[1970-01-01]

This is weird. Mainframes are the dinosaurs of tech. Never would I think, 'let's add some AI' to a mainframe. It would be like adding opposable thumbs to dinosaurs. You are still solving the wrong problem, but it sure will be interesting watching the systems cope.

[sai18]

Looks like it's already been pointed out. We’re not applying AI to these systems — IBM is already pursuing those initiatives (https://research.ibm.com/blog/spyre-for-z).

Our focus is different: we’re using AI to understand these 40+ year-old black box systems and capture the knowledge of the SMEs who built and maintain them before they retire. There simply aren’t enough engineers left who can fully understand or maintain these systems, let alone modernize them.

The COBOL talent shortage has already been a challenge for many decades now, and it’s only becoming more severe.

[spratzt]

Isn’t strange that this talent shortage never translates itself into decent rates?

[koolba]

IIUC, what's being solved here is not the mainframe, it's the lack of knowledge transfer of what the heck that software is doing and how it works. Anything that drives down the cost of answering those types of questions, whether for debugging or replacing, is going to be worth a lot to the dinosaurs running these systems.