How Devin Is Modernizing COBOL at Fortune 500 Companies
AISummary
Cognition describes how Devin handles COBOL modernization at several Fortune 500 companies, citing a shortage of COBOL developers and 68% failure rates for such efforts.
The post identifies three obstacles for agents: untraceable data across copybooks, little COBOL in model training, and no way to run code on Linux-based VMs.
It says Devin succeeds on documentation, batch migrations, and large-scale refactoring, while transactional workloads remain out of reach.
AIWhy it matters
The post explains why agents struggle with COBOL and which workloads they can migrate, giving a framework for judging where automation fits legacy systems.
Source: Cognition Blog (Devin, Windsurf) · cognition.comPublished · added here