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People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going. So is IBM. There was a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Jo
by reaperducer 3mo ago
People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.
So is IBM.
There was a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back about how IBM is flying under the radar, and doing well by not taking the hype bait.
It noted that 70% of all credit card transactions on the planet go through an IBM system.
- nightshift1 3mo agoIt ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers. I think IBM will lose many customers.
- reaperducer 3mo agoIt ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers. I think IBM will lose many customers. The problem is that those COBOL systems have to be absolutely provably correct, for both financial and regulatory reasons. LLMs can't do that. They're designed to be variable. You can't vibe code a bank transaction system. "Close enough" isn't good enough in some fields. A minor glitch in a video game may result in screen artifacts. A minor glitch in a banking system can crash the economy.
- jimjimjim 3mo agoYep, if AI could do it so could out-sourcing it to India. AI is great for "almost" but not great at "exact"
- dghlsakjg 3mo agoIt’s also a solved problem combined with a risk averse industry. COBOL on mainframes has worked reliably for decades. On the scale of what a bank will spend on operations the mainframe doesn’t really cost much. Banks are sort of the canonical example of “no one ever got fired for buying ibm”.
- impulser_ 3mo agoYeah, I should have said growing not going. That's what I meant.