago
obviously the entire thing is horrific, but the complete fucking malice of the senior people, starting at trump, who act is if nothing in the world is hard or complicated, and all they have to do is be loud massive cunts and things will work out their (personal, of course - none of them give a fuck about others or indeed "America") way is just absolute poison that will destroy America. in this particular case, we've actually already seen what happens - "Xtreme Programming" was birthed from the - failed - attempt to re-write the Chrysler payroll system in Smalltalk in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens... edit: and that was run by Kent Beck, not the National Union of Racist CS Undergrads that Musk exclusively hires from
KaiserPro 2y ago
The old "The place is clean, why do I need cleaners" line. I mean, there is a chance that this might work. But I strongly doubt that it would. Given Musk's history of re-writes and deadlines, I suspect that actually its not going to happen. But on the flip side, if you don't care about complying with the law or caring about users, its probably possible. Don't get me wrong, the SSA needs some innovation, but innovation, not revolution.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > I mean, there is a chance that this might work. There really isn't.
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    I was being "generous" so that people don't instantly write off the rest of my post, should they be ideologically opposed to seeing what a massive massive risk DOGE pose by fucking with this stuff.
afavour 2y ago
So head-smackingly stupid. But also exactly what you’d expect from a group of inexperienced young developers. What are the odds we'll end up with an 85% AI generated NextJS-powered app that melts down the second it's implemented?
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
If they screw this up the litigation could be the largest of all time.
- codeduck 2y ago
  I like your optimism.
- wraaath 2y ago
  While simultaneously causing one of the biggest mass casualty events in what was once the United states.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  I honestly think their strategy at this point might be to incur so incredibly much in very-real damages on a variety of fronts that the courts are left with the choice of either letting them get away with most of it (so, most folks aren't compensated for the harm they suffered) or forcing the US into abrupt bankruptcy (same outcome for the harmed, but also the US enters a severe depression instantly).
- kccoder 2y ago
  WHEN they screw this up any litigation will be a "witch hunt" and they'll simply refuse to pay any settlement awarded, assuming they allow it to get that far.
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  I think it’s a centrist position to expect DOGE will need a bailout.
ck2 2y ago
They will most certainly just have a LLM "try" to write it Then put it live in alpha Screw up millions of people Everyone is a beta-tester with Musk, no matter how dangerous to the product And didn't just 21 out of 50 "DOGE" employees quit in protest? https://www.npr.org/2025/02/25/nx-s1-5308095/doge-staff-resignations-elon-musk https://www.npr.org/2025/02/25/nx-s1-5308095/doge-staff-resi... Is he going to outsource this to India with data access? Musk "special hire" status ends June 1st, good luck getting it done by then or maybe this is the excuse he wants to keep going in continued violation of law
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Those weren't Musk's edgelord "DOGE" children, they were people on the highly-effective Obama-created digital tiger team USDS, which team Trump killed and then reanimated as a DOGE-zombie, to avoid having to ask Congress to create a DOGE bureau for him. US "DOGE" Service, instead of Digital, and yes that really is what they changed it to in the EO that did this, I'm not making it up, it was that stupid. > Musk "special hire" status ends June 1st, good luck getting it done by then or maybe this is the excuse he wants to keep going in continued violation of law Oh and last I checked they were claiming he's only working one day a week, to stretch this out effectively indefinitely. They'll probably get away with it.
light_hue_1 2y ago
Everything is easy when you don't understand it. What can an accounting system possibly do? Keep track of people, how much they're eligible for, and when you paid them last. DONE. > SSA maintains more than 60 million lines of COBOL today, along with millions more lines of other legacy programming languages. Months?! I hope they mean days. With ChatGPT and AWS, they'll be rolling! All of those millions of lines of code are clearly doing nothing useful.
damnitbuilds 2y ago
[flagged]
- sundaeofshock 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - damnitbuilds 2y ago
    [flagged]
- troyvit 2y ago
  You can assume that if you like. I've downloaded my stuff and am hoping that'll be enough.
  - sundaeofshock 2y ago
    I’m worried it won’t be. If it comes to that, what’s to prevent them from saying I forged it all?
    - troyvit 2y ago
      That is a very good point. All I have is a few PDFs and some xml to make it feel official.
dfilppi 2y ago
[dead]
kilpikaarna 2y ago
> Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. It doesn’t include a date type, so dates are often coded to a specific reference point—May 20, 1875, the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre. I thought this was wishful thinking / already deboonked?
- Volundr 2y ago
  > That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. This part has if you trust Elon as a source. He shared some graphs where there was no spike at 150, and people older than 150. If you trust Elon on this is really up to the reader, but it's a peeve of mine that sources keep reporting the COBOL epoch thing, which was always just a (plausible) theory as fact. > Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. This part hasn't. These 150 year olds are simply people whose death hasn't been recorded. They aren't collecting Social Security. In fact social security automatically stops at 115, and the number of Social Security recipients over 100 is within expectations [1]. This if course doesn't not mean there are zero deab people still receiving checks. With any system this size some fraud will exist, the question is how much, and how much does it cost to chase down. The issue with unrecorded deaths for people over 100 has been known since at least 2015 [2]. In short it hasn't been fixed due to the cost, combined with the risk of incorrectly marking someone dead, which can seriously fuck up your life, not just social security. This whole bruhaha could have been avoided if someone did a 5-minute Google search before Elon/Trump started their theatrics. [1] https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/people-over-100-social-security/ https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/people-ove... [2] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    It's not like nobody's ever looked into fraud and error rates in social programs. It's consistently pretty damn low, and when problems have been found, they've usually been addressed. People think these are full of fraud for the same reason they think foreign aid is some insane double-digit percentage of the budget: because Republicans shove messaging at them through dedicated propaganda outlets literally 24/7 complaining about these things, and have done this for decades, and folks don't bother to check.
biophysboy 2y ago
As somebody that has worked at the CDC and now works for the NIH, the thing that enrages me about all of this is the gov desperately needs more efficiency. With hiring, compliance, grants, etc. Its very telling that I have heard nothing about the rube goldberg usajobs application system from DOGE. Instead, we are getting a stupid made-for-TV efficiency, where the leaders refuse to understand technical concepts as braindead simple as a reference date.
- techpineapple 2y ago
  I think it's remarkable, that if you look at like immigration, they really play up the emotional aspects of what they're doing, because they're fundamentally not as competent at deportations. Similar to this, they don't have any answers of how to make it really efficient because it's "hard" so instead we get a twitter feed of imagined savings.
roxolotl 2y ago
It never fails to amaze me how little we learn from the past. I wish I knew if it was unique to software development or all industries suffer from this level of hubris. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
- nine_k 2y ago
  I think Joel is a bit extremist here. IIRC EBay rewrote their backend three times. It was not because the previous version was wrong, but because they were growing and changing, so a new backend was needed anyway to tackle that. They were and are doing fine. Twitter rewrote their codebase from Ruby on Rails (the endless source of fail whales) to a completely different platform, again due to the huge growth. Technology-wise, they are doing pretty fine. Facebook rewrote Messenger from a very thick and complex client architecture to an outrageously lightweight and flexible architecture based on eventual consistency / roughly-CRDT approach. FB Messenger is doing very fine. Never rewrite your codebase without a really good reason. Big wins in performance, maintainability, and ease of development may be good reasons, depending on your situation.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    Rewriting a backend is easier, because you can use a Strangler Fig[0] pattern to replace it bit by bit. The customers don't even have to notice. With a browser you really can't do that, because you can't force users to update and then you'd have a bunch of semi-working Frankenstein monsters in the wild. A full rewrite and release is the only option. [0] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html
- hnthrow90348765 2y ago
  Well, it's Elon and DOGE, so you can't exactly start with assuming it's made in good faith and they simply haven't learned
dzonga 2y ago
COBOL / ADA etc are very old languages but it doesn't mean they're bad languages. the only major 'risk' I can think of about them is talent pipeline. DOGE wants to rewrite in a few months using Java lol. If it was Ruby maybe like MAYBe.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Can't say about Cobol, but Ada is actively developed, actively used, and has one of the best provable correctness toolsets/extensions in the industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    Cobol also has a recent standard update (2023). It's still not popular outside of its niche, but the people using it aren't just sticking with ancient versions (though they also do that).
slantedview 2y ago
This plan is just another way, like firing workers, to break Social Security, something that the wealthy have wanted to do for decades.
- 9283409232 2y ago
  This definitely is going to break SSA. Republican leadership has already been publicly saying "only fraudsters will complain about a late social security payment." They know this will be a disaster.
nineplay 2y ago
I had lunch this week with some former coworkers. When I'd started working with them it was on the 20 year old C++ engine that ran everything. Even at that time there was large team 'rewriting' it in Java. That team was dissolved about 2 years later. During the course of my employment two more large teams were spun up to do a rewrite and then came crashing down after a year or two. I hadn't seen my coworkers for about 7 years. Naturally they were still working on the C++ code. Naturally they'd seen two more rewrite teams come and go while I'd been gone. I'm not sure why I'm bringing this up......
- iKlsR 2y ago
  Isn't it customary for new hires or teams to drop into a legacy codebase and within weeks propose a rewrite.
  - akmarinov 2y ago
    Yeah but now the AI can do it! /s
  - palmotea 2y ago
    > Isn't it customary for new hires or teams to drop into a legacy codebase and within weeks propose a rewrite. And if they're actually serious and not just venting, it's also customary calibrate downward how much you trust their judgements.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Yes but did the subject matter experts have the kind of trust/working relationship those at the SSA have with DOGE? That should smooth out this project.
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  In medium-sized companies, I learned not to represent anything as rewriting. Some projects were massively reshaped, sure.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 2y ago
What is it with that guy and unnecessary and inappropriate rewrites?
- disqard 2y ago
  It is a tech-centric version of "I alone can fix it".
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Months is a long time when you could just have an LLM spin up the rewrite for you in weeks! /s
thiht 2y ago
They’ll fail. I worked on a successful rewrite of a 25 years old Perl codebase. We did it because we had a strong understanding of the business, of the existing codebase, and were not afraid to maintain both in parallel. It took us years to migrate most of it blocks by blocks (some parts are still in Perl and likely won’t ever be migrated for various reasons) because a rewrite is not just converting some code, it’s an opportunity to rethink the whole architecture and responsibilities. Doing a rewrite is doable and might be suitable, but I guarantee no one there has any idea what they’re doing. They wouldn’t talk of "months" otherwise. 60 million lines is a 5-10 years rewrite, realistically.
emorning3 2y ago
hmmmm, does the SSA have a good automated test suite? If so then maybe it's ripe for conversion by LLM.
croes 2y ago
Completely rewriting a running system isn’t efficient
yongjik 2y ago
> ... the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits. People can tolerate injustice to others, but they won't tolerate late checks. If DOGE follows through, I think it will break Republican support in a scale even larger than threatening Canada or sending people to El Salvadorean prison. We're certainly living in "interesting" times ...
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Nah, the controlled media ecosystem (THAT THEY OPT INTO) and controlled narrative is too strong. They will absolutely suffer and starve and die before admitting that they were tricked or that maybe the democrats aren't the problem. The same people who are freaking out about the deficit and insisted we couldn't send $100 billion worth of scrap hardware to Ukraine are having zero problems eating up this admin blowing up people in the desert again and were perfectly willing to vote for Bush Jr's second term after it was obvious the middle east wars were outright fraudulent and illegal, while calling you an unpatriotic anti-american asshole for daring to criticize him. They will absolutely, unflinchingly, uncritically buy "It's the democrats fault" for the reason they can't afford rent.
  - yongjik 2y ago
    I've seen people saying Trump's floor is at 30-40%, which is depressingly high, but there are the rest who still voted Trump last year - generally low-information voters who don't watch news, aren't interested in all the talks of "democracy at danger," and voted Trump because of gas price or whatever. If these people get angry at Trump, that means trouble for Republicans. And "where's my check?" is just that kind of thing that could make these people really angry.
- johntitorjr 2y ago
  [dead]
palmotea 2y ago
It's surprising to me how willing some people are to do the equivalent of yelling "I am stupid and have no idea what I'm doing," to a large public audience. This is a reminder to all you Americans to create a Social Security account and print out your statement.
Aloisius 2y ago
IBM has been working on transpiling COBOL to Java for ages now, but it's not anywhere near perfect. I believe the USAF converted a million+ line COBOL codebase using it, but it still took a couple years.
skc 2y ago
I've seen too many people think this move will be a total disaster. I think it'll be a very bumpy ride but ultimately the team will succeed. Besides "liberal sabotage" is a ready made retort for any mishaps along the way.
- Gud 2y ago
  It will obviously be a disaster. Do you honestly believe it’s possible to rebuild ANY code base with millions of lines of code, to another language in MONTHS? It won’t be a ”bumpy road”. It will be a total failure.
  - skc 2y ago
    I believe there is certainly some hubris involved in their projected timeline but I think at least part of that is due to a belief that we have much, much better tooling today than was available to teams that attempted this sort of thing back in the day.
    - Gud 2y ago
      ”Some hubris”. Ok, let’s disagree to disagree.
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  I will loudly point out that the USAF contracted to replace COBOL with Java, attaining 90% reduction in TCO. It’s time for a friendly competition.
tibbydudeza 2y ago
It is the plan - no SSA cheques are cut and then they blame the "system" is offline. Brilliant !!!!
andyjohnson0 2y ago
https://archive.ph/WIsni https://archive.ph/WIsni
andyjohnson0 2y ago
Their timescales are clearly extremely unrealistic, but I don't understand the motivation for doing this at all. > “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months, then their way is the right way, and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist I'm struggling to believe that this is the real motivation. But what is it? Speculation: they don't know how to backdoor the legacy codebase/platform so they first need to transform it into something they can more easily subvert?
throw0101b 2y ago
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this: the hard part in replacing/updating government system is not the coding part. The hard part is understanding the policies that have been changed and modified over the decades which is reflected in the code's logic. See "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software" (Jun 2023): > There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-what-happens-when-governments-build-software/id1056200096?i=1000616611521 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-what-happens-w... * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-12/why-governments-struggle-to-build-software-and-computer-systems https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-12/why-gover... One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge. Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem": * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217 Copy-paste from: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078946
Graa 2y ago
Last year I had the privilege to learn about the IBM mainframe, and the mainframers converted me. It is one of the most advanced systems I have ever seen. IBM solved most cloud-issues 30 years ago, and the backwards compatibility is insane. Everyone is worried about 'code from the eighties' still running, but this just proves that the system is reliable. And in this datacenter (that I was learning about) the mainframe did 80% of calculations while only using 8% of the datacenter's power, because the machine is so terrifyingly efficient. This is not just about converting COBOL code. This is about converting the JCL (batch processing) jobs to whatever cool real-time processing solution the new architecture is going to have, and about translating the security boundaries from RACF to new security controls. Using AI to 'convert' it might prove difficult, because I don't think we have the datasets to train an AI to do this properly.

123 points by danso 2y ago

techpineapple 2y ago

Did Twitter ever talk about finishing the rewrite they talked about doing early on?

ndegruchy 2y ago
They're still gathering 'everything' so they can be the 'everything' app like Papa Musk wanted.
ilikecakeandpie 2y ago
Does anyone actually finish their rewrite?
- a3w 2y ago
  "one does not simply rewrite vim" is prior evidence to suggest: no, usually you brake of a rewrite unless you have a very good reason and made much better choices the second time around.
- breakingrules3 2y ago
  [dead]

tocs3 2y ago

I am a care taker for an elderly parent. This worries me some. What sort of things should I get together if we need to reapply or other documents would we need to show that she has been receiving SSA payments (for 40 years of work)?

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Grab their social security statement [1], payment history/schedule [2], and keep the documents mentioned here [3] on hand and ready. [1] https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/statement.html https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/statement.html [2] https://www.ssa.gov/manage-benefits/view-benefit-payment-schedule https://www.ssa.gov/manage-benefits/view-benefit-payment-sch... [3] https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/applying5.html https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/applying5.ht...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Thanks!
- tocs3 2y ago
  Thank you.

techpineapple 2y ago

Do 10x engineers stack? So if you have 10 10x engineers is that 100x or is it 100,000,000,000x?

jncfhnb 2y ago
With AI you extend into a complex plane of effectiveness
- a3w 2y ago
  Up to 16k tokens. Or a million tokens of a code base. After that, effiency goes down to... zero-ish?
- adrianmonk 2y ago
  Yes, imaginary effectiveness seems like an accurate description.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    Not effective, not ineffective, but rotated 90º off the plane of effectiveness. Kind of like "not even wrong".
mentalgear 2y ago
They certainly stack, how else would you get to Mars other than with a space-elevator-type-ladder of 10x engineers. Certainly not those failing brittle rockets.
- daveguy 2y ago
  That's not fair. Only about half of the new ones have blown up.
tootie 2y ago
What's the old saw? Nine women can't make a baby in one month?

_fat_santa 2y ago

https://archive.is/UvOO7 https://archive.is/UvOO7

hiddencost 2y ago

Now is a great time to download your payment history from SSA.gov

jppope 2y ago
how would one go about doing this?
- daveguy 2y ago
  Post from elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505659#43506099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505659#43506099
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Login to https://www.ssa.gov/ https://www.ssa.gov/ and click the "Your Social Security Statement" link at the top of your homepage to download a PDF or XML file of your earnings by year and total payments to SS and Medicare.
  - tzs 2y ago
    I'd say download both the PDF and the XML. The PDF is easier to read, but the XML has more information. In particular the XML shows earnings for every year. The PDF shows earnings for several recent years, and then from groups of years before that. I don't know if it is the same groupings for everyone but mine is grouping 1966-1980, 1981-1990, 1991-2000, 2001-2005, then the individual years up to 2024.
    - joshstrange 2y ago
      This 100%, that's what I did. I should have said "and", thank you for calling that out!

mentalgear 2y ago

I'm smelling another hyperloop ...

codeduck 2y ago

Tell me you're an inexperienced developer without telling me you're an inexperienced developer.

jareds 2y ago

As someone who used to work for a Mainframe software vendor I'm tired of COBOL being considered "legacy" and bad. I didn't do much COBOL programming, but IBM is still releasing new compilers and new versions of z/OS for the Mainframe. Just because a language is old doesn't mean it's useless and worth rewriting. Instead of having COBOL be the boogeyman explain what the issues are. Is the system stuck on old COBOL versions do to lack of funding for upgrades, incompetence when it comes to long term maintenance plans, technical issues that make it impossible to move forward with new COBOL versions and would require a rewrite, etc. Are we going to see stories like this in 20 years about some company thinking they should rewrite the Linux Kernel in some new language and throw away all the C code that's been running for decades?

a3w 2y ago
Isn't the hard part of programming the requirements engineering and support after the initial release to customers? Which of the unpaid 60+ workhours/week youths that Elon is sending in will stay on the project after shipping 1.0 ?
- techpineapple 2y ago
  Yeah, I wonder how much tooling their is around the existing app and api's. I remember being on this team managing users in this kinda archaic way using scripts, but the scripts we're really effective, so someone came in and rewrote the whole thing to use LDAP, and like sure it was technically the right choice, but it added like 6 hours per week of overhead because the tooling wasn't there, and, there were no real described tangible benefits other than "lol, bash scripts"
mattlondon 2y ago
Might be more prosaic - could just be hard to find COBOL engineers, and the ones they do find might want extortionate rates. Rewriting in something where engineers are cheaper and that can use commodity/cloud servers probably looks quite good on paper Vs paying IBM in blood.
- 2y ago

ForHackernews 2y ago

Grok, make a node.js program to administer and oversee hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to millions of retirees. VERY IMPORTANT: No fraud or DEI.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> hundreds of millions Millions of millions, even. "The federal government spent $1.35 trillion on Social Security in fiscal year 2023."[0] [0] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-social-security-is-it-sustainable/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-...

jmclnx 2y ago

hahahaha What can go wrong and with the inspection service all fired, who will check for backdoors Again these people need to go, and as others said, save everything you have from SSA on paper and if you can PDFs.

a3w 2y ago

TIL US and A has SSA. *had. Doge will make short work of it.

jpease 2y ago

Years are made of months.

kccoder 2y ago
Someone once asked me how long it would be before I arrived to a meeting (wasn't late) and I told them it could be measured in nanoseconds. Same energy.

piva00 2y ago

Not really surprised, it's the usual mistake of any novice engineer, thinking that rewriting a system they don't like is going to solve all the issues they imagine. With the teenagers involved in DOGE under Musk it's just going to be hilarious when they inevitably fail. They just never had the experience to actually go through a complete rewrite of something that's been alive for decades... And never bothered to read "The Mythical Man-Month" because of course they are ninja rockstars 100x developers, and lessons from history and experience don't apply to them. Really sad that their mess will do very real harm to lots of people who depend on this system working...

wormlord 2y ago
I don't think this is a case of "Second System Syndrome" I think this is an instance of shock therapy being applied at home. When they fail they can blame woke DEI and just tell everyone they are increasing the limit on 401(k) and IRA contributions so who even needs SS anyways?
nelblu 2y ago
> it's just going to be hilarious when they inevitably fail. I won't be surprised if the "failure" is then twisted as the "success". I see tech projects basking in their success when in reality they just make things harder for everyone. In this specific case, let's see what could go wrong? Someone doesn't get paid their social security — but that's not a bug that's a feature. Govt money saved :).

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bananapub 2y ago

obviously the entire thing is horrific, but the complete fucking malice of the senior people, starting at trump, who act is if nothing in the world is hard or complicated, and all they have to do is be loud massive cunts and things will work out their (personal, of course - none of them give a fuck about others or indeed "America") way is just absolute poison that will destroy America. in this particular case, we've actually already seen what happens - "Xtreme Programming" was birthed from the - failed - attempt to re-write the Chrysler payroll system in Smalltalk in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens... edit: and that was run by Kent Beck, not the National Union of Racist CS Undergrads that Musk exclusively hires from

KaiserPro 2y ago

The old "The place is clean, why do I need cleaners" line. I mean, there is a chance that this might work. But I strongly doubt that it would. Given Musk's history of re-writes and deadlines, I suspect that actually its not going to happen. But on the flip side, if you don't care about complying with the law or caring about users, its probably possible. Don't get me wrong, the SSA needs some innovation, but innovation, not revolution.

rsynnott 2y ago
> I mean, there is a chance that this might work. There really isn't.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  I was being "generous" so that people don't instantly write off the rest of my post, should they be ideologically opposed to seeing what a massive massive risk DOGE pose by fucking with this stuff.

afavour 2y ago

So head-smackingly stupid. But also exactly what you’d expect from a group of inexperienced young developers. What are the odds we'll end up with an 85% AI generated NextJS-powered app that melts down the second it's implemented?

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

If they screw this up the litigation could be the largest of all time.

codeduck 2y ago
I like your optimism.
wraaath 2y ago
While simultaneously causing one of the biggest mass casualty events in what was once the United states.
alabastervlog 2y ago
I honestly think their strategy at this point might be to incur so incredibly much in very-real damages on a variety of fronts that the courts are left with the choice of either letting them get away with most of it (so, most folks aren't compensated for the harm they suffered) or forcing the US into abrupt bankruptcy (same outcome for the harmed, but also the US enters a severe depression instantly).
kccoder 2y ago
WHEN they screw this up any litigation will be a "witch hunt" and they'll simply refuse to pay any settlement awarded, assuming they allow it to get that far.
ttyprintk 2y ago
I think it’s a centrist position to expect DOGE will need a bailout.

ck2 2y ago

They will most certainly just have a LLM "try" to write it Then put it live in alpha Screw up millions of people Everyone is a beta-tester with Musk, no matter how dangerous to the product And didn't just 21 out of 50 "DOGE" employees quit in protest? https://www.npr.org/2025/02/25/nx-s1-5308095/doge-staff-resignations-elon-musk https://www.npr.org/2025/02/25/nx-s1-5308095/doge-staff-resi... Is he going to outsource this to India with data access? Musk "special hire" status ends June 1st, good luck getting it done by then or maybe this is the excuse he wants to keep going in continued violation of law

alabastervlog 2y ago
Those weren't Musk's edgelord "DOGE" children, they were people on the highly-effective Obama-created digital tiger team USDS, which team Trump killed and then reanimated as a DOGE-zombie, to avoid having to ask Congress to create a DOGE bureau for him. US "DOGE" Service, instead of Digital, and yes that really is what they changed it to in the EO that did this, I'm not making it up, it was that stupid. > Musk "special hire" status ends June 1st, good luck getting it done by then or maybe this is the excuse he wants to keep going in continued violation of law Oh and last I checked they were claiming he's only working one day a week, to stretch this out effectively indefinitely. They'll probably get away with it.

light_hue_1 2y ago

Everything is easy when you don't understand it. What can an accounting system possibly do? Keep track of people, how much they're eligible for, and when you paid them last. DONE. > SSA maintains more than 60 million lines of COBOL today, along with millions more lines of other legacy programming languages. Months?! I hope they mean days. With ChatGPT and AWS, they'll be rolling! All of those millions of lines of code are clearly doing nothing useful.

damnitbuilds 2y ago

[flagged]

sundaeofshock 2y ago
[flagged]
- damnitbuilds 2y ago
  [flagged]
troyvit 2y ago
You can assume that if you like. I've downloaded my stuff and am hoping that'll be enough.
- sundaeofshock 2y ago
  I’m worried it won’t be. If it comes to that, what’s to prevent them from saying I forged it all?
  - troyvit 2y ago
    That is a very good point. All I have is a few PDFs and some xml to make it feel official.

dfilppi 2y ago

[dead]

kilpikaarna 2y ago

> Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. It doesn’t include a date type, so dates are often coded to a specific reference point—May 20, 1875, the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre. I thought this was wishful thinking / already deboonked?

Volundr 2y ago
> That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. This part has if you trust Elon as a source. He shared some graphs where there was no spike at 150, and people older than 150. If you trust Elon on this is really up to the reader, but it's a peeve of mine that sources keep reporting the COBOL epoch thing, which was always just a (plausible) theory as fact. > Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. This part hasn't. These 150 year olds are simply people whose death hasn't been recorded. They aren't collecting Social Security. In fact social security automatically stops at 115, and the number of Social Security recipients over 100 is within expectations [1]. This if course doesn't not mean there are zero deab people still receiving checks. With any system this size some fraud will exist, the question is how much, and how much does it cost to chase down. The issue with unrecorded deaths for people over 100 has been known since at least 2015 [2]. In short it hasn't been fixed due to the cost, combined with the risk of incorrectly marking someone dead, which can seriously fuck up your life, not just social security. This whole bruhaha could have been avoided if someone did a 5-minute Google search before Elon/Trump started their theatrics. [1] https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/people-over-100-social-security/ https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/people-ove... [2] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  It's not like nobody's ever looked into fraud and error rates in social programs. It's consistently pretty damn low, and when problems have been found, they've usually been addressed. People think these are full of fraud for the same reason they think foreign aid is some insane double-digit percentage of the budget: because Republicans shove messaging at them through dedicated propaganda outlets literally 24/7 complaining about these things, and have done this for decades, and folks don't bother to check.

biophysboy 2y ago

As somebody that has worked at the CDC and now works for the NIH, the thing that enrages me about all of this is the gov desperately needs more efficiency. With hiring, compliance, grants, etc. Its very telling that I have heard nothing about the rube goldberg usajobs application system from DOGE. Instead, we are getting a stupid made-for-TV efficiency, where the leaders refuse to understand technical concepts as braindead simple as a reference date.

techpineapple 2y ago
I think it's remarkable, that if you look at like immigration, they really play up the emotional aspects of what they're doing, because they're fundamentally not as competent at deportations. Similar to this, they don't have any answers of how to make it really efficient because it's "hard" so instead we get a twitter feed of imagined savings.

roxolotl 2y ago

It never fails to amaze me how little we learn from the past. I wish I knew if it was unique to software development or all industries suffer from this level of hubris. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

nine_k 2y ago
I think Joel is a bit extremist here. IIRC EBay rewrote their backend three times. It was not because the previous version was wrong, but because they were growing and changing, so a new backend was needed anyway to tackle that. They were and are doing fine. Twitter rewrote their codebase from Ruby on Rails (the endless source of fail whales) to a completely different platform, again due to the huge growth. Technology-wise, they are doing pretty fine. Facebook rewrote Messenger from a very thick and complex client architecture to an outrageously lightweight and flexible architecture based on eventual consistency / roughly-CRDT approach. FB Messenger is doing very fine. Never rewrite your codebase without a really good reason. Big wins in performance, maintainability, and ease of development may be good reasons, depending on your situation.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Rewriting a backend is easier, because you can use a Strangler Fig[0] pattern to replace it bit by bit. The customers don't even have to notice. With a browser you really can't do that, because you can't force users to update and then you'd have a bunch of semi-working Frankenstein monsters in the wild. A full rewrite and release is the only option. [0] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html
hnthrow90348765 2y ago
Well, it's Elon and DOGE, so you can't exactly start with assuming it's made in good faith and they simply haven't learned

dzonga 2y ago

COBOL / ADA etc are very old languages but it doesn't mean they're bad languages. the only major 'risk' I can think of about them is talent pipeline. DOGE wants to rewrite in a few months using Java lol. If it was Ruby maybe like MAYBe.

nine_k 2y ago
Can't say about Cobol, but Ada is actively developed, actively used, and has one of the best provable correctness toolsets/extensions in the industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  Cobol also has a recent standard update (2023). It's still not popular outside of its niche, but the people using it aren't just sticking with ancient versions (though they also do that).

slantedview 2y ago

This plan is just another way, like firing workers, to break Social Security, something that the wealthy have wanted to do for decades.

9283409232 2y ago
This definitely is going to break SSA. Republican leadership has already been publicly saying "only fraudsters will complain about a late social security payment." They know this will be a disaster.

nineplay 2y ago

I had lunch this week with some former coworkers. When I'd started working with them it was on the 20 year old C++ engine that ran everything. Even at that time there was large team 'rewriting' it in Java. That team was dissolved about 2 years later. During the course of my employment two more large teams were spun up to do a rewrite and then came crashing down after a year or two. I hadn't seen my coworkers for about 7 years. Naturally they were still working on the C++ code. Naturally they'd seen two more rewrite teams come and go while I'd been gone. I'm not sure why I'm bringing this up......

iKlsR 2y ago
Isn't it customary for new hires or teams to drop into a legacy codebase and within weeks propose a rewrite.
- akmarinov 2y ago
  Yeah but now the AI can do it! /s
- palmotea 2y ago
  > Isn't it customary for new hires or teams to drop into a legacy codebase and within weeks propose a rewrite. And if they're actually serious and not just venting, it's also customary calibrate downward how much you trust their judgements.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Yes but did the subject matter experts have the kind of trust/working relationship those at the SSA have with DOGE? That should smooth out this project.
ttyprintk 2y ago
In medium-sized companies, I learned not to represent anything as rewriting. Some projects were massively reshaped, sure.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rsynnott 2y ago

What is it with that guy and unnecessary and inappropriate rewrites?

disqard 2y ago
It is a tech-centric version of "I alone can fix it".

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Months is a long time when you could just have an LLM spin up the rewrite for you in weeks! /s

thiht 2y ago

They’ll fail. I worked on a successful rewrite of a 25 years old Perl codebase. We did it because we had a strong understanding of the business, of the existing codebase, and were not afraid to maintain both in parallel. It took us years to migrate most of it blocks by blocks (some parts are still in Perl and likely won’t ever be migrated for various reasons) because a rewrite is not just converting some code, it’s an opportunity to rethink the whole architecture and responsibilities. Doing a rewrite is doable and might be suitable, but I guarantee no one there has any idea what they’re doing. They wouldn’t talk of "months" otherwise. 60 million lines is a 5-10 years rewrite, realistically.

emorning3 2y ago

hmmmm, does the SSA have a good automated test suite? If so then maybe it's ripe for conversion by LLM.

croes 2y ago

Completely rewriting a running system isn’t efficient

yongjik 2y ago

> ... the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits. People can tolerate injustice to others, but they won't tolerate late checks. If DOGE follows through, I think it will break Republican support in a scale even larger than threatening Canada or sending people to El Salvadorean prison. We're certainly living in "interesting" times ...

mrguyorama 2y ago
Nah, the controlled media ecosystem (THAT THEY OPT INTO) and controlled narrative is too strong. They will absolutely suffer and starve and die before admitting that they were tricked or that maybe the democrats aren't the problem. The same people who are freaking out about the deficit and insisted we couldn't send $100 billion worth of scrap hardware to Ukraine are having zero problems eating up this admin blowing up people in the desert again and were perfectly willing to vote for Bush Jr's second term after it was obvious the middle east wars were outright fraudulent and illegal, while calling you an unpatriotic anti-american asshole for daring to criticize him. They will absolutely, unflinchingly, uncritically buy "It's the democrats fault" for the reason they can't afford rent.
- yongjik 2y ago
  I've seen people saying Trump's floor is at 30-40%, which is depressingly high, but there are the rest who still voted Trump last year - generally low-information voters who don't watch news, aren't interested in all the talks of "democracy at danger," and voted Trump because of gas price or whatever. If these people get angry at Trump, that means trouble for Republicans. And "where's my check?" is just that kind of thing that could make these people really angry.
johntitorjr 2y ago
[dead]

palmotea 2y ago

It's surprising to me how willing some people are to do the equivalent of yelling "I am stupid and have no idea what I'm doing," to a large public audience. This is a reminder to all you Americans to create a Social Security account and print out your statement.

Aloisius 2y ago

IBM has been working on transpiling COBOL to Java for ages now, but it's not anywhere near perfect. I believe the USAF converted a million+ line COBOL codebase using it, but it still took a couple years.

skc 2y ago

I've seen too many people think this move will be a total disaster. I think it'll be a very bumpy ride but ultimately the team will succeed. Besides "liberal sabotage" is a ready made retort for any mishaps along the way.

Gud 2y ago
It will obviously be a disaster. Do you honestly believe it’s possible to rebuild ANY code base with millions of lines of code, to another language in MONTHS? It won’t be a ”bumpy road”. It will be a total failure.
- skc 2y ago
  I believe there is certainly some hubris involved in their projected timeline but I think at least part of that is due to a belief that we have much, much better tooling today than was available to teams that attempted this sort of thing back in the day.
  - Gud 2y ago
    ”Some hubris”. Ok, let’s disagree to disagree.
ttyprintk 2y ago
I will loudly point out that the USAF contracted to replace COBOL with Java, attaining 90% reduction in TCO. It’s time for a friendly competition.

tibbydudeza 2y ago

It is the plan - no SSA cheques are cut and then they blame the "system" is offline. Brilliant !!!!

andyjohnson0 2y ago

https://archive.ph/WIsni https://archive.ph/WIsni

andyjohnson0 2y ago

Their timescales are clearly extremely unrealistic, but I don't understand the motivation for doing this at all. > “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months, then their way is the right way, and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist I'm struggling to believe that this is the real motivation. But what is it? Speculation: they don't know how to backdoor the legacy codebase/platform so they first need to transform it into something they can more easily subvert?

throw0101b 2y ago

Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this: the hard part in replacing/updating government system is not the coding part. The hard part is understanding the policies that have been changed and modified over the decades which is reflected in the code's logic. See "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software" (Jun 2023): > There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-what-happens-when-governments-build-software/id1056200096?i=1000616611521 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-what-happens-w... * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-12/why-governments-struggle-to-build-software-and-computer-systems https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-12/why-gover... One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge. Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem": * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217 Copy-paste from: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078946

Graa 2y ago

Last year I had the privilege to learn about the IBM mainframe, and the mainframers converted me. It is one of the most advanced systems I have ever seen. IBM solved most cloud-issues 30 years ago, and the backwards compatibility is insane. Everyone is worried about 'code from the eighties' still running, but this just proves that the system is reliable. And in this datacenter (that I was learning about) the mainframe did 80% of calculations while only using 8% of the datacenter's power, because the machine is so terrifyingly efficient. This is not just about converting COBOL code. This is about converting the JCL (batch processing) jobs to whatever cool real-time processing solution the new architecture is going to have, and about translating the security boundaries from RACF to new security controls. Using AI to 'convert' it might prove difficult, because I don't think we have the datasets to train an AI to do this properly.