Can Al Fix Wall Street's 'Spaghetti Code' Crisis?

Tech titans like IBM and Microsoft hope Al can translate creaky old code into more modern programming languages-before it causes multibillion-dollar meltdowns

- By Ben Weiss

THERE AREN'T A LOT of businesses built around tape cassettes or floppy disks, so a lack of experts who can repair those decades-old technologies is rarely a problem. That's not the case with Cobol-a 64-year-old programming language that Wall Street and the federal government rely on to process tens of trillions of dollars worth of transactions annually. As Cobol gets older, those massive organizations have been hard-pressed to find people who can update their ancient systems.

When something does go wrong, many firms turn to 82-year-old Bill Hinshaw, the "Cobol Cowboy." Hinshaw works out of his home office in northern Texas, where he oversees a remote team of some 600 aging Cobol engineers some of whom cut their teeth as programmers in the '60s and '70s. Every week, the cowboys respond to emergency calls including one in 2021 from Superior Welding Supply, a 93-year-old Iowa firm whose only in-house Cobol expert died just before the company's software crashed.

Firms of all sorts are wrestling with how to maintain old code, typically Cobol, that still runs but that is often poorly documented and hard to modify-part of a sprawling problem that programmers call "spaghetti code." For years, government agencies, the media, and large banks have sounded the alarm over their aging technical infrastructure. Now tech giants like IBM and Microsoft think they may have found a powerful tool to wean us off Eisenhower-era tech: generative AI.

"Spaghetti code"