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It's not implausible that we'll wind up with something like the extremely long-lasting market for COBOL developers. A niche skill that's absolutely essential in a few places, and which can command high salaries as a result... for a few people. Only so many huge legacy banking systems, after all.

The problem, as with COBOL, would be the loss of the existing pipeline that created new competent high-level developers.



IBM just launched a new mainframe with AI accelerators https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-code-assistant-z in part to help rewrite production COBOL into Java https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-code-assistant-z


"The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x." -- Kent Beck


Sounds fantastic! And it might also help with ageism, when "learned programming long before LLMs" is recognized as a differentiator.

I, for one, welcome this change very much, disastrous as it sounds.




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