We've probably heard the joke that if you learn COBOL, you'll have job security for life because banks are too scared to rewrite their 40-year-old mainframes.
Well, that joke just got a lot less funny for IBM.
Yesterday afternoon, Anthropic proved that their new Claude Code agent can map massive dependencies, document undocumented workflows, and translate archaic COBOL logic into Java/Python with an insane 98% accuracy.
IBM's stock plunged 13.15% in hours. At first I thought legacy codebases were a gold mine for developers now I'm glad that I didn't stake an entire career on that. One AI company comes along and all of a sudden your competitive advantage is gone. I'm still optimistic for software engineering/developers though.
Now they're hosting live demos showing Claude migrating heavily entrenched legacy COBOL systems directly onto modern cloud infrastructure.
A full breakdown is on my blog in case you want a deeper dive.
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