If there are 40 years of undocumented business quirks, document them and then re-evaluate. A human new to the codebase would fail under the same conditions.
Thats not just an undocumented quirk, but a fundamental part of being a punch-card ready language.
Well there’s your issue!
Clearly it isn’t just “broken” for everyone, “Claude Code modernizes a legacy COBOL codebase”, from Anthropic:
In this case, a five stage pipeline, built on demo environments and code that were already in the training data, was successful. I see more red flags there, than green.
The prohibitions on other companies (LLM providers) being able to see your code also won’t be going away soon.
That’s something that can be either solved for real or be promised to not happen.
It actually is a restriction in many industries.