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> Can LLMs do Cobol? I imagine it's the one place where LLMs would absolutely shine. COBOL jobs are usually very verbose, lots of boilerplate, but what they do
by the_af 1y ago
> Can LLMs do Cobol?
I imagine it's the one place where LLMs would absolutely shine. COBOL jobs are usually very verbose, lots of boilerplate, but what they do is mostly very straightforward batch processing. It's ripe for automation with LLMs.
The flip side is that banks are usually very conservative about technology (for good reason).
- kreetx 1y agoI don't think LLMs are anything human language specific, so would they really shine here? I.e, COBOL and SQL may be great for humans who otherwise aren't used to programming languages, but LLMs have seen everything, and thus are able to know any (programming) language, not just ones which are English-like.
- the_af 1y agoI think it would shine because COBOL is very verbose and the programs written with it (batch jobs) very straightforward but also very boilerplate-rish and boring to write by hand, a situation with little risk and high reward to automate.
- accrual 1y agoIMO the ideal path to working on COBOL without having decades of experience would be to spend a few days groking the syntax and writing toy programs for practice, then collaborate with a large LLM to understand the current code and gradually make changes.
- macintux 1y agoHave you worked with COBOL? My understanding is that the language itself isn't the real problem. Mainframes, control languages: everything around COBOL is very different from most Windows/UNIX people have experienced.