[Makena Kelly at WIRED]

If you know anything about building software, you know that this is an absurd idea:

"The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk."

Moving a 60 million line COBOL codebase to another language (be it Java or anything else) is not a small undertaking, and the SSA underpins necessary benefits for millions of Americans. Doing it in months likely requires using something like an LLM - and anyone who's used an LLM to code will tell you that the output is riddled with mistakes and inefficiencies. It's not a workable plan.

Or, as Dan Hon puts it in the piece:

“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead.”

A project like this should take years. Most of that isn't coding time: it's analysis, writing the tests, rearchitecting, and putting protections in place to ensure that nobody goes without the benefits they need to live. Doing it as a rush job isn't just incompetence; it's indifference to the lives of some of our most vulnerable neighbors. Which, let's face it, is in keeping with everything else going on.

#Democracy

[Link]