Highlights
Worth reading.
What we're reading on AI and legacy systems, and why it matters.
In the news
ECB tells banks to draw up plans against AI attacks amid disruption fears (opens in a new tab)Europe's top bank supervisor gave lenders until October 31 to show how they will modernise ageing technology and fix vulnerabilities faster. Legacy code is now a supervisory deadline, and supervisors in other regions read the same letters.
Gartner Predicts More Than 70% of Mainframe Exit Projects Will Fail Due to Overestimation of Generative AI's Capabilities (opens in a new tab)Gartner put a number on it: more than 70% of mainframe exits started this year will miss their goals, because teams overestimate what GenAI tooling can do. The missing piece is verification: translated code is a draft, verified behavior is the deliverable.
'You need those experts to even define what these transformations are': COBOL developers will always be needed, even as AI takes the lead on modernization projects (opens in a new tab)AWS Transform's VP, Asa Kalavade, says the hard questions are how you validate the code and who defines the transformation. Both answers depend on COBOL expertise that is declining. Capturing that knowledge and automating validation is the whole job.
IBM vs. Anthropic: A Tale of the COBOL Modernization Tape (opens in a new tab)An analyst's view that the tool debate arrives too early. Define success, assess the estate, and set the bar for behavioral equivalence first. That bar is exactly what a verification layer exists to clear.
IBM is the latest AI casualty. Shares tank 13% on Anthropic programming language threat (opens in a new tab)One blog post about COBOL moved IBM's shares 13% in a day. The market now believes AI can read legacy code. Reading it is the easy part. Proving the rewrite behaves identically is where projects live or die.
Information Technology: Agencies Need to Plan for Modernizing Critical Decades-Old Legacy Systems (opens in a new tab)The US government spends about 80 cents of every IT dollar keeping old systems alive, and its watchdog found critical systems up to 60 years old running COBOL with known vulnerabilities. Public institutions everywhere carry the same profile.