Original link: Anthropic's new AI tool can write 67-year-old COBOL code, sending 115-year-old IBM's stock tumbling by 13% / Tom's Hardware.
Total overreaction. And IBM stock price has gone up again.
Sure AI tools can convert COBOL code to code in another language. But as I wrote in comp.lang.cobol:
This is mostly a media hype thing. Automatic translation from language X to language Y is not a new thing introduced with AI. It has been possible for decades. I would expect tools (whether traditional or AI based) to be able to correctly translate the code. There may be exceptions but automatic conversion of 95% of the code and manual translation of the remaining 5% is still good. It have been possible for decades before AI, but it is not particular interesting, because it is not the problem businesses are looking to have solved. Let us say that the tool can convert COBOL to Java (nothing special about Java in this context except that a lot of companies using COBOL prefer to convert to Java). First problem is maintenance. Manual maintenance of automatic converted code is harder than maintenance of human written code. Having AI do maintenance makes maintenance fast but raises new issues about what really got modified and therefore need to be tested. A cheap conversion followed by expensive maintenance is not attractive to businesses. Second problem is that the language is not the only problem that businesses want solved - most likely it is not even the most important problem business want solved. They don't just want to modernize the programming language - they want to modernize the entire architecture. Specifics vary, but in many cases this means some of switching from ISAM to RDBMS, switching from vertical scalable to horizontal scalable, switching from a online+offline model to an always online model, switching from EBCDIC to Unicode etc.. Sure you can ask the AI to do that as well. But unless it receives a gigantic input about how it should be done then the result will be a disaster. So the "AI will just convert the entire code base" story is BS.