Those old COBOL programmers in the government are toast. No more premium gigs for the COBOL contractors either.

The stock is actually down 13% on the day. That is $31 billion in market cap gone!

Anthropic has solved the coding problem.

BREAKING: IBM stock, $IBM, falls over -10% after Anthropic announces that Claude can streamline COBOL code.

It’s becoming increasingly clear how pivotal the times we are in right now truly are. pic.twitter.com/yGVZBeHk3R

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) February 23, 2026

Is Claude a US person

One of my favorites was the Supernova in the CS department in Zachary.

To program it, you would write the program (in Assembly Language, of course) and punch it on cards.

Then you would take it to a Nova to read the cards, assemble the program, and produce it on paper tape.

Then you would mount the paper tape on the Supernova and toggle in the bootstrap program. Toggling it in was interesting because some of the lights on the console were burned out so you couldn't check to make sure that you got it right.

Then you would press the switch to read the tape and run the program.

Note: It's been many years since then. I may have the Nova and the Supernova backwards. But I don't think so.

By the way, I took a COBOL course in the mid 1970s and hated every second of it.

DAMMIT! Next thing you know, even FORTRAN programmers are toast!


Edit: Hey Nav referenced it already. D'oh!

Are they Indian TATAs?

If yes, then GTFO. Make the new gens learn to ****ing code. I'm so tired of the outsourcing debate.

Soon India will decide they hate us and accumulate wealth to acquire a nuclear bomb to threaten us for more "govt aid."

How is this picture escaping everyone?

flown-the-coop said:

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Who is Claude?

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Claude! is a well known TexAgs poster.

India already has nukes. So does Pakistan.

IBM is oversold imo but that's probably a topic for the B & I board .

eric76 said:

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Are there even any COBOL programmers left who are not already at least 65?

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Current or former?

Max Stonetrail said:

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In 2026, was IBM really deriving that much revenue from COBOL? If that is what caused this, seems overdone.

On another note, COBOL is so wordy and long, it's no surprise that it has even take AI a few years to crank anything out.

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No. This is an emotional sell off. There were some analysts on CNBC today commenting at how dumb it was that their stock dropped over this. Maybe a good buying opportunity but I don't follow IBM at all these days.

Looks to me like the guy who refused to give up COBOL got old and retired.

Anthropic's AI named Claude vs. 10M lines of legacy IBM mainframe COBOL code.

I'm putting my money on COBOL.

Max Stonetrail said:

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In 2026, was IBM really deriving that much revenue from COBOL? If that is what caused this, seems overdone.

On another note, COBOL is so wordy and long, it's no surprise that it has even take AI a few years to crank anything out.

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IBM charges a lot for COBOL and its compilers. I don't know why this news would effect IBM stock though as they just sell the licensing to it. Faster methods of writing COBOL shouldn't effect their revenue.

YouBet said:

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Max Stonetrail said:

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In 2026, was IBM really deriving that much revenue from COBOL? If that is what caused this, seems overdone.

On another note, COBOL is so wordy and long, it's no surprise that it has even take AI a few years to crank anything out.

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No. This is an emotional sell off. There were some analysts on CNBC today commenting at how dumb it was that their stock dropped over this. Maybe a good buying opportunity but I don't follow IBM at all these days.

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Yeah the stock had already been down quite a bit from its high not long ago before this. Definitely oversold at this point.

deer corn said:

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Are they Indian TATAs?

If yes, then GTFO. Make the new gens learn to ****ing code. I'm so tired of the outsourcing debate.

Soon India will decide they hate us and accumulate wealth to acquire a nuclear bomb to threaten us for more "govt aid."

How is this picture escaping everyone?

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too late

Aaaagh ... COBOL was the second of two BANA sections I had to take for my MKTG degree.

Next to managerial accounting, that COBOL class was the worst.

Claude! said:

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IIIHorn said:

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flown-the-coop said:

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Who is Claude?

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Claude! is a well known TexAgs poster.

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Howdy.

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Gg on helping take over vuvuzela

Gilligan said:

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eric76 said:

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Are there even any COBOL programmers left who are not already at least 65?

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Current or former?

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Maybe A&M is still running some legacy Cobol-based systems.

A&M is an enormous nonprofit government entity that sells higher education, does research, and provides many other services. To run those enterprises, there must have been many COBOL-based systems that used to run on A&M's OS/MVS mainframe. And the USDA, the Texas Railroad Commission, the state's Ag Extension Service, NOAA, and several other federal and state government agencies probably had many systems written in Cobol that ran on A&M's IBM (or Amdahl) mainframe.

I was teaching Cobol as late as ~2010 (too lazy to pull up my vitae, if I still have a copy). The kids were still very sought after - I think at the time we were one of the last 3 universities with Cobol in our curriculum in the US.

Speaking of Claude, one guy (an AI purveyor so take this with a grain of salt) was saying that it was enough of a step up to make him realize he (and other programmers) were just not as valuable to a company now.

I agree with this, and am a bit dejected. I had a lot of great students who went the way of programming and DB coding/mgmt and it pains me to think that some of them will probably not have as sure of a kick-ass future as I thought.

You know government has been full of COBOL for random reasons and they just "couldnt get rid of it."

Lots of cobol out there I'm told. Haven't touched it since the mid 90s. But it's how I landed my first IT job.

eric76 said:

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Are there even any COBOL programmers left who are not already at least 65?

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I took the class and had to drop due to scheduling issues in 1989 for Programming for Engineers

DeschutesAg said:

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Gilligan said:

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eric76 said:

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Are there even any COBOL programmers left who are not already at least 65?

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Current or former?

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Maybe A&M is still running some legacy Cobol-based systems.

A&M is an enormous nonprofit government entity that sells higher education, does research, and provides many other services. To run those enterprises, there must have been many COBOL-based systems that used to run on A&M's OS/MVS mainframe. And the USDA, the Texas Railroad Commission, the state's Ag Extension Service, NOAA, and several other federal and state government agencies probably had many systems written in Cobol that ran on A&M's IBM (or Amdahl) mainframe.

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A lot of companies still have COBOL-based systems.

I know for a fact Verizon does. Alliant Energy, too, in Iowa.