[accrual]

IMO the ideal path to working on COBOL without having decades of experience would be to spend a few days groking the syntax and writing toy programs for practice, then collaborate with a large LLM to understand the current code and gradually make changes.

[macintux]

Have you worked with COBOL? My understanding is that the language itself isn't the real problem. Mainframes, control languages: everything around COBOL is very different from most Windows/UNIX people have experienced.