January 19, 2026
Mainframes, meet the memes
Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?
Banks cheer, vets eye-roll, and a 1970s rule keeps breaking the bots
TLDR: A COBOL dev says AI keeps tripping over old rules and corporate lock‑downs, making it more hassle than help. The comments split: banks with custom models claim smooth sailing, skeptics joke that no one—human or bot—gets COBOL, while others report real wins modernizing crusty legacy apps.
The post that lit up the thread: a COBOL dev says AI can’t even stick to “column 72” (an old-school formatting rule) and keeps bungling punctuation in nested ifs—so they spend more time fixing AI’s mess than writing code. Plus, corporate lockdowns and locked-down desktops (VDIs) mean they can’t even run big models. Cue the split. Team AI shows up with BoredPositron from banking bragging that their fine‑tuned models are doing just fine—COBOL’s wordy, English-like style makes it a natural fit, apparently. Team Nope fires back with the instant meme: “No humans understand COBOL, no AI understand COBOL.” Ouch. In the middle, edarchis says not COBOL but close enough: a crusty ColdFusion app now basically writes itself with AI while they just review—and they’ve even used AI to modernize an old system. Meanwhile, brightball drops a hopeful note and a link: COBOL isn’t going anywhere. The plot twist? m3h_hax0r wonders if AI struggles because there’s less public COBOL to learn from—and fewer bad examples might actually help. The vibe: banks with secret sauce say “works great,” freelancers and legacy wranglers say “lol no,” and everyone agrees the real boss is four decades of weird business rules the bots don’t know.
Key Points
- •Enterprise compliance policies prevent sending code to external AI services.
- •Restricted VDI environments make running resource-heavy local AI models impractical.
- •AI-generated COBOL often violates strict formatting rules, such as column 72 and period termination in nested IFs.
- •Time spent linting and correcting AI output can exceed manual coding time.
- •AI is useful for generating test data but lacks undocumented business logic needed for production work.