My First Real Experience Using AI to Refactor Legacy Code
Introduction In February 2026, Anthropic published a blog post about using Claude Code to modernize legacy COBOL systems. After that, many people said the technical moat was disappearing, human experts would be replaced, and even IBM’s stock price dropped sharply. Personally, I think many people didn’t fully read the article or understand the real meaning behind it. The value of AI tools in legacy refactoring is not to replace engineers....