IBM’s generative AI tool aims to refactor ancient COBOL code for its mainframes

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 121 points –
IBM’s generative AI tool aims to refactor ancient COBOL code for its mainframes
arstechnica.com
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tbh refactoring (if it can be done safely) could be a huge help to orgs and fantastic AI use case. Rarely do businesses want to spend the resources to improve a codebase. Hope it goes well for IBM.

How can you verify that it's actually running safely? If you'd have a comprehensive testing framework in place, you wouldn't need AI driven refactoring in the first place.

You could code review the commits it makes I suppose. Saves you having to think of how to refactor something but still makes it fairly easy to mitigate the AI doing something terribly wrong.

Is it? These code bases are often extremely fragile. There's a reason hardly anybody works on them.