Your organisations dirty secret

Somewhere in your organisation is a PC running DOS, or a mainframe running a Cobol application.

That application is part of your core stack. Something that you can't do without.

Something that has become mythical, because there is little or no documentation for it, and just a handful of people who might know how to keep it running, let alone updated.

You aren't alone.

Anthropic points out that legacy Cobol systems handle an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US. They power critical systems in finance, airlines, and government.

The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them. Production code has been modified repeatedly over decades, but the documentation hasn't kept up.

The number of engineers who know how to code in languages like Cobol is getting smaller and smaller every year.

The good news, Claude is here to help you.

It can read your entire COBOL codebase and map the structure.

It finds the entry points, traces execution paths, maps data flows between modules and documents dependencies and workflows.

It identifies shared data structures that link modules, and initialization sequences that affect runtime behavior. The things that don't show up in static analysis.

By tracing how data moves through a system from input to output, AI describes the processing pipelines that nobody remembers building but everyone depends on.

Imagine if we could do the same for organisational process flows.

SOURCE

Article : https://claude.com/blog/how-ai-helps-break-cost-barrier-cobol-modernization