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focktoday at 5:57 AM1 replyview on HN

300 to 4000 lines of "production like" (whatever that is) cobol code which is easily ported to a non-mainframe env. Our's sometimes uses assembler in its innards, so good luck with real legacy code spanning a dozen files and 50k loc...

I recently threw in (want to check those intelligence metrics!) some real production code into a non-agentic system (just to get a feel how things perform without a custom harness) and results where ... interesting. The particular program uses some preprocessor no LLM we have access to (newest was GPT 5.5) has any clue about - so they confabulate what it could do (Gemini 2.5 didn't even notice there was a preprocessor...). This is expected of course but it somehow seems the problem of this technology that unless you feed it masses of data or mechanically break up the tasks in rote subunits, it just doesn't do anything sensible still...


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TimBytetoday at 7:58 AM

Yeah that’s why they delegated code gen to deterministic tooling and saved the model for input fuzzing - let it fight the data instead of legacy syntax