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I have never considered trying to apply Claude/Gemini/etc. to Fortran or COBOL. That would be interesting.




You can actually use Claude Code (and presumably the other tools) on non-code projects, too. If you launch claude code in a directory of files you want to work on, like CSVs or other data, you can ask it to do planning and analysis tasks, editing, and other things. It's fun to experiment with, though for obvious reasons I prefer to operate on a copy of the data I'm using rather than let Claude Code go wild.

I use Claude Code for "everything", and have just committing most things into git as a fallback.

It's great to then just have it write scripts, and then write skills to use those scripts.

A lot of my report writing etc. now involve setting up a git repo, and use Claude to do things like process the call transcripts from discovery calls and turn them into initial outlines and questions that needs followup, and tasks lists, and write scripts to do necessary analysis etc., so I can focus on the higher level stuff.


Side note from someone who just used Claude Code today for the first time: Claude Code is a TUI, so you can run it in any folder/with any IDE and it plays along nicely. I thought it was just another vscode clone, so I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't try to take over my entire workflow.

It's even better: It's a TUI if you launch it without options, but you can embed it in scripts too - the "-p" option takes a prompt, in which case it will return the answer, and you can also provide a conversation ID to continue a conversation, and give it options to return the response as JSON, or stream it.

Many of the command line agent tools support similar options.


They also have a vscode extension that compares with github copilot now, just so you know.

I was just giving my history :) but yes I am sure this could actually get us out of the COBOL lock-in which requires 70 years old programmers to continue working.

The last article I could find on this is from 2020 though: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/new-jersey-seeks-cobol-progr...


Or you could just learn cobol. Using an LLM with a language you don’t know is pretty risky. How do you spot the subtle but fatal mistakes they make?



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