Comment by cmrdporcupine
5 hours ago
Given the mass of code out there, it strikes me it's only a matter of time before someone fine tunes one of the larger more competent coding models on COBOL. If they haven't already.
Personally I've had a lot of luck Opus etc with "odd" languages just making sure that the prompt is heavily tuned to describe best practices and reinforce descriptions of differences with "similar" languages. A few months ago with Sonnet 4, etc. this was dicey. Now I can run Opus 4.5 on my own rather bespoke language and get mostly excellent output. Especially when it has good tooling for verification, and reference documentation available.
The downside is you use quite a bit of tokens doing this. Which is where I think fine tuning could help.
I bet one of the larger airlines or banks could dump some cash over to Anthropic etc to produce a custom trained model using a corpus of banking etc software, along with tools around the backend systems and so on. Worthwhile investment.
In any case I can't see how this would be a threat to people who work in those domains. They'd be absolutely invaluable to understand and apply and review and improve the output. I can imagine it making their jobs 10x more pleasant though.
> competent coding models on COBOL
Which COBOL... This is a particular issue in COBOL is it's a much more fragmented language than most people outside the industry would expect. While a model would be useful for the company that supplied the data, the amount of transference may be more limited than one would expect.