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Comment by anonymous908213 | Hacker News Reader

> COBOL supports more than 40% of online banking systems, 80% of in-person credit card transactions and 95% of ATM transactions, while Fortran is used in weather forecasting and nuclear reactor safety analysis.

Can we not vibe code foundational bank infrastructure and nuclear reactor safety software? Pretty please?

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When the last senior COBOL developer dies off and you need to update the bank's code to comply with this year's changes in banking regs, it might be good for the new people to have LLM support to at least understand what the existing code does.

No, I don't want vibe-coded bank infrastructure. Yes, I do want LLMs that can work with COBOL.

It's a nuclear reactor, Michael. What's the worst that could happen? A meltdown?

Like all software, vibe coding is not the hard part. Maintaining it is. I'm sure there there 100 times the number of people wanting to vibe code this in Rust vs wanting to maintain someone else's vibe coded Rust. So, usually the natural state is keep running the show as-is until it is the next guy's problem.

You forgot flight computers.

those are ada. Don't worry, they'll forget about ada until the defense contractors pay them to remember

oh man ada. I wrote a terrible Ada compiler in university.

OpenAI is already working on fixing F-35 avionics.

https://en.technosotnya.com/2026/10/openai-55-ai-models-f35....

> Can we not vibe code foundational bank infrastructure and nucelear reactor safety software? Pretty please?

How can you power the "rogue" AI infrastructure and mistakenly funnel the funds needed for the operation otherwise?

Matrix needs energy, Matrix needs money.

VIBE CODE ALL THE TIHNGS! /s

Soon enough, it'll be 'Could we not entrust our safety critical systems to those emotional error prone humans? Pretty Please?'

I feel that we have to mention Stanislav Petrov now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

As far as I know, critical systems like reactor control software is mathematically proven first and verified after implementation. I don’t think you can go beyond that.

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