WIRED: DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase In Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse

[patphil]

13. I agree. Replacing a huge, complicated system takes years, not months.

It's obvious they don't intend to follow the software development lifecycle.
It would take at least a year for a large group of experienced software engineers to develop the design documents. At each step during the process, the customer must review and sign off on their efforts.
Once the documents are approved, the coding begins...a process that will take years for large, complex systems. Each module is tested and revised as needed. This happens again at the various sub-system levels, and finally as a complete system.
Once the programmers have finished their part, the customer has to develop and get approval of plans and documents for the system level testing. This testing is done by the customer, because they know what the system is supposed to do. Programmers have blind spots due to not actually being system users.
It's not uncommon to have serious errors show up at this point, which means a lot of the process has to be re-done.
This is why Cobol was still being used. It's a massive project to completely redo the Social Security Computer systems in a different computer language. No one in government was willing to allocate the huge sum of money needed to do the job, especially on such a mission critical system.
Also, once the new system is complete, the users have to be trained in it's use. Even with a drastically reduced staff, we're still talking a whole lot of people. AI is not able to do everything; not even close.

To think Musk's kids can do this in months, and get it right, is like me taking a flying leap and landing on Mars.
There's no fucking way they can do it successfully.