AI is okay at it.

It is one of the things they are best at.

Tho it works best with small chunks of well isolated code… I doubt it’d be very successful with the IRS’s ball of COBOL, especially considering how little cobol code is available for training sets.

It’d still require a ton of hairy manual work.

Also from that article

> IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java

Hard to wholesale believe claims when they are literally the ones selling that capability.

It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.

there's https://www.codeconvert.ai/cobol-to-python-converter if you prefer python

> It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.

All well and good, but the system deals with money. You cannot have rounding issues. For non COBOL systems, rounding issues are a big issue.

Not that Java is dead but that is reminiscent of the futurama professor invention of translating one dead language into another.