Charlie Stross on Nostr: Absolutely true. (For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the ...

Absolutely true.

(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)

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nevent1q…v090

For the Y2K, we weren't allowed to change any of the original code running on the AS/400. That code was always off-limit, and had existed since the 1970s as far as I know.

We created an intermediate tool that would look at transactions going into and out of the database.

When data was coming out, we'd convert the dates to 4-digit years. Then when data was going in, we'd convert 4-digit years back to 2-digit years.

I have no idea if 26 years later that is still in place. I suspect so. But the thought that banks will authorize AI and "vibe coding" to magically replace all this off-limit code running on the back end is hard to believe.