It’s cool for small and easily testable functions like sorting, but to refactor large amounts of code? No thanks. Would be great if it could leave comments on my pull request though.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the negative response here, but personally this seems like the perfect application of LLMs. Yeah, it’ll need to be verified by humans, but so would human-translated code. Using an appropriately trained LLM to do the first pass translation has the potential to eliminate a lot of toil.
The AI would likely be trained or fine tuned specifically for COBOL. In these very narrow use cases AI can find some things that humans can miss.
Google did this recently on a sorting algorithm and was able to speed it up by 70%: More info here
It’s cool for small and easily testable functions like sorting, but to refactor large amounts of code? No thanks. Would be great if it could leave comments on my pull request though.
Try PR-Codex
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the negative response here, but personally this seems like the perfect application of LLMs. Yeah, it’ll need to be verified by humans, but so would human-translated code. Using an appropriately trained LLM to do the first pass translation has the potential to eliminate a lot of toil.