GoKawiil
Tech News
OpenAI announced on October 19th that its latest AI models show improved ability to migrate old software written in legacy languages like COBOL into modern code. The company says this could help organizations maintain and modernize aging systems still embedded in banking, government and other critical infrastructure.
OpenAI says its newer models show large improvements writing and migrating code in older languages like COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic. Using its new MultiLangBench test, GPT-6 Astra scored an average 87.4% pass rate versus 26.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol, with COBOL jumping from 10.9% to 72.1%. Separately, GPT-6.1 Sol reportedly reached 86.6% accuracy migrating COBOL to modern languages at low reasoning effort, rising to 97.9% at higher effort.
Microsoft used AI agents to convert the Copilot runtime's 430,000 lines of TypeScript into 800,000 lines of Rust, a project that took about 14.5 weeks, over 135 releases, roughly $120,000 in AI token costs, and three weeks of human developer oversight to fix dozens of regressions. The Rust version now powers Copilot across VS Code, Visual Studio, the CLI, SDK, and Office apps like Excel and Outlook.