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Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

> AI is not deterministic, it will be making tons of mistakes.

From the paper:

> The COBOL source is passed through an internal deterministic Migrator to produce a generated Java target.

Also, humans are not deterministic either. Give the same COBOL -> Java translation to multiple developers and each will come up with a different solution. Heck, even the same developer will produce a different output for the same task, depending on the day of the week.

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> Also, humans are not deterministic either.

Indeed, and that's why so few dare to migrate them, and so many who do fail or blow the budget many times over.

I think that was the implicit point of the comment: don't expect that with AI, suddenly we can convert all those COBOL apps with a single prompt.

But it says that the agentic authoring step patches the migrator when things get stuck. So while the execution of this stuff is deterministic, its actual content is not.

Which is why N-version programming is often used for systems that need to work (like plane software) and even then, as we know today, it can not be perfect. Google "plane software bugs history" for an insight into that.

So they solved the "make no mistakes" problem? They deserve a nobel prize.

Deterministic != Correct

> Also, humans are not deterministic either.

And that's why it's usually a stupid idea to nilly-willy migrate large code bases to different languages (also I'm getting really tired of the "but humans aren't either" trope).

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