Absolutely true.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
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!)
Also, the entire finance industry is on a massive cocaine-style high about AI and vibe coding, and have drunk *all* the Kool-Aid, with an "Emperor's New Clothes" denial of the downsides. So it wouldn't surprise me one jot if managers at bank say "we've vibe coded all the stuff, and there's no risk because we're rockstars".
(I've worked in software Dev in investment banks and other financial institutions for the last 30 years)
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I have a friend who has run loan operations in small to mid-sized regional banks her whole career and it's kind of amazing that none has gone down hard
yet, just on the basis of systems issues. The companies merge repeatedly and each successor enterprise is a frakenstein's monster of old systems from each previous merger held together by baling wire and bubble gum. Throw vibe coding into the mix and the whole jenga pile (to mix metaphors) may finally come tumbling down.@jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross This is exactly how the banking system is, even large banks, & the work of integrating or migrating those systems is frequently farmed out to consulting firms (ask me how I know). It’s all fragile, held together with tape, & breaks all the time.
I’ve been away from that world for a bit, but I think it’s very likely those people would be looking at LLMs as a godsend.
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undefined oblomov@sociale.network shared this topic
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@quinn @jzillw I spent a few years doing back end dev in a payment service provider that hooked into all the big British high street banks. About 10% of their managers were brilliant, 70% were a waste of oxygen, and 20% were clearly undercover anarchists seeking the downfall of capitalism by weaponizing Svejk-like cheerful ineptitude.
@cstross
'Cheerful ineptitude' is a glorious term which I will use without restraint from now on. -
RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
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!)
@cstross Also, we don't need to vibecode this, just do it carefully.
I was once involved with a company that did semi-automated COBOL->Java translations, with very good effect. The way I understand it, the end result you got was the business logic in reasonably decent, maintainable(!), Java, which then called into a monstrously gigantic "Do what COBOL would have done here" library for the actual calculations.
It wasn't cheap, but it was also not half-assed.
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@jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross This is exactly how the banking system is, even large banks, & the work of integrating or migrating those systems is frequently farmed out to consulting firms (ask me how I know). It’s all fragile, held together with tape, & breaks all the time.
I’ve been away from that world for a bit, but I think it’s very likely those people would be looking at LLMs as a godsend.
@causticmsngo @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross
So...are you all saying I need to stash my cash under my mattress or in my freezer? -
@quinn @jzillw I spent a few years doing back end dev in a payment service provider that hooked into all the big British high street banks. About 10% of their managers were brilliant, 70% were a waste of oxygen, and 20% were clearly undercover anarchists seeking the downfall of capitalism by weaponizing Svejk-like cheerful ineptitude.
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@bituur_esztreym @cstross @quinn It also shortens to a nice acronym that sounds way less insulting than it really is ("WoO manager", "he has WoOed all the way through this project", "that's a glorious pile of WoO").
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
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!)
@cstross As a person, who was working in banking IT: yes, but no.
I do not know, how that matches other banks, but for me that was: they were risk averse, because of that they were conservative, and that has caused another class of problems.
There was one delivery a colleague working in another dept was working on. The delivery required some changes in the storage configuration. It was well tested and documented, and it was sound. However, to make a change on production they needed a blessing from involved department. And, obviously, they needed one from the storage guys, as they will be implementing this part of the change. And they said: sorry, not this quarter.
There was a rule for dept managers: three strikes and you are out. Three serious fuckups (affecting prod) happen during a quarter in your dept, and you're fired. Doesn't matter, if you're at fault.
So, the storage dept has a serious h/w failure already. You know, those pesky spinning rusts decided to get more rusty. And the manager wasn't keen to take any new risks this quarter.
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@bituur_esztreym @cstross @quinn It also shortens to a nice acronym that sounds way less insulting than it really is ("WoO manager", "he has WoOed all the way through this project", "that's a glorious pile of WoO").
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@causticmsngo @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross
So...are you all saying I need to stash my cash under my mattress or in my freezer?@ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
No. But definitely try not to exceed the FDIC-insured maximum of $250,000 per bank if you can. If you have $500K lying around, keep it in two different banks.
Notwithstanding the incompetence and corruption of the Trump regime, the Federal Reserve and its affiliated systems are still holding up.
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I have a friend who has run loan operations in small to mid-sized regional banks her whole career and it's kind of amazing that none has gone down hard
yet, just on the basis of systems issues. The companies merge repeatedly and each successor enterprise is a frakenstein's monster of old systems from each previous merger held together by baling wire and bubble gum. Throw vibe coding into the mix and the whole jenga pile (to mix metaphors) may finally come tumbling down.Vibe coding could cause a disaster there, yes. But AI assisted refactoring might be part of a solution.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
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!)
@cstross I've had a project sponsor in a financial institution tell me, within the same week, "If we get this wrong I could go to prison" and "We can go faster if Copilot reviews the pull requests that Claude generates" so I do not have much trust in banking being averse to risk.
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I have a friend who has run loan operations in small to mid-sized regional banks her whole career and it's kind of amazing that none has gone down hard
yet, just on the basis of systems issues. The companies merge repeatedly and each successor enterprise is a frakenstein's monster of old systems from each previous merger held together by baling wire and bubble gum. Throw vibe coding into the mix and the whole jenga pile (to mix metaphors) may finally come tumbling down.Ex-outsourcing moose here: Mainly "Closed Book Life Insurance" companies with a steadily shrinking workload, so they offload their computing to someone else. Then the companies get bought, sold and merged and we had to migrate the workloads (with incompatible support software (tape management, print archiving, etc.) to a single system. Changing their networks from SNA to TCP/IP was also "interesting"... 3:OP>
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
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!)
@cstross As someone who has spent the last twelve or so years working with one of these systems, I regret to report that the people at the top are absolutely working on using LLMs to convert the stable COBOL codebase into Java that runs in the cloud. But on the other hand, they've been talking about moving off the mainframe for at least ten of those twelve years, and we're no closer to it now than we were then
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@cstross I've had a project sponsor in a financial institution tell me, within the same week, "If we get this wrong I could go to prison" and "We can go faster if Copilot reviews the pull requests that Claude generates" so I do not have much trust in banking being averse to risk.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
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!)
@cstross Don't banks also have a history of getting billions in free money from the government when they fuck up hard enough...?
IT won't make that decision, but most AI mandates are coming from the higher level executives...
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@cstross Don't banks also have a history of getting billions in free money from the government when they fuck up hard enough...?
IT won't make that decision, but most AI mandates are coming from the higher level executives...
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@8r3n7 My experience was of '96-2000.
In 2008/09, half the main banks in the UK were nationalized to stop them going bust and taking half the populations' mortgages and savings with them. They ended up back in private hands again a decade later.
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@quinn @jzillw I spent a few years doing back end dev in a payment service provider that hooked into all the big British high street banks. About 10% of their managers were brilliant, 70% were a waste of oxygen, and 20% were clearly undercover anarchists seeking the downfall of capitalism by weaponizing Svejk-like cheerful ineptitude.
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Vibe coding could cause a disaster there, yes. But AI assisted refactoring might be part of a solution.
@dummzeuch @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross The important term is "assisted". And boy, assistance we need with that...
I'm not involved in the project in my company, we are doing exactly that refactoring (though not LLM-assisted) - and in parts actually develop new systems to replace the old one.
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@USGRANT 🫂
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Troppo velocemente!
Ci stanno arrivando molto più velocemente di quanto mi aspettassi!E poi? E poi Mullvad è stato censurato nel Regno Unito. Guarda qui gli spot vietati. And then? And then Mullvad was censored in the UK. Watch the banned ads here.
La metamorfosi del Regno Unito in distopia totalitaria sta avvenendo ad una velocità sconvolgente!
Politici e autorità britanniche stanno lavorando intensamen
https://monodes.com/predaelli/2026/02/25/troppo-velocemente/
#Ethics
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@kenobit grazie mille ☺️
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I *hate* "why not just" as a reply.
"Why not just do it this other way instead?"
It implies that the other way is faster, easier, or otherwise better, without actually providing any evidence to that effect.
The person who made the original proposal has to research what those advantages might be and see if they actually apply to the current situation. This is information that the replier supposedly already has.
If you know it's better, say why.
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Cool 19 out of 20
I just read The Big Tech Walkout 2026, the full detailed programme. I feel somehow cool as I've already done 19 out of 20 points. Sadly I can't fullfill the last, deleting WhatsApp account…
https://monodes.com/predaelli/2026/02/25/cool-19-out-of-20/
#Ethics
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@arclight Any examples of good lessons you learned from that project?
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@Cioci Ciao! Sì, sarà alla Feltrinelli di via Zanardelli, a Brescia, a partire dalle 18:00! Ingresso gratuito e senza prenotazioni.
