60 million lines of code send your check

BOOMERS TRADE

Andrew James reporting. 64, and counting.

Our generation wrote the code. Now it is retiring with us.

Banks, insurers and Washington itself still lean on software written when most of us were young. The people who understand it best are collecting the checks it prints.

Still running

The decades-old code behind Social Security payments, kept alive by a shrinking circle of people who can read it.

Somebody about my age probably wrote part of the program that sends my Social Security payment.

The language is called COBOL. It was designed in 1959 for business records, and it still runs payroll, banking and benefit systems across the country.

Nobody brags about it at parties. It just works. Every month. For more than 70 million people.

60 million+

Lines of COBOL code the Social Security Administration maintains

5 years

How long its 2017 plan to move off COBOL was supposed to take

The code outlived the plan to replace it. It is still the code that pays us.

Back in 2016, the agency’s own inspector general told Congress something worth hearing twice. Staff knowledge of those older systems was shrinking because the people who knew them were retiring.

That is not only a Washington problem. Every big company carries decades of old code. Much of it was written by people now on the back porch. Now artificial intelligence is being asked to change that code, often without knowing what else it touches.

One young company sells a fix for exactly that blind spot. It is open to small investors.

From our partners

The Average Large Company Runs 897 Applications

MuleSoft’s 2025 survey of IT leaders put the count there. Some of those programs are decades old and share data, so an AI change to one can trip another.

Bito gives companies a map of their codebase, helping AI coding tools understand how different parts of their software work together before making changes. In independent testing, AI coding tools using Bito resolved 3.8 times as many tasks on codebases with more than 1.5 million lines of code.

So the companies with the most code have the most reason to buy. Bito says multiple Fortune 500 companies are in pilots, and its round is open to individual investors on Wefunder.

Look at Bito’s round on Wefunder →

All performance benchmarks reference independent evaluation conducted by The Context Lab on SWE-Bench Pro. Full methodology and results at bito.ai/benchmarks/swe-bench-pro-evaluation/ Statements regarding expected outcomes, product performance, market size or business results are based on current data and involve known and unknown risks. Actual results may differ. Past customer outcomes are not a guarantee of future results. Reg CF SAFE offering via Wefunder. Minimum investment: $1,000. Valuation cap: $90 million. Investing in early-stage companies is risky and illiquid. Review the terms and risks at https://wefunder.com/bito/.

Sources: MuleSoft 2025 Connectivity Benchmark Report.

Here is the part that makes me smile. Old code breaks. Somebody still has to read it.

In the spring of 2020, several states had unemployment systems buckle under a flood of claims. Officials went looking for COBOL programmers. Plenty of the people who answered were retirees.

Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, and where the old skills fit.

Travel

The trips came after a career many of us spent writing the systems that still run.

Health & Housing

The cohort is here this quarter

The check arrives on time because somebody still maintains the code behind it.

Longevity

Next in front of the money

More good years means more years of being the one who remembers how it works.

Estate

Whatever the next generation inherits, it includes software nobody fully documented.

Who gets the phone call

The semi-retired programmer who still reads COBOL. When a bank or an agency hits a wall in its oldest system, it rarely needs a whole team. It needs the one person who already knows what the code was meant to do. That person tends to name the price, and the work arrives whenever something old breaks.

The honest catch? This market shrinks by design. Modern tools, AI among them, are built to read old code so fewer humans have to. Contract work comes in bursts. No pension attached.

Code is only half the story. The other half is the money behind them, and Washington has been borrowing a lot of it.

One firm put together a guide for retirees watching the debt and the dollar.

From our partners

The National Debt Just Hit $40 Trillion

The national debt has crossed $40 trillion.

When you started saving for retirement, you expected Social Security, Medicare, taxes, and the rules around your money to remain relatively predictable. But while you were working and building your nest egg, Washington was borrowing.

Now, the cost of that borrowing is growing...and retirees may feel it through a quieter threat: a dollar that buys less each year.

Since 2020, the dollar has lost roughly a quarter of its purchasing power. A retirement account can appear unchanged on a statement while the cost of groceries, insurance, property taxes, and healthcare continues to climb.

Meanwhile, central banks have bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold per year for three years running.

This Free 2026 Wealth Protection Guide explains why some retirees are paying attention, why stocks, bonds, funds, and cash can share the same dollar-based exposure, and how physical gold and silver differ from paper assets.

Get your free guide - delivered to your inbox in minutes. No fees. No obligations.

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The arithmetic

More than 60 million lines of COBOL maintained by the Social Security Administration, and staff knowledge of older systems diminishing due to retirement: SSA Office of the Inspector General, congressional testimony, July 14, 2016. SSA’s 2017 plan to move from COBOL to Java over about five years: Computerworld, April 4, 2025. COBOL first designed in 1959. State unemployment systems seeking COBOL programmers in April 2020: widely reported at the time. More than 70 million people receive Social Security or SSI: Social Security Administration, October 2026.

Next time your payment lands, picture the code it passed through on the way. Somebody wrote it in the year of a moon shot or a Beatles record. Somebody else, probably our age, still keeps it running.

Andrew

Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.

60 million lines of code send your check

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