Comment by Waffle2180

I’m not a full-time COBOL dev, but I’ve worked adjacent to mainframe systems (bank integrations, legacy batch jobs, and data pipelines).

From what I’ve seen, LLMs aren’t really a threat to COBOL roles right now. They can help explain unfamiliar code, summarize programs, or assist with documentation, but they struggle with the things that actually matter most: institution-specific conventions, decades of undocumented business logic, and the operational context around jobs, datasets, and JCL.

In practice, the hardest part isn’t writing COBOL syntax, it’s understanding why a program exists, what assumptions it encodes, and what will break if you change it. That knowledge tends to live in people, not in code comments.

So AI feels more like a force multiplier for experienced engineers rather than a replacement. If anything, it might reduce the barrier for newer engineers to approach these systems, which could be a net positive given how thin the talent pool already is.