ssa_final2_reallyfinal_v03_final.py
April 2, 2025 5:06 AM Subscribe
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk. DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code. (Wired, archive)
"Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you?" (on the perils of upgrading sensitive systems when you don't need to...h/t Lanark for the early-morning panic attack!)
"Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you?" (on the perils of upgrading sensitive systems when you don't need to...h/t Lanark for the early-morning panic attack!)
Idiotic.
posted by whatevernot at 5:14 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]
posted by whatevernot at 5:14 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]
To be fair, total rewrite is what every junior engineer wants to do the first time they take over a project…
posted by chasing at 5:16 AM on April 2 [27 favorites]
posted by chasing at 5:16 AM on April 2 [27 favorites]
There are some places for the greybeard COBOL wizards to do the deep magic now.
posted by cobaltnine at 5:17 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
posted by cobaltnine at 5:17 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
Sincere question: Is there any reason to say “DOGE” instead of “Elon Musk”?
Does the former have any existence independent of the latter?
posted by Lemkin at 5:23 AM on April 2 [7 favorites]
Does the former have any existence independent of the latter?
posted by Lemkin at 5:23 AM on April 2 [7 favorites]
How do companies like Apple and Google write software? I don't know exactly, but I know they have code reviews where pieces of code are examined line by line by a whole team.
AI may be able to do a lot, but I don't think getting compatibility between different programs created at different times is one of them.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:25 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]
AI may be able to do a lot, but I don't think getting compatibility between different programs created at different times is one of them.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:25 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]
The issue imo isn't about code reviews or things like that. I've worked in bank software for years - there will be a bunch of undocumented behaviour and zero chance a rewrite will capture all these edge cases cause there aren't, like, test cases to cover all this off.
Ringfence the damn cobol and keep it working is the only sane plan.
posted by whatevernot at 5:27 AM on April 2 [28 favorites]
Ringfence the damn cobol and keep it working is the only sane plan.
posted by whatevernot at 5:27 AM on April 2 [28 favorites]
"..payments to the more than 65 million people..."
"...SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL..."
Interesting coincidence(?) that we have about one line of code per recipient.
posted by mattiv at 5:30 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]
"...SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL..."
Interesting coincidence(?) that we have about one line of code per recipient.
posted by mattiv at 5:30 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]
As Terry Jeffords eloquently puts it.... WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There's no point, no motherfucking point. At best you're transpiling from one language to another, but the language is the least important detail of the system. I fucking repeat, THE LEAST IMPORTANT DETAIL OF THE SYSTEM. Learning a language is easy, learning a system is way harder.
You'll gain no understanding, no further ability, the same codebase developed in the paradigm of another language transferred to something more modern just puts you more at risk of a translation error.
At best this is utter stupidity, at worst and most likely it's intended to commit fraud or kill social security by crashing the system.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:45 AM on April 2 [44 favorites]
There's no point, no motherfucking point. At best you're transpiling from one language to another, but the language is the least important detail of the system. I fucking repeat, THE LEAST IMPORTANT DETAIL OF THE SYSTEM. Learning a language is easy, learning a system is way harder.
You'll gain no understanding, no further ability, the same codebase developed in the paradigm of another language transferred to something more modern just puts you more at risk of a translation error.
At best this is utter stupidity, at worst and most likely it's intended to commit fraud or kill social security by crashing the system.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:45 AM on April 2 [44 favorites]
In Canada, they upgraded/merged the various federal payment systems into one. It went online as it wasn't ready, it was an utter shitshow, they still haven't resolved all the pay issues it created, some people lost their houses, some got paid too much and had to pay back taxes. And that was an honest try, not that DOGE fuckery.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:47 AM on April 2 [31 favorites]
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:47 AM on April 2 [31 favorites]
There is essentially zero chance the idiotic move fast and break things approach will be successful here. Even worse they may never be able revert or fully compensate for missed payments. And we are by definition dealing with old people here. Take a year to fix a payment and there's a good chance the person dies.
See for example the Phoenix pay system which was nominally good faith attempt to update the Canadian Federal payroll system. Started in 2011 they are still figuring out back pay for people. And that was provided by IBM not a handful of unqualified Musk toadies.
posted by Mitheral at 5:48 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
See for example the Phoenix pay system which was nominally good faith attempt to update the Canadian Federal payroll system. Started in 2011 they are still figuring out back pay for people. And that was provided by IBM not a handful of unqualified Musk toadies.
posted by Mitheral at 5:48 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
whatevernot: fence it off, but plan to divide and slowly replace things. Migrations are possible but they require time, money, and skill - anathema to this administration. Back in the 90s, I worked for a COBOL vendor to pay for school and we had a number of customers who were doing things like carving off reporting or the public UI so they’d have, say, a Java web app which provided the interface for their customers and somewhere in the middle it’d have an RPC call to pass a completed order record to the COBOL app or request their account history, which allowed them to trim down the COBOL portion feature by feature with time to gradually test and update everything.
posted by adamsc at 5:52 AM on April 2 [14 favorites]
posted by adamsc at 5:52 AM on April 2 [14 favorites]
How do companies like Apple and Google write software? I don't know exactly, but I know they have code reviews where pieces of code are examined line by line by a whole team.
That, and THEY CONTROL THE REQUIREMENTS. I repeat, THEY CONTROL THE REQUIREMENTS.
They can pick and choose, drop features, etc...
Government software rewrites are hard because you're turning law and regulations into systems on top of your organisation requirements. And you're not allowed to redesign the law or regulations so that it's easier to understand.
That type programming is easy, explaining and understanding EVERYTHING your org does is hard.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:53 AM on April 2 [22 favorites]
That, and THEY CONTROL THE REQUIREMENTS. I repeat, THEY CONTROL THE REQUIREMENTS.
They can pick and choose, drop features, etc...
Government software rewrites are hard because you're turning law and regulations into systems on top of your organisation requirements. And you're not allowed to redesign the law or regulations so that it's easier to understand.
That type programming is easy, explaining and understanding EVERYTHING your org does is hard.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:53 AM on April 2 [22 favorites]
The politics of this are pretty clear:
- They can't pass a bill that kills Social Security, so they'll kill it by breaking it.
- Elon is the fall guy. Trump keeps his hands clean.
There's a whole swathe of entitled conservatives who have hated Social Security for generations because "handouts." They are protected by privilege and have no idea how important the program is for the basic functioning of this country, how many people's lives will be negatively affected by destroying it.
One way or another, the fallout from this is going to be huge.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 5:53 AM on April 2 [45 favorites]
- They can't pass a bill that kills Social Security, so they'll kill it by breaking it.
- Elon is the fall guy. Trump keeps his hands clean.
There's a whole swathe of entitled conservatives who have hated Social Security for generations because "handouts." They are protected by privilege and have no idea how important the program is for the basic functioning of this country, how many people's lives will be negatively affected by destroying it.
One way or another, the fallout from this is going to be huge.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 5:53 AM on April 2 [45 favorites]
> At best this is utter stupidity, at worst and most likely it's intended to commit fraud or kill social security by crashing the system.
or turn it into a social credit system as a means of social control?
also btw...
-Changes at Social Security Administration may impact customer service, benefit payments, experts say
-Trump's Social Security check change could affect half a million Americans
-Seniors won't complain if they miss a Social Security check, Lutnick says
-In DOGE effort to combat fraud, Social Security's core mission at stake
-Scoop: Senate Dems to launch Social Security war room
and if it seems like a flunkee is steering this ship...
-Leaked memo: DOGE plots to cut Social Security phone support
-Social Security postpones, partially rolls back phone service cuts
-Social Security's new in-person identification requirement angers retirees and advocates
-Social Security Administration Relaxes ID Verification Rules After Backlash From Lawmakers And Advocates
-Social Security Says DOGE Ruling Could Force Agency to Shut Down
-Social Security Head Calls Off Shutting Agency After Court Order
posted by kliuless at 5:54 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
or turn it into a social credit system as a means of social control?
also btw...
-Changes at Social Security Administration may impact customer service, benefit payments, experts say
-Trump's Social Security check change could affect half a million Americans
-Seniors won't complain if they miss a Social Security check, Lutnick says
-In DOGE effort to combat fraud, Social Security's core mission at stake
-Scoop: Senate Dems to launch Social Security war room
and if it seems like a flunkee is steering this ship...
-Leaked memo: DOGE plots to cut Social Security phone support
-Social Security postpones, partially rolls back phone service cuts
-Social Security's new in-person identification requirement angers retirees and advocates
-Social Security Administration Relaxes ID Verification Rules After Backlash From Lawmakers And Advocates
-Social Security Says DOGE Ruling Could Force Agency to Shut Down
-Social Security Head Calls Off Shutting Agency After Court Order
posted by kliuless at 5:54 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
There can be good reasons to migrate a critical codebase away from poorly supported language/hardware, but doing so needs to be a deliberate and extensive procedure, the result of a longterm commitment to maintaining the function of the original software backed up by extensive testing in a sandbox environment and likely running the new code concurrently with the old for a good long time to make sure it exactly replicates the intended behavior. It is a lot of work and a lot of expense and requires good people. These "oh, let's push changes to the production server and fix bugs as they come up" fuckers are not remotely up to the task.
posted by jackbishop at 5:55 AM on April 2 [15 favorites]
posted by jackbishop at 5:55 AM on April 2 [15 favorites]
And that was provided by IBM not a handful of unqualified Musk toadies.I’m not sure there’s a difference here you can rely on. All of the big consulting companies have some good people but also a ton of unqualified cheaper people. You’re at a high risk of similar failures in all of these cases if you don’t have your own technical staff who can identify where you’re being taken for a ride – and those are the people Musk is firing.
posted by adamsc at 5:55 AM on April 2 [13 favorites]
i don’t actually disagree that the SSA system should be modernized but it should be done as part of a multi year manhattan project esque effort. you have to study the existing system in depth, determine the conditions for success, and roll out the solution in stages over time. it needs to take years. the way i would do it is we would run the new system alongside the old, but only in simulation, and look at where behavior diverges, then adjust until it produces identical outcomes for at least a year. AI can’t do this, the doge rudeboys can’t do this. it’s going to be a huge fucking mess
posted by dis_integration at 6:02 AM on April 2 [20 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 6:02 AM on April 2 [20 favorites]
And we are by definition dealing with old people here.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. I downloaded my SS statement a few weeks ago, and the government owes me $60,000 for SS so far. Wanna bet that even if the system collapses, those SS payments towards my non existent retirement will still be removed from my check?
I'm 45. I don't feel old, but I am very tired!
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:02 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
In some ways yes, in some ways no. I downloaded my SS statement a few weeks ago, and the government owes me $60,000 for SS so far. Wanna bet that even if the system collapses, those SS payments towards my non existent retirement will still be removed from my check?
I'm 45. I don't feel old, but I am very tired!
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:02 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
Clawback cruelty : 100% withholding rate for Social Security overpayments increased on March 27
It's baby boomers who hold 52% of the weath in the US, so fun times ahead once they start covering the shortfall by selling off their stocks and bonds faster, even with sell pressure reduced by the US having the 25th worst wealth gini coefficient of 0.850.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:04 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
It's baby boomers who hold 52% of the weath in the US, so fun times ahead once they start covering the shortfall by selling off their stocks and bonds faster, even with sell pressure reduced by the US having the 25th worst wealth gini coefficient of 0.850.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:04 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
@adamsc - agree entirely. I was software architect at Scotiabank for a year before Covid and I spent inordinate amount of time with the "back end" COBOL guys & gals - ringfence/upgrade where necessary was the modus operandi.
It was extremely slow going. Cause they took care. And the back end systems were full of undocumented magic tricks.
posted by whatevernot at 6:04 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
It was extremely slow going. Cause they took care. And the back end systems were full of undocumented magic tricks.
posted by whatevernot at 6:04 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
I'm sorry, but COBOL for the IRS and Social Security should have been ditched a long time ago - it's just the honestly lazy malfeasance of whomever is the guy in the pull quote that has held it back.
Government software rewrites are hard because you're turning law and regulations into systems on top of your organisation requirements. And you're not allowed to redesign the law or regulations so that it's easier to understand.
Almost every software product is like this. It's not special to governments, and what the goverment does with the IRS and Social Security is not particularly difficult. Most corporations don't just deal with the taxing authority of the US, they deal with the taxing authority of the entire world.
No one who has gotten one of the IRS or Social Security's criptic letters would say 'it works'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 6:05 AM on April 2
Government software rewrites are hard because you're turning law and regulations into systems on top of your organisation requirements. And you're not allowed to redesign the law or regulations so that it's easier to understand.
Almost every software product is like this. It's not special to governments, and what the goverment does with the IRS and Social Security is not particularly difficult. Most corporations don't just deal with the taxing authority of the US, they deal with the taxing authority of the entire world.
No one who has gotten one of the IRS or Social Security's criptic letters would say 'it works'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 6:05 AM on April 2
I'm sorry, but COBOL for the IRS and Social Security should have been ditched a long time ago - it's just the honestly lazy malfeasance of whomever is the guy in the pull quote that has held it back
Technical debt is a helluva drug.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:09 AM on April 2 [8 favorites]
Technical debt is a helluva drug.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:09 AM on April 2 [8 favorites]
the government owes me $60,000 for SS so far
If this number is the dollars you've paid in so far, the government owes you twice as much because your employers also paid in an equal amount. And that's before we start calculating interest.
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 6:12 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
If this number is the dollars you've paid in so far, the government owes you twice as much because your employers also paid in an equal amount. And that's before we start calculating interest.
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 6:12 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
So...yeah. I won't have much retirement money besides that. Yay.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:18 AM on April 2
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:18 AM on April 2
Mar Hicks, historian of technology and gender and author of the excellent Programmed Inequality, wrote a great piece on the history of COBOL a few years ago, which this news makes freshly relevant.
posted by rory at 6:19 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
posted by rory at 6:19 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
As a social worker whose has had to navigate SSI and SSDI benefit claim issues for years and years now I'm not sure on the getting benefits and benefit calculation side things are actually working as intended. It's super hard to know, especially with under educated marginalized single adults with no kids who don't have people to advocate for them. And many people just don't know their work histories all that well. And the law is complicated here. Many times the answer becomes the system said that, that's why.
In general the payment system does what it is suppose to do. The retirement system is reliable to. But the disability system is a mess.
The workers aren't actually super sure or don't want to explain and digging doesn't actually give a concrete answer. Overpayment is frequent enough and with SSI the law is you have to spend it in 9 months or loose your benefits and then years later SSI comes back and is like please give me that 10,000 usd back now and people can't because they were already in poverty prior to the overpayment and are still in poverty after. They end up homeless then dead. Or some other tax funded program ends up paying for the difference which is what happened in my cases ususally.
Part of this is because the law is really complicated mostly focused on reducing fraud to the point that people can't get what they need. The rules need to be alot simpler and more efficient and no database is going to change that bullshit.
Yes, I'm terrified of doing a rapid database change that can impact millions of Americans all at once, but i don't believe that the current programming is actually working fully as intended and that there aren't mysterious things happening that can't be tracked and are justified by saying that the programming is correct to begin with.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:22 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
In general the payment system does what it is suppose to do. The retirement system is reliable to. But the disability system is a mess.
The workers aren't actually super sure or don't want to explain and digging doesn't actually give a concrete answer. Overpayment is frequent enough and with SSI the law is you have to spend it in 9 months or loose your benefits and then years later SSI comes back and is like please give me that 10,000 usd back now and people can't because they were already in poverty prior to the overpayment and are still in poverty after. They end up homeless then dead. Or some other tax funded program ends up paying for the difference which is what happened in my cases ususally.
Part of this is because the law is really complicated mostly focused on reducing fraud to the point that people can't get what they need. The rules need to be alot simpler and more efficient and no database is going to change that bullshit.
Yes, I'm terrified of doing a rapid database change that can impact millions of Americans all at once, but i don't believe that the current programming is actually working fully as intended and that there aren't mysterious things happening that can't be tracked and are justified by saying that the programming is correct to begin with.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:22 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
And you're not allowed to redesign the law or regulations so that it's easier to understand.
Also no offense or anything but this comment says you have never dealt with a government agency or looked at any law. I'm working on a government project that was mandated to be deployed back in 2024, but still doesn't have any of the information required to actually implement it, and I'm talking basic information like file contents and name. We had to guess at all of that, and deploy into production to meet the mandate or face fines on somebody's guesses.
And most laws proscribe outcomes, they don't describe exactly what you are supposed to do to meet them. That's really fun when working with lawyers and accountants and developers. Lawyers give like 3X as many requirements for a line of law text on Wednesday as they do on Friday.
posted by The_Vegetables at 6:26 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]
Also no offense or anything but this comment says you have never dealt with a government agency or looked at any law. I'm working on a government project that was mandated to be deployed back in 2024, but still doesn't have any of the information required to actually implement it, and I'm talking basic information like file contents and name. We had to guess at all of that, and deploy into production to meet the mandate or face fines on somebody's guesses.
And most laws proscribe outcomes, they don't describe exactly what you are supposed to do to meet them. That's really fun when working with lawyers and accountants and developers. Lawyers give like 3X as many requirements for a line of law text on Wednesday as they do on Friday.
posted by The_Vegetables at 6:26 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]
I'm sorry, but COBOL for the IRS and Social Security should have been ditched a long time ago - it's just the honestly lazy malfeasance of whomever is the guy in the pull quote that has held it back.
Not only are you wrong, but soon we are all going to find out just how wrong you are.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:32 AM on April 2 [52 favorites]
Not only are you wrong, but soon we are all going to find out just how wrong you are.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:32 AM on April 2 [52 favorites]
Perhaps they are planning on some pragmatic simplifications like sending everyone over the age of 60 the same generous amount.
posted by congen at 6:39 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]
posted by congen at 6:39 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]
I wonder if they'll bother even backing up the old system.
Probably start with Elon and his brother uninstalling the mainframes, like in Sacramento.
posted by MtDewd at 6:39 AM on April 2 [7 favorites]
Probably start with Elon and his brother uninstalling the mainframes, like in Sacramento.
posted by MtDewd at 6:39 AM on April 2 [7 favorites]
Another issue is that there's no pipeline for new COBOL programmers is nonexistent. Experienced, senior developers can make big bucks, if they've got experience in the relevant systems, but if you're fresh out of college, COBOL is the worst choice you can make. That has maintenance implications as your experienced people leave or die.
As for why DOGE and not Musk, is because Steve Davis is spearheading this thing. I know nothing about him, but I'd be shocked if he has the technical skill or political acumen to pull this off successfully.
Finally, in particular, Google's a horrible example to use. They have a long history of building working systems, and then throwing them away and replacing them with new, incompatible systems. Ask the many, many people still pissed off about Google Reader.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:43 AM on April 2
As for why DOGE and not Musk, is because Steve Davis is spearheading this thing. I know nothing about him, but I'd be shocked if he has the technical skill or political acumen to pull this off successfully.
Finally, in particular, Google's a horrible example to use. They have a long history of building working systems, and then throwing them away and replacing them with new, incompatible systems. Ask the many, many people still pissed off about Google Reader.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:43 AM on April 2
Chaos is their mode and modus. They may be stupid, but this is overshadowed by how they want to burn it all down to exploit for personal gain. Rebuilding to something more to their liking? An afterthought at best.
Grar.
posted by Enturbulated at 6:53 AM on April 2 [9 favorites]
Grar.
posted by Enturbulated at 6:53 AM on April 2 [9 favorites]
Another issue is that there's no pipeline for new COBOL programmers is nonexistent.
In the piece linked by rory above, Hicks says
posted by MtDewd at 7:13 AM on April 2 [9 favorites]
In the piece linked by rory above, Hicks says
The reality is that there are plenty of new COBOL programmers out there who could do the job. In fact, the majority of people in the COBOL programmers’ Facebook group are twenty-five to thirty-five-years-old, and the number of people being trained to program and maintain COBOL systems globally is only growing. Many people who work with COBOL graduated in the 1990s or 2000s and have spent most of their twenty-first century careers maintaining and programming COBOL systems.(this was from 2020, but probably still accurate)
posted by MtDewd at 7:13 AM on April 2 [9 favorites]
The SSA already had a migration away from COBOL in the works until COVID disrupted everything. They had a five-year timeline.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:13 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:13 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
I work for a pension system that is far smaller than the SSA. Even looking at modernizing parts of our pension administration systems, we're looking at 8-10 years to do it right, and the other people in here who've worked on government systems know exactly why.
The whole reason the SSA hasn't moved to modernize off COBOL is because of the enormous amount of work and money and risk it would take to even 1:1 the existing systems, and that's just to get you to a working clone. (Nobody will ever do this, because at best, it looks the same outside of IT. At worst, you spent a whole lot of money, its a failure, and it ends your career.)
Elon Musk cannot succeed at this. Cannot. I have to conclude it's just a way to break the SS system beyond fixing.
posted by mrgoat at 7:15 AM on April 2 [21 favorites]
The whole reason the SSA hasn't moved to modernize off COBOL is because of the enormous amount of work and money and risk it would take to even 1:1 the existing systems, and that's just to get you to a working clone. (Nobody will ever do this, because at best, it looks the same outside of IT. At worst, you spent a whole lot of money, its a failure, and it ends your career.)
Elon Musk cannot succeed at this. Cannot. I have to conclude it's just a way to break the SS system beyond fixing.
posted by mrgoat at 7:15 AM on April 2 [21 favorites]
COBOL is not hard to learn. You hire people and train them in COBOL. Done.
More important is the understanding that every large software project is, in essence, its own language. The amount of time and study required to learn the ins and outs of the system, the internal libraries, the build and deployment systems, the test frameworks, etc. dwarfs the amount of time you'd ever spend learning the details of any given programming language. And that's part of the onboarding for anyone who's going to touch the system. On large projects, the language does not matter. The process and documentation does.
You can tell these are not serious people because they are saying "we will rewrite this system" and not "we will document this system". Good luck watching your typescript grind to a halt every time the GC runs and people starving next time someone pulls a left-pad, guys.
(Also yes, much of IBM is a sales organization with a vestigial consultancy hanging off the side. I would not call any government contact they work on a good-faith effort.)
posted by phooky at 7:15 AM on April 2 [27 favorites]
More important is the understanding that every large software project is, in essence, its own language. The amount of time and study required to learn the ins and outs of the system, the internal libraries, the build and deployment systems, the test frameworks, etc. dwarfs the amount of time you'd ever spend learning the details of any given programming language. And that's part of the onboarding for anyone who's going to touch the system. On large projects, the language does not matter. The process and documentation does.
You can tell these are not serious people because they are saying "we will rewrite this system" and not "we will document this system". Good luck watching your typescript grind to a halt every time the GC runs and people starving next time someone pulls a left-pad, guys.
(Also yes, much of IBM is a sales organization with a vestigial consultancy hanging off the side. I would not call any government contact they work on a good-faith effort.)
posted by phooky at 7:15 AM on April 2 [27 favorites]
Huh, I stand corrected on seeing the news of the previous five year plan. That's.... an aggressive time line.
posted by mrgoat at 7:17 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]
posted by mrgoat at 7:17 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]
You hire people and train them in COBOL.
I have a wild idea, hear me out on this, why don't you just maybe not fire the tens of thousands of people you already have trained up over the last 80 years that are/were already working in the SSA in the first place?!?
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 7:29 AM on April 2 [23 favorites]
I have a wild idea, hear me out on this, why don't you just maybe not fire the tens of thousands of people you already have trained up over the last 80 years that are/were already working in the SSA in the first place?!?
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 7:29 AM on April 2 [23 favorites]
I'm 95% sure the importance of rewriting the SSA system won't actually be rewriting it, because they're not going to do that. They're going to stick a shim in front of the COBOL payment approving part written in whatever, and Musk will be in control of *that*. They have no interest in actually replacing the SSA system. They just want to defraud the fuck out of it in a way that's not immediately traceable, and they just won't care how many random cheques don't get sent because of it - it'll just be 'glitches in Biden's terrible old system'. And it can safely flow into Trump's 'sovereign wealth fund' aka wealth for the new sovereign, or wherever they want.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 7:42 AM on April 2 [8 favorites]
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 7:42 AM on April 2 [8 favorites]
Also no offense or anything but this comment says you have never dealt with a government agency or looked at any law. I'm working on a government project that was mandated to be deployed back in 2024, but still doesn't have any of the information required to actually implement it, and I'm talking basic information like file contents and name. We had to guess at all of that, and deploy into production to meet the mandate or face fines on somebody's guesses.
My point, which I didn't explained properly I think, is that a LOT of commercial software from successful compagnies like google or Apple ships by the magic of changing the goalposts. Not by abandoning the main functions of the software, but by simplifying around the edges or dropping things that seem marginal. A project manager from a government IT team can drop the ball and deliver a non-functional system, but they can't change the legal requirements.
New system might face hurdles of badly thought out regulations, but when you reimplement an already existing and functioning system you're not supposed to just drop functionality because it's inconvenient or doesn't fit your schedule. Not saying it doesn't happen, just saying comparing what apple or google does to what those system do doesn't really apply.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:43 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]
My point, which I didn't explained properly I think, is that a LOT of commercial software from successful compagnies like google or Apple ships by the magic of changing the goalposts. Not by abandoning the main functions of the software, but by simplifying around the edges or dropping things that seem marginal. A project manager from a government IT team can drop the ball and deliver a non-functional system, but they can't change the legal requirements.
New system might face hurdles of badly thought out regulations, but when you reimplement an already existing and functioning system you're not supposed to just drop functionality because it's inconvenient or doesn't fit your schedule. Not saying it doesn't happen, just saying comparing what apple or google does to what those system do doesn't really apply.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:43 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]
have fun finding sixty years of corner cases
posted by Sperry Topsider at 7:47 AM on April 2 [12 favorites]
posted by Sperry Topsider at 7:47 AM on April 2 [12 favorites]
Two consecutive posts from Bluesky which ring true. My reading is that Musk is going to come a cropper but will also cause huge amounts of damage in the process. Both of these are probably intended objectives.
posted by epo at 7:50 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]
posted by epo at 7:50 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]
How can I steal your money if you are going to be watching?
posted by pthomas745 at 7:52 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]
posted by pthomas745 at 7:52 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]
"Real America" won't complain if they miss a Social Security check.
Nice of them to just come right out and say "Real America" is rich people and rich people only.
My mother just came out of retirement in her 70s because she can't trust these stupid motherfuckers with her sole income anymore. I hate it for her, she was thriving so much in retirement. (She has also been thriving on the Zoloft and the therapist that she could finally afford once she got on Medicare...)
But we don't have a choice. The family simply cannot stay afloat if we need to fund her entirely, we are all barely managing as it is. An old lady needs to leave her dogs and go back to work at dawn every day again, after 50 years in the workforce and a scant 2 out of it, because of these utter pieces of shit-stained garbage.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:01 AM on April 2 [25 favorites]
Nice of them to just come right out and say "Real America" is rich people and rich people only.
My mother just came out of retirement in her 70s because she can't trust these stupid motherfuckers with her sole income anymore. I hate it for her, she was thriving so much in retirement. (She has also been thriving on the Zoloft and the therapist that she could finally afford once she got on Medicare...)
But we don't have a choice. The family simply cannot stay afloat if we need to fund her entirely, we are all barely managing as it is. An old lady needs to leave her dogs and go back to work at dawn every day again, after 50 years in the workforce and a scant 2 out of it, because of these utter pieces of shit-stained garbage.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:01 AM on April 2 [25 favorites]
I'm sorry, but COBOL for the IRS and Social Security should have been ditched a long time ago - it's just the honestly lazy malfeasance of whomever is the guy in the pull quote that has held it back.
I'm sorry, but this is a bad, poorly informed take. COBOL has survived for so long not just by inertia (though there has been some of that), but because it turns out that COBOL is really good at large scale batch processing in ways that proposed successors rarely match. Turns out that Admiral Hopper was pretty good at her job and knew what she was doing when she helped create the language.
The problem isn't that COBOL is old, it's that tech culture is addicted to novelty for the sake of novelty, instead of evaluating tools based on their actual effectiveness. And the answer to that is to remind people that standards usually become such for a reason.
Another issue is that there's no pipeline for new COBOL programmers is nonexistent.
My employer found the solution to this "problem", which is quite simple, really - you hire smart young developers, and pay them to learn COBOL with support from the old guard. Again, this goes back to that addiction to novelty.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:21 AM on April 2 [50 favorites]
I'm sorry, but this is a bad, poorly informed take. COBOL has survived for so long not just by inertia (though there has been some of that), but because it turns out that COBOL is really good at large scale batch processing in ways that proposed successors rarely match. Turns out that Admiral Hopper was pretty good at her job and knew what she was doing when she helped create the language.
The problem isn't that COBOL is old, it's that tech culture is addicted to novelty for the sake of novelty, instead of evaluating tools based on their actual effectiveness. And the answer to that is to remind people that standards usually become such for a reason.
Another issue is that there's no pipeline for new COBOL programmers is nonexistent.
My employer found the solution to this "problem", which is quite simple, really - you hire smart young developers, and pay them to learn COBOL with support from the old guard. Again, this goes back to that addiction to novelty.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:21 AM on April 2 [50 favorites]
I think the two most likely paths here are:
One, they begin piecemeal replacing the more isolated and testable functions and systems in Java. Years from now someone will discover that the Social Security code base is 90% legacy Fortran and 10% legacy Java, and we need to begin an effort to rewrite the whole thing in Rust or Swift or something.
Two, a small number of DOGE developers work to create a parallel version of the existing system. Six months from now they will announce that they have replicated 90% of the functionality and will be done in another six. We will never hear from them again. This is the ideal scenario.
posted by justkevin at 8:23 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]
One, they begin piecemeal replacing the more isolated and testable functions and systems in Java. Years from now someone will discover that the Social Security code base is 90% legacy Fortran and 10% legacy Java, and we need to begin an effort to rewrite the whole thing in Rust or Swift or something.
Two, a small number of DOGE developers work to create a parallel version of the existing system. Six months from now they will announce that they have replicated 90% of the functionality and will be done in another six. We will never hear from them again. This is the ideal scenario.
posted by justkevin at 8:23 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]
"I'm sorry, but COBOL for the IRS and Social Security should have been ditched a long time ago "Why?
posted by fullerine at 8:25 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
1.Slowly but surely I'm starting to think Musk maybe isn't quite the genius he's made himself out to be. Like, maybe he's a better grifter than anything else.
2. But seriously, it would be to everyone's benefit to shoe-horn that guy out of there and back to .... fucking anywhere else in the world. Because think about it, he fucks up Twitter/Tesla/whatever, it's a private company that affects a somewhat limited scope of people over a fairly small span of time. He starts fucking with Social Security and, uh... ahem, where's my fucking money that I've been paying into for the last 30+ years? (At the very least some competent politician should tie this around the neck of every Republican for the next twenty years - they want it? They should own the fuck out of it.)
posted by From Bklyn at 8:27 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
2. But seriously, it would be to everyone's benefit to shoe-horn that guy out of there and back to .... fucking anywhere else in the world. Because think about it, he fucks up Twitter/Tesla/whatever, it's a private company that affects a somewhat limited scope of people over a fairly small span of time. He starts fucking with Social Security and, uh... ahem, where's my fucking money that I've been paying into for the last 30+ years? (At the very least some competent politician should tie this around the neck of every Republican for the next twenty years - they want it? They should own the fuck out of it.)
posted by From Bklyn at 8:27 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
But we don't have a choice. The family simply cannot stay afloat if we need to fund her entirely, we are all barely managing as it is.
SSA cheques are the only income my Alzheimer's ridden mother has. If it's gone, the impact on her and so many other people will be enormous. I hate it when people say that maybe if SSA cheques disappear or impacted in any way, yeah that will teach those elderly Republican voters! Cool cool cool, but it also punishes elderly Democratic voters too.
posted by Kitteh at 8:37 AM on April 2 [14 favorites]
SSA cheques are the only income my Alzheimer's ridden mother has. If it's gone, the impact on her and so many other people will be enormous. I hate it when people say that maybe if SSA cheques disappear or impacted in any way, yeah that will teach those elderly Republican voters! Cool cool cool, but it also punishes elderly Democratic voters too.
posted by Kitteh at 8:37 AM on April 2 [14 favorites]
The thinking is probably "they are too old/ill to hold up a protest sign let alone do a violence so there is no downside here; fuck em."
Remember back in the 80s there was this Soviet immigrant comedian whose schtick was reciting something absolutely banal about the US and comparing it to the USSR, "when my parents wanted to have sex they told me to look out the window, but now i have a whole apartment to myself with four rooms AND a private bathroom" and then saying "WHAT A COUNTRY!"
Maybe there should be an American immigrant comedian in Europe whose uses the same schtick.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:54 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]
Remember back in the 80s there was this Soviet immigrant comedian whose schtick was reciting something absolutely banal about the US and comparing it to the USSR, "when my parents wanted to have sex they told me to look out the window, but now i have a whole apartment to myself with four rooms AND a private bathroom" and then saying "WHAT A COUNTRY!"
Maybe there should be an American immigrant comedian in Europe whose uses the same schtick.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:54 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]
Strategic precursor to privatization. See also NHS databases.
posted by aesop at 9:03 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
posted by aesop at 9:03 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
It seems unlikely to me that any extant LLMs were trained with a corpus of knowledge that contains instructions on how to actually be a truly good COBOL programmer. This is the kind of stuff you still need to buy books for, there are decades of edge cases piled up in ways that even an experienced programmer can't appreciate without consideration due to the nature of the language. Not only do they not have competent developers they don't have competent testers or even the ability to accurately interpret the requirements. There's almost no chance this will see the light of day but it's going to turn into one of history's most ironic projects as they floor it towards the painted cave on the sheer granite cliff ahead.
posted by feloniousmonk at 9:25 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]
posted by feloniousmonk at 9:25 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]
unless you're a 20+ year veteran of mainframe migrations, the role here is essentially, "listen to someone who is."
posted by j_curiouser at 9:31 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
posted by j_curiouser at 9:31 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
The thinking is probably "they are too old/ill to hold up a protest sign let alone do a violence so there is no downside here; fuck em."
Honestly if Lutnick's statement quoted above is anything to go by, the thinking is just "Well my parents have money and my friends' parents have money ergo all people who matter have money and I don't really understand that anyone else is real."
It's a bit of a stretch to call that "thinking," since it's roughly on the level of a gerbil hoarding food pellets.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:34 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
Honestly if Lutnick's statement quoted above is anything to go by, the thinking is just "Well my parents have money and my friends' parents have money ergo all people who matter have money and I don't really understand that anyone else is real."
It's a bit of a stretch to call that "thinking," since it's roughly on the level of a gerbil hoarding food pellets.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:34 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
I spent the first 20 years of my programming career doing mostly COBOL work. Here's a bit of COBOL magic I did:
There was this manufacturing accounting system I was called to fix. The "how much money did it cost to manufacture this component?" part couldn't seem to arrive at the correct result. I looked at the problem and realized that the only correct solution would require traversing a binary tree (the manufacturing process could fork and parts become separated then merged together back down the line). Traversing a binary tree is no biggie: just use recursion. Problem: there was no way to do recursive procedure calls in the flavor of COBOL I had to work with. Solution: build my own parameter stack and use recursive PERFORMs. That is, use a PERFORM range than can call itself.
Now, old hands will blanch at the phrase "recursive PERFORM". In some implementations of COBOL, this is impossible, since the PERFORM statement ALTERS the RETURN point on the fly. But the particular OS I was using kept its PERFORM return points on a stack, so recursive PERFORMs would work as long as the code could keep track of the parameters on the "parameter stack" that I created.
TL;DR: I used "magic" to solve this accounting problem. Hey, good luck AI in figuring out why I did that! (I COMMENTed the code extensively, but does AI even look at COMMENTs? I doubt it.)
posted by SPrintF at 9:51 AM on April 2 [30 favorites]
There was this manufacturing accounting system I was called to fix. The "how much money did it cost to manufacture this component?" part couldn't seem to arrive at the correct result. I looked at the problem and realized that the only correct solution would require traversing a binary tree (the manufacturing process could fork and parts become separated then merged together back down the line). Traversing a binary tree is no biggie: just use recursion. Problem: there was no way to do recursive procedure calls in the flavor of COBOL I had to work with. Solution: build my own parameter stack and use recursive PERFORMs. That is, use a PERFORM range than can call itself.
Now, old hands will blanch at the phrase "recursive PERFORM". In some implementations of COBOL, this is impossible, since the PERFORM statement ALTERS the RETURN point on the fly. But the particular OS I was using kept its PERFORM return points on a stack, so recursive PERFORMs would work as long as the code could keep track of the parameters on the "parameter stack" that I created.
TL;DR: I used "magic" to solve this accounting problem. Hey, good luck AI in figuring out why I did that! (I COMMENTed the code extensively, but does AI even look at COMMENTs? I doubt it.)
posted by SPrintF at 9:51 AM on April 2 [30 favorites]
People keep complaining that the only people at protests are little old ladies. But that’s who protests, because our kids if we have them are adults and we are willing to be arrested if we have to. We are also the ones who vote. And we call our elected representatives, and yes, a few of us have money in retirement funds. But I am one of the few people my age (the generalization about boomers is an average, which means much of the wealth is concentrated in the tail of the bell curve) who might actually survive if they take away Social Security.
Social Security, even for people who were employed all their lives is not enough - it’s a safety net for people who through no fault of their own have ended up in a tough situation. I am 73, which means the odds I will live into my 90’s are not bad; the company that administers my 401(k) has a plea on the home page asking us please not to withdraw all our money in the present market, but if the market gets much worse I may have to, if they destroy Social Security.
All of which I said to my elected representatives when I emailed them today.
posted by Peach at 9:51 AM on April 2 [19 favorites]
Social Security, even for people who were employed all their lives is not enough - it’s a safety net for people who through no fault of their own have ended up in a tough situation. I am 73, which means the odds I will live into my 90’s are not bad; the company that administers my 401(k) has a plea on the home page asking us please not to withdraw all our money in the present market, but if the market gets much worse I may have to, if they destroy Social Security.
All of which I said to my elected representatives when I emailed them today.
posted by Peach at 9:51 AM on April 2 [19 favorites]
It seems unlikely to me that any extant LLMs were trained with a corpus of knowledge that contains instructions on how to actually be a truly good COBOL programmer.
Indeed. One of the main reasons LLMs can get a decent grasp on (some) programming languages is that GitHub and open source software in general provide an enormous amount of training data for those languages, but that's just not true of COBOL, for many reasons. There are ~6k COBOL repos on GitHub, and the vast majority appear to be "Hello, World" or other basic homework projects written by students learning COBOL for a class. Filtering by projects with more than 5 followers and with an update in the past year (as a proxy for a project being at least vaguely relevant in the real world) cuts that ~6k down to 36, which is basically nothing.
By comparison, there are ~173,000 such Python repos on GH, and many of those are huge.
And sure enough, what work has been done on evaluating the abilities of LLMs to write COBOL has found that they are terrible at it:
posted by jedicus at 9:58 AM on April 2 [16 favorites]
Indeed. One of the main reasons LLMs can get a decent grasp on (some) programming languages is that GitHub and open source software in general provide an enormous amount of training data for those languages, but that's just not true of COBOL, for many reasons. There are ~6k COBOL repos on GitHub, and the vast majority appear to be "Hello, World" or other basic homework projects written by students learning COBOL for a class. Filtering by projects with more than 5 followers and with an update in the past year (as a proxy for a project being at least vaguely relevant in the real world) cuts that ~6k down to 36, which is basically nothing.
By comparison, there are ~173,000 such Python repos on GH, and many of those are huge.
And sure enough, what work has been done on evaluating the abilities of LLMs to write COBOL has found that they are terrible at it:
GPT-4 - the best-performing model - generates a correct solution for 10.27% of problems. Compare this to [the Python equivalent], where it solves 67% of problems. CodeLlama, one of the best open-source coding models, fares even worse, with the 34b variant only clocking 2%. COBOLEval is hard.That's really, really bad. GPT-4 is a little out of date, but given the continued lack of training data and the absence of any notable announced improvements in this area, I doubt that newer models are much better, and they would need to be wildly better to be trusted with a large, mature, critical codebase like this. Like, better than they are at Python.
Looking at the failure cases, we can see that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to generate COBOL that even compiles. Only 47.94% of GPT-4 generated solutions compile with GnuCOBOL.
posted by jedicus at 9:58 AM on April 2 [16 favorites]
does AI even look at COMMENTs? I doubt it.
It does, at least in the handful of languages I've used LLMs with, but they've been trained on so little COBOL that there's no telling how well they do or don't take into account COBOL comments, especially if their training data used an idiosyncratic comment block structure or was poorly commented.
posted by jedicus at 10:01 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]
It does, at least in the handful of languages I've used LLMs with, but they've been trained on so little COBOL that there's no telling how well they do or don't take into account COBOL comments, especially if their training data used an idiosyncratic comment block structure or was poorly commented.
posted by jedicus at 10:01 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]
It’s hilarious (in a very grim way), that the random developers on MeFi all have the exact same response to this. (I did a double take when reading the thread, because some comments are almost word for word what I have said elsewhere.) This is so obvious, so elementary, that it throws all the shade on DOGE— the fact that they think this is possible and a good idea alone should disqualify them from attempting it.
posted by instamatic at 10:16 AM on April 2 [14 favorites]
posted by instamatic at 10:16 AM on April 2 [14 favorites]
It seems unlikely to me that any extant LLMs were trained with a corpus of knowledge that contains instructions on how to actually be a truly good COBOL programmer.
So much this. Beyond the programming language generation gap, most good COBOL would not be on GitHub or open sourced even if it were modern. It is specifically a language designed for business in the late Cold War - thus there will be vanishingly little training data to draw from. This is very nearly the worst case possible for LLM code assistance except attempting the exact same thing plus what SprintF just described: hacking a major programming concept like recursion into a language where literally no training data will suggest recursion is even possible because outside the context of the current project it isn’t.
I’m struggling to think of a worse refactor to attempt with coding assistance from LLMs. Air traffic control? ICBM command and control? Obviously the point of this exercise is to just demolish the system already in place and claim victory, but it’s so fucking insulting that they pretend otherwise.
posted by Ryvar at 10:18 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
So much this. Beyond the programming language generation gap, most good COBOL would not be on GitHub or open sourced even if it were modern. It is specifically a language designed for business in the late Cold War - thus there will be vanishingly little training data to draw from. This is very nearly the worst case possible for LLM code assistance except attempting the exact same thing plus what SprintF just described: hacking a major programming concept like recursion into a language where literally no training data will suggest recursion is even possible because outside the context of the current project it isn’t.
I’m struggling to think of a worse refactor to attempt with coding assistance from LLMs. Air traffic control? ICBM command and control? Obviously the point of this exercise is to just demolish the system already in place and claim victory, but it’s so fucking insulting that they pretend otherwise.
posted by Ryvar at 10:18 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
Well Socky isn't doing anything now its not April 1st. Set Socky loose!
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:26 AM on April 2 [12 favorites]
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:26 AM on April 2 [12 favorites]
I'm sorry, but COBOL for the IRS and Social Security should have been ditched a long time ago - it's just the honestly lazy malfeasance of whomever is the guy in the pull quote that has held it back.I agree with the first part – the language and tools are not getting any fresher and developers are harder to find – but I think the person in that quote is only partially wrong. It sounds like they still have the habits of a 20th century developer where people were a lot less concerned about security but there’s a deeper truth about software which is really important: you shouldn’t change things just for the sake of change, but you absolutely need to maintain the ability to change things when necessary. For an agency like Social Security, they don’t have an emergency saying all of their COBOL is unsafe to use but since it’s a running system they do have a big risk as the people who know it retire. Splitting functionality into more maintainable components should be a natural part of their work spread over years, and that’s especially true for an agency which is guaranteed to have changes originating from outside of their control.
Now, as it turns out they’ve been trying to modernize for decades and we get to the real problem: doing that well requires hiring smart people and paying them well. Contractors cost twice as much and turn over more, and a key part of this process is maintaining institutional knowledge. Unfortunately, for many years Congress has balked at hiring federal employees and the pay scale has lagged behind the private sector so hiring experts was hard even before the current instability removed the benefit of job security. The question shouldn’t be COBOL but the institutional challenges towards actively maintaining software. If it’s running, it’s done in the same way that your garden is done.
posted by adamsc at 10:27 AM on April 2 [8 favorites]
My employer found the solution to this "problem", which is quite simple, really - you hire smart young developers, and pay them to learn COBOL with support from the old guard. Again, this goes back to that addiction to novelty.
The problem isn't just an addiction to novelty but a managerial expectation that you can just hire people with a minimum number of years of experience in any random thing, where in reality the random thing is specialized enough that the hiring pool is small, if not nonexistent. But most managers won't budge on that expectation, even in the face of job openings that stay unfilled for years. It's the job market's fault, not impossible standards. Why pay to train people when you could just complain you can't hire anybody?
But now with AI plagiarism machines (er, "coding assistants") and "vibe coding" all the management bros on LinkedIn are overjoyed at the idea they won't even have to hire experienced programmers at all. They can just let a machine steal (er, "write") code that may or may not actually do what they want, and cash out before anybody finds out where the mistakes are. It's perfect for a legacy system like Social Security.
posted by fedward at 10:28 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]
The problem isn't just an addiction to novelty but a managerial expectation that you can just hire people with a minimum number of years of experience in any random thing, where in reality the random thing is specialized enough that the hiring pool is small, if not nonexistent. But most managers won't budge on that expectation, even in the face of job openings that stay unfilled for years. It's the job market's fault, not impossible standards. Why pay to train people when you could just complain you can't hire anybody?
But now with AI plagiarism machines (er, "coding assistants") and "vibe coding" all the management bros on LinkedIn are overjoyed at the idea they won't even have to hire experienced programmers at all. They can just let a machine steal (er, "write") code that may or may not actually do what they want, and cash out before anybody finds out where the mistakes are. It's perfect for a legacy system like Social Security.
posted by fedward at 10:28 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]
Unfortunately, for many years Congress has balked at hiring federal employees and the pay scale has lagged behind the private sector so hiring experts was hard even before the current instability removed the benefit of job security.
Also this, and it plays into the whole Republican "government can never work" rug pull, where they cripple it themselves and then cynically hold it up as an example of why they're right.
posted by fedward at 10:31 AM on April 2 [12 favorites]
Also this, and it plays into the whole Republican "government can never work" rug pull, where they cripple it themselves and then cynically hold it up as an example of why they're right.
posted by fedward at 10:31 AM on April 2 [12 favorites]
it throws all the shade on DOGE— the fact that they think this is possible and a good idea alone should disqualify them from attempting it.
are the people behind this really so clueless, or is their objective, as others have suggested, purely destructive
posted by ginger.beef at 10:33 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]
are the people behind this really so clueless, or is their objective, as others have suggested, purely destructive
posted by ginger.beef at 10:33 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]
“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas
This Iain M. Banks fan is 100% correct. Unfortunately, the other, more famous and more idiotic one (who has apparently not read the books closely, judging by his behaviour) is not, in fact, worried about any of those things.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:35 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]
This Iain M. Banks fan is 100% correct. Unfortunately, the other, more famous and more idiotic one (who has apparently not read the books closely, judging by his behaviour) is not, in fact, worried about any of those things.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:35 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]
are the people behind this really so clueless, or is their objective, as others have suggested, purely destructive
¿Porque no los dos?
posted by fedward at 10:36 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
¿Porque no los dos?
posted by fedward at 10:36 AM on April 2 [10 favorites]
Indeed. One of the main reasons LLMs can get a decent grasp on (some) programming languages is that GitHub and open source software in general provide an enormous amount of training data for those languages
Define "decent". I can't tell you how many times Gemini has given me code that uses make-believe methods or stuff that must have come from someone's custom re-implementation of a library. One time I even got some code that rather obviously came from a Python PEP that had been rejected.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:14 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
Define "decent". I can't tell you how many times Gemini has given me code that uses make-believe methods or stuff that must have come from someone's custom re-implementation of a library. One time I even got some code that rather obviously came from a Python PEP that had been rejected.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:14 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]
At the very least some competent politician should tie this around the neck of every Republican for the next twenty years
“I’m not a member of any organized political party…. I’m a Democrat.”
— Will Rogers
posted by kirkaracha at 11:21 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]
“I’m not a member of any organized political party…. I’m a Democrat.”
— Will Rogers
posted by kirkaracha at 11:21 AM on April 2 [2 favorites]
Such a great FPP title. We have an old Cobol system of comparable size that we've been steadily migrating from for the last 10 years or so. Even though we're in control of all the requirements, and know our entire system end-to-end, tackling all the unexpected issues and edge cases has been an enormous project. Likewise, the straddle time during our first system transition was especially painful, and required about 6 months of human glue in taskforce mode to make actually happen. The idea that you can just throw gen AI and a few junior level developers at this problem and expect a working system to magically appear in a few months is so divorced from reality, I have no words.
posted by lock robster at 11:28 AM on April 2 [7 favorites]
posted by lock robster at 11:28 AM on April 2 [7 favorites]
It's almost like muskrat has never worked in software development at anything resembling a professional level...
posted by mrgoat at 11:31 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]
posted by mrgoat at 11:31 AM on April 2 [4 favorites]
The whole point of this boondoggle is the destruction of Social Security, in the easiest Silicon Valley method that has been proven to work - blame it on the algorithm and bad code and 'oops we deleted the backups of the old system!'
This is from the same group who keep going 'OMG! We discovered massive fraud!'
Musk Berated for 'Absurd' Social Security Fraud Lies
"Elon and his all-male team lie about Social Security like other people chew gum," said one former head of the agency.
This is from the same group who keep going 'OMG! We discovered massive fraud!'
Musk Berated for 'Absurd' Social Security Fraud Lies
"Elon and his all-male team lie about Social Security like other people chew gum," said one former head of the agency.
Musk and seven DOGE staffers—all of them men—appeared on Fox News Thursday, where the world's richest person called the Trump administration's crusade to eviscerate the federal government under pretext of improving efficiency "the biggest revolution in the government since the original revolution" in 1776.posted by rambling wanderlust at 11:32 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
The DOGE staffers repeated unfounded claims that Social Security is riddled with fraud; that in some cases, 40% of calls to the Social Security Administration phone center are fraudulent; and that millions of people aged 120 and older are registered with SSA.
Acknowledging that DOGE's wrecking-ball approach to government reform is getting "a lot of complaints along the way," Musk said: "You know who complains the loudest, and with the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters."
...
Responding to what she called Musk's "absurd claim," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works (SSW), said Friday that "the truth is that Social Security has a fraud rate of 0.00625%, far lower than private sector retirement programs."
I am struck by the amount of traffic here focusing on how this is a foolhardy project, or above ("divorced from reality")
you're not exactly wrong, but if they are just looking to break things then this is 100% aligned with their current reality and the reality they seek to create
if fascists announce they are hunting me down to show me how to tie my shoes properly and people devote time to observing that their methods of tying shoes is ridiculous/ineffective/etc, meanwhile I'm getting beat to death in the street, well. Who here needs a reality check
posted by ginger.beef at 11:35 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
you're not exactly wrong, but if they are just looking to break things then this is 100% aligned with their current reality and the reality they seek to create
if fascists announce they are hunting me down to show me how to tie my shoes properly and people devote time to observing that their methods of tying shoes is ridiculous/ineffective/etc, meanwhile I'm getting beat to death in the street, well. Who here needs a reality check
posted by ginger.beef at 11:35 AM on April 2 [11 favorites]
imho there are more direct and easier ways to break the SSA and they're already doing some of those, so I'm not sure whether quixotic upgrade idea is intentionally part of a "break the SSA" program or not
posted by BungaDunga at 11:59 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]
posted by BungaDunga at 11:59 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]
At best this is utter stupidity, at worst and most likely it's intended to commit fraud or kill social security by crashing the system.
All three. Definitely fraud. Look at the myriad ways they're milking the system already. The resulting crash to the system throws society into a turmoil, makes for more fraud and grift with no accountability, and gets rid of those pesky olds and poors. When things go to hell, we get the Orange Wankstain declaring martial law and voting himself into the third term as Dicktator.
There's no coming back from this, because once the system is broken, it's to complex and expensive to recover and implement.
I read the other day that 25% of Ameri-can'ts feel they are prospering under Trump. I'd like to see what income bracket they're in. Sure ain't happening in my world, although the MAGA red-pillers I know are expecting the money to rain down on them any time now once those illegals are gone and the tariffs kick in. Oh yeah, the current cost of eggs is either Biden's fault or due to Hillary's emails.
posted by BlueHorse at 12:21 PM on April 2
All three. Definitely fraud. Look at the myriad ways they're milking the system already. The resulting crash to the system throws society into a turmoil, makes for more fraud and grift with no accountability, and gets rid of those pesky olds and poors. When things go to hell, we get the Orange Wankstain declaring martial law and voting himself into the third term as Dicktator.
There's no coming back from this, because once the system is broken, it's to complex and expensive to recover and implement.
I read the other day that 25% of Ameri-can'ts feel they are prospering under Trump. I'd like to see what income bracket they're in. Sure ain't happening in my world, although the MAGA red-pillers I know are expecting the money to rain down on them any time now once those illegals are gone and the tariffs kick in. Oh yeah, the current cost of eggs is either Biden's fault or due to Hillary's emails.
posted by BlueHorse at 12:21 PM on April 2
It is totally killing me how many people get sucked into the framing Republicans/DOGE provide, taking their 'stated reasons' as if they are even remotely related to what they actually want to do or implement, and arguing about it as if it is even remotely in good faith.
If you believe Musk who said "Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time" and then DOGE goes on with all sorts of easily refuted claims of fraud... Claiming tens of millions of dead people are collecting Social Security benefits, millions of non-permanent immigrants collecting benefits, etc., that they have anybody but their own interests in mind, there are some good deals on bridges out there for you...
They know that they can't just eliminate Social Security outright, but with the crippling 50% staff reduction combined with this 'rewrite' will make it much easier to disappear payments to people that they don't like. It isn't just about reimplementing what exists, but cutting the parts they hate and being able to put in new loopholes and backdoors where needed.
For example, DOGE have been very busy targeting Harris voting counties with their cuts: "92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts." Combine this with the Executive Order to combine Federal and State data across agencies with an automated AI pipeline to target all of their perceived enemies, and you can see where this rewrite is going to go in the end.
Just ask the poor people who DOGE has marked as dead at SSA, how their attempts to get their payments restarted are going so far. Or that Maryland father who got deported to the slave labor camp in El Salvador, and the Trump administration is like 'Too bad, there is nothing we can do, sucks to be him!'
posted by rambling wanderlust at 12:47 PM on April 2 [21 favorites]
If you believe Musk who said "Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time" and then DOGE goes on with all sorts of easily refuted claims of fraud... Claiming tens of millions of dead people are collecting Social Security benefits, millions of non-permanent immigrants collecting benefits, etc., that they have anybody but their own interests in mind, there are some good deals on bridges out there for you...
They know that they can't just eliminate Social Security outright, but with the crippling 50% staff reduction combined with this 'rewrite' will make it much easier to disappear payments to people that they don't like. It isn't just about reimplementing what exists, but cutting the parts they hate and being able to put in new loopholes and backdoors where needed.
For example, DOGE have been very busy targeting Harris voting counties with their cuts: "92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts." Combine this with the Executive Order to combine Federal and State data across agencies with an automated AI pipeline to target all of their perceived enemies, and you can see where this rewrite is going to go in the end.
Just ask the poor people who DOGE has marked as dead at SSA, how their attempts to get their payments restarted are going so far. Or that Maryland father who got deported to the slave labor camp in El Salvador, and the Trump administration is like 'Too bad, there is nothing we can do, sucks to be him!'
posted by rambling wanderlust at 12:47 PM on April 2 [21 favorites]
if fascists announce they are hunting me down to show me how to tie my shoes properly and people devote time to observing that their methods of tying shoes is ridiculous/ineffective/etc, meanwhile I'm getting beat to death in the street, well. Who here needs a reality check.
Right. So. Not sure if this is entirely directed my way, but my reality is that in the next few months, it's highly likely that a certain "merit-based" hire will ruin my life, irrevocably. I wish that was hyperbole, or unjustified, but it's not. If the fascists choose to pull the trigger, no cavalry is going to ride in and save the day at the 11th hour.
I hate it. I hate talking about it. I hate thinking about it. I hate having this sword constantly hanging over my head. Want to know what it's like being targeted by your government? You don't sleep at night. You stop eating well. You go over every decision you've ever made in your adult life and wonder, "Will this be the one they use against me?"
So, yes. I've become one of those people who copes by posting anonymously online, with the personal hope that the fascists in this world get so bogged down by their own incompetence that their dreams never have a chance to come true.
I get that fascism is scary, especially when you don't know how to fight it, and especially when you can't. But some of us are just trying to make do with the incredibly shitty hand we're dealt. If we snipe at each other, that's just one more win for them.
My 2¢.
posted by lock robster at 1:31 PM on April 2 [11 favorites]
Right. So. Not sure if this is entirely directed my way, but my reality is that in the next few months, it's highly likely that a certain "merit-based" hire will ruin my life, irrevocably. I wish that was hyperbole, or unjustified, but it's not. If the fascists choose to pull the trigger, no cavalry is going to ride in and save the day at the 11th hour.
I hate it. I hate talking about it. I hate thinking about it. I hate having this sword constantly hanging over my head. Want to know what it's like being targeted by your government? You don't sleep at night. You stop eating well. You go over every decision you've ever made in your adult life and wonder, "Will this be the one they use against me?"
So, yes. I've become one of those people who copes by posting anonymously online, with the personal hope that the fascists in this world get so bogged down by their own incompetence that their dreams never have a chance to come true.
I get that fascism is scary, especially when you don't know how to fight it, and especially when you can't. But some of us are just trying to make do with the incredibly shitty hand we're dealt. If we snipe at each other, that's just one more win for them.
My 2¢.
posted by lock robster at 1:31 PM on April 2 [11 favorites]
sorry, I could have made my point differently. I did latch onto your words but not as a direct response to your post, just generally think it's a mistake to characterize what these people are doing as in any way clueless or bumbling
posted by ginger.beef at 2:42 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]
posted by ginger.beef at 2:42 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]
Spending time and effort on moving away from COBOL is not a bad idea at all - but of course the potential for Elon’s half-arsed efforts to make everything worse is very very high. I would put it at a probability of 100%.
This is the end result of starving these agencies of funding over decades.
posted by awfurby at 3:35 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]
This is the end result of starving these agencies of funding over decades.
posted by awfurby at 3:35 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]
I feel like someone with some authority—the ACM, say—should come forward and say what a bad idea this is.
posted by newdaddy at 3:55 PM on April 2 [3 favorites]
posted by newdaddy at 3:55 PM on April 2 [3 favorites]
As I like to say: Start by identifying the problem(s) you're trying to solve. If it doesn't solve any legitimate problems, don't do it.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:38 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:38 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]
Elon, BigBallz, and the rest want to move the IRS to a typical off-premises model wherein they own the companies contracted to maintain the edge access and data stores. They don’t care what the language is, or whether it works, or whatever. They want those contracts, want to skim 20% off the top. They’ll do and say anything to bring this about.
They are looking at a lifetime of leisure, private jets, TV appearances, hot girlfriends, and caviar.
The objections in this thread, the deaths of the needy, the looming needless destruction, all besides the point.
posted by pdoege at 5:14 PM on April 2 [10 favorites]
They are looking at a lifetime of leisure, private jets, TV appearances, hot girlfriends, and caviar.
The objections in this thread, the deaths of the needy, the looming needless destruction, all besides the point.
posted by pdoege at 5:14 PM on April 2 [10 favorites]
Hi there, this is going to the world's biggest-ever face splat.
It would be a lot of fun to watch the incompetent morons drive themselves straight off the cliff and get their well-earned just deserts - if not for the millions of people who are going to be hurt badly, of course.
posted by flug at 6:02 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]
It would be a lot of fun to watch the incompetent morons drive themselves straight off the cliff and get their well-earned just deserts - if not for the millions of people who are going to be hurt badly, of course.
posted by flug at 6:02 PM on April 2 [2 favorites]
Yeah unrelated to this, about 2 weeks ago we were told we have until April 15 to convert all files to the modern .docx, .xlsx, etc (not old .doc format), add the current flavor of sensitivity level into the filenames, electronically "label" all files with the sensitivity label (which is not the same as the filename, but does automatically encrypt the files properly for the sensitivity level), and upload them into "the cloud" (which storage location should be ready "any time now"). Or else it will all be lost. Oh by the way "losing" legal records is illegal, and accidentally uploading something to the cloud that isn't properly labelled is also illegal.
I let File Explorer count the files just in my division's shared network drive, and I'm just a small fraction of the organization. Over 1.2 million files. Assume 1 minute per file (not counting the "hey does anyone still need this" negotiation among hundreds of people), that's over 8 person-years of work. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to make the deadline. Within a week it was already pushed back... to June. Thanks for that.
I mean if I had 8 person-years of people available not doing their day jobs, Musk and co would have figured out how to fire us all already.
posted by ctmf at 6:20 PM on April 2 [17 favorites]
I let File Explorer count the files just in my division's shared network drive, and I'm just a small fraction of the organization. Over 1.2 million files. Assume 1 minute per file (not counting the "hey does anyone still need this" negotiation among hundreds of people), that's over 8 person-years of work. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to make the deadline. Within a week it was already pushed back... to June. Thanks for that.
I mean if I had 8 person-years of people available not doing their day jobs, Musk and co would have figured out how to fire us all already.
posted by ctmf at 6:20 PM on April 2 [17 favorites]
Oh and working too much overtime at our paygrades, also illegal.
posted by ctmf at 6:49 PM on April 2 [7 favorites]
posted by ctmf at 6:49 PM on April 2 [7 favorites]
I've seen skilled organizations, without pre-existing turnover, and with what seemed at the time careful planning and coordination, attempt much simpler ports that went very, very badly.
Excellent odds with this crew that they crash everything and have to revert to paper ledgers.
posted by zippy at 7:19 PM on April 2 [3 favorites]
Excellent odds with this crew that they crash everything and have to revert to paper ledgers.
posted by zippy at 7:19 PM on April 2 [3 favorites]
> i feel like someone with some authority—the acm, say—should come forward and say what a bad idea this is.
[1 favorite −] favorite added! [⚑]
posted by Sperry Topsider at 8:47 PM on April 2
[1 favorite −] favorite added! [⚑]
posted by Sperry Topsider at 8:47 PM on April 2
@ctmf
You might find this macro useful, it can convert about 50 files per minute:
https://ss64.com/office/word-convert.html
So 1.2 million files are likely to take at least 400 hours.
You can also automate applying a sensitivity label.
posted by Lanark at 1:48 AM on April 3 [6 favorites]
You might find this macro useful, it can convert about 50 files per minute:
https://ss64.com/office/word-convert.html
So 1.2 million files are likely to take at least 400 hours.
You can also automate applying a sensitivity label.
posted by Lanark at 1:48 AM on April 3 [6 favorites]
An example of how the Republicans are already weaponizing Social Security:
Leaked Emails Expose Trump's Devastating Revenge Plot on Dem. Governor
Maine Governor Janet Mills stood up to Donald Trump, and he can’t get over it.
Leaked Emails Expose Trump's Devastating Revenge Plot on Dem. Governor
Maine Governor Janet Mills stood up to Donald Trump, and he can’t get over it.
Lawmakers are calling on the Social Security Administration chief to resign after internal emails revealed that the administration shut Maine off from the late-age insurance program in retaliation for publicly defying the MAGA agenda.posted by rambling wanderlust at 3:24 AM on April 3 [6 favorites]
Representative Gerry Connolly called Tuesday for the resignation of Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of social security. In a release, Connolly’s office shared emails sent by Dudek in which the DOGE acolyte inquired to his staff about which contracts Maine had with his agency and ultimately chose to cancel them, despite being aware that doing so would increase fraud and waste.
“Despite reinstating the contracts on March 7, 2025, and claiming that he did not intend to harm the people of Maine, the emails obtained by the Committee show that Acting Commissioner Dudek knew of the negative impacts of cancelling the programs and was willing to hurt the people of Maine and waste taxpayer money to avenge President Trump,” Connolly’s office wrote.
As a veteran of several "modernize ALL the things" projects, I speak from experience when I say that this rewrite effort will have all the efficiency, efficacy, and safety of a burning thermite-filled clown car careening over a mile-high cliff onto an orphanage built on a Superfund site.
Those broccoli-haired assholes are going to try to redo it all in JavaScript, aren't they?
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:29 AM on April 3 [3 favorites]
Those broccoli-haired assholes are going to try to redo it all in JavaScript, aren't they?
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:29 AM on April 3 [3 favorites]
I feel like someone with some authority—the ACM, say—should come forward and say what a bad idea this is.
It wouldn't matter if they did. These guys recognize no authority, no expertise, other than their own. The electoral base that put them in this position resents experts too, and even if they didn't the public reaction would still probably be something along the lines of TLDR LOL.
posted by fedward at 7:14 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]
It wouldn't matter if they did. These guys recognize no authority, no expertise, other than their own. The electoral base that put them in this position resents experts too, and even if they didn't the public reaction would still probably be something along the lines of TLDR LOL.
posted by fedward at 7:14 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]
yeah but in a hypothetical postfascist future we will know which organizations knuckled under and which organizations spoke sense
posted by Sperry Topsider at 11:39 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]
posted by Sperry Topsider at 11:39 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]
100% of the value of a working system is that it works.
if ya want to do a rewrite on even a small component, ya fucken a better have a demonstrable value-add.
I concur that the goal is to quickly and irreversibly crash the system.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:04 PM on April 3 [5 favorites]
if ya want to do a rewrite on even a small component, ya fucken a better have a demonstrable value-add.
I concur that the goal is to quickly and irreversibly crash the system.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:04 PM on April 3 [5 favorites]
I work on a financial system several orders of magnitude larger than this in many dimensions, though not in the dollar amount processed (I get to use the word quadrillion at work to describe monthly values, just not for money sadly) complete with undocumented behavior that is essential to system function, and decades of technical debt, not to mention significant legal consequences to fucking up. Migrating this kind of system is actually a good idea and possible. However even within my commercial context, we have the rigor of having engineers write incredibly detailed documents for literally any kind of customer impact that we can detect and prioritize every action that document recommends above normal work, and accept that projects of the scale require hundreds of engineers paid quite a lot of money over many years along with product and management functions - and this is just with significant legal and financial consequences for screwing up, not screwing up someone’s retirement check and their life. When I look at this project, I don’t think up a bunch of technical reasons that it can’t happen because it certainly can and honestly I’m pretty sure it would not be as significant as stuff that goes on in Silicon Valley on the regular to accomplish it…. But do you think these clowns are going to approach it with anything close to the rigor necessary? Will they even notice when the checks don’t go out? If they do, will they hold people’s feet to the fire until all of that stuff is made right and the system is changed so it can’t happen again? Probably not possible in the new paradigm of burn the government down every four years… so we keep the COBOL going in the SSA and maybe the new Manhattan Project is to make it future proof to run that 70s code forever… but do you think these clowns are gonna do that? Anyway, this is just a different perspective on we’re screwed, isn’t it? At least we all agree
posted by thedaniel at 1:33 PM on April 3 [8 favorites]
posted by thedaniel at 1:33 PM on April 3 [8 favorites]
You might find this macro useful, it can convert about 50 files per minute
Not directly, users can't use scripts or macros; they're all disabled. Security!
Which isn't to say it's not useful. I'll point the IT department at them and see if they'll make us an approved "tool" that we can run from our machines.
I can use one-liners in power shell if I type them manually at the prompt, which is at least helping me *find* all these legacy files for conversion in step 1. I can't really think of any way to automate it if I need to catch a file with sensitive contents that wasn't labelled in the filename where a script can see it. Someone is going to have to open files to verify unless it's obvious from the name.
posted by ctmf at 5:55 PM on April 3 [2 favorites]
Not directly, users can't use scripts or macros; they're all disabled. Security!
Which isn't to say it's not useful. I'll point the IT department at them and see if they'll make us an approved "tool" that we can run from our machines.
I can use one-liners in power shell if I type them manually at the prompt, which is at least helping me *find* all these legacy files for conversion in step 1. I can't really think of any way to automate it if I need to catch a file with sensitive contents that wasn't labelled in the filename where a script can see it. Someone is going to have to open files to verify unless it's obvious from the name.
posted by ctmf at 5:55 PM on April 3 [2 favorites]
Maybe "AI" could do it *punches self in the face*
(I think my strategy is going to be to sort by "last accessed" and do my reasonable best, but then when I don't succeed, just... not delete anything. If it's lost, well then someone is going to have to be the person who legally destroyed those records by deleting or pulling the plug on the last server, and that person won't be me)
posted by ctmf at 5:59 PM on April 3 [1 favorite]
(I think my strategy is going to be to sort by "last accessed" and do my reasonable best, but then when I don't succeed, just... not delete anything. If it's lost, well then someone is going to have to be the person who legally destroyed those records by deleting or pulling the plug on the last server, and that person won't be me)
posted by ctmf at 5:59 PM on April 3 [1 favorite]
Also on the same note, wielded by a skilled practitioner generative AI is an absolutely legit velocity multiplier and I’m surprised that the programmers on this site are so united in rejecting it but.. skilled practitioner implies domain knowledge and attention and care to detail, that’s another aspect where the doge stuff is often actually a reasonable way to approach solving these problems but executed in a context where none of the guardrails and incentives to actually make the approach work will ever happen
posted by thedaniel at 12:33 AM on April 4
posted by thedaniel at 12:33 AM on April 4
wielded by a skilled practitioner generative AI is an absolutely legit velocity multiplier and I’m surprised that the programmers on this site are so united in rejecting itFrom my perspective, it’s the marketing: the pitch should be “it makes your skilled developers 10-30% faster”, but the money guys want to hear “you can fire 80% of your most expensive employees” and so that’s what the people selling tools are claiming.
The problem in all cases is that LLMs don’t understand anything but are repeating patterns. That’s still quite useful but it means you need a skilled reviewer and rigorous testing or you get what is becoming a cliche of a “vibe coder” putting something into production and then realizing that they don’t know how to fix the security holes and other bugs because they didn’t understand how it worked in the first place. That’s especially bad for something like Social Security both because you really don’t want that class of problem in a financial system millions of people depend on, and because both LLMs and the DOGE staff lack experience with the COBOL language and the environment it runs so the quality of the code is going to be lower and they have less capacity to recognize that before something blows up.
posted by adamsc at 5:47 AM on April 4 [2 favorites]
The problem in all cases is that LLMs don’t understand anything but are repeating patterns.
There are at least two more problems there:
(1) The patterns being repeated might actually suck, which I think of as the Stack Overflow problem. On SO a common pattern was that somebody didn't read the question well but rushed to post an answer anyway, so the top answer was often a poor fit for the question. Combine that with the fact that an LLM might not know the difference between bad code and good code, and you're rolling the dice as to whether the proffered solution solves the problem in an idiomatic, performant way, blithely repeats somebody's bad code from a poorly understood student assignment, or even comes close to solving your problem at all. I'd rather not waste my time trying to figure out which one I got.
(2) There's no way to know if the solution is plagiarized from code that the LLM shouldn't have been trained on in the first place, so you could be stepping on a copyright/trademark landmine, and there's no way to know until you get sued.
I find it really worrisome how blasé some programmers are about plagiarized code of unknown provenance and copyright. The thought of that exposure gives me the heebie-jeebies.
posted by fedward at 9:20 AM on April 4 [2 favorites]
There are at least two more problems there:
(1) The patterns being repeated might actually suck, which I think of as the Stack Overflow problem. On SO a common pattern was that somebody didn't read the question well but rushed to post an answer anyway, so the top answer was often a poor fit for the question. Combine that with the fact that an LLM might not know the difference between bad code and good code, and you're rolling the dice as to whether the proffered solution solves the problem in an idiomatic, performant way, blithely repeats somebody's bad code from a poorly understood student assignment, or even comes close to solving your problem at all. I'd rather not waste my time trying to figure out which one I got.
(2) There's no way to know if the solution is plagiarized from code that the LLM shouldn't have been trained on in the first place, so you could be stepping on a copyright/trademark landmine, and there's no way to know until you get sued.
I find it really worrisome how blasé some programmers are about plagiarized code of unknown provenance and copyright. The thought of that exposure gives me the heebie-jeebies.
posted by fedward at 9:20 AM on April 4 [2 favorites]
I get what you’re saying, adamsc, but I am operating on observations of hundreds of people at a very large company and a large part of my job is to make the engineering process for these people better.. I am convinced that these tools have a lot of legitimate non-BS uses that fit in with normal mature software development processes, and I have a proper SWE background. I have to detach from this topic though because I think that going on a deep dive of why I think this is not only a derail here, but it approaches discussing things that I am not comfortable discussing, given my obligation to keep most details of my work confidential. I wouldn’t suggest they use LLMs on Social Security in any case lol
posted by thedaniel at 10:52 AM on April 4
posted by thedaniel at 10:52 AM on April 4
There are at least two more problems there:Fair, I would class both of those broadly under the umbrella of lack of cognition but splitting it is reasonable, too. There’s no “is this right?” or “can I use this?” debate because there’s no mind to ask that question. Given the domain, I think the first will be worse because there’s less copyrighted code in their training corpus and the code is likely to be more idiosyncratic because most COBOL code was written before the open source movement.
I am convinced that these tools have a lot of legitimate non-BS uses that fit in with normal mature software development processesI don’t disagree. It’s been frustrating watching people oversell the tools or claim that AGI is right around the corner because unlike something like blockchains there is a lot of utility here if you embrace what they’re good at and build your workflow around their strengths and limitations.
posted by adamsc at 11:10 AM on April 4 [1 favorite]
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posted by leotrotsky at 5:08 AM on April 2 [27 favorites]