AI company Anthropic shook markets and mainframe pros alike in February when it announced that its Claude Code coding assistant could support IT pros’ attempts to modernize COBOL, one the oldest programming languages.

The claims—that Claude could act as a codebase-mapping, code-testing modernizer—led many a COBOL’er to respond: Whoa, wait a minute. It’s more complicated than that.

“The engineers doing this work know the code is the starting point, not the destination. What the application runs on, how it scales, how it recovers, how it is encrypted, and how it integrates with everything around it—that is the real modernization work,” Rob Thomas, SVP and software and chief commercial officer at IBM, wrote in a LinkedIn post the same day that Anthropic touted its COBOL feature.

“Translating code itself isn’t modernization,” John McKenny, SVP and general manager for intelligent Z optimization and transformation at BMC Software, told IT Brew. “Modernization is in the systems, in the architecture,” he added, citing decisions around platform choice, application integrations, and security. (He did some LinkedIn writing on the topic recently, too.)

Check out all the COBOL chatter.—BH

Tired? Using AI frivolously at home. Wired Required? Using AI frivolously at work.

For many, using AI at work is no longer optional. A September 2025 AI Resume Builder survey found that more than half (58%) of 1,295 surveyed companies require a certain number of employees to use AI tools, with Microsoft and Shopify just a few of the mainstream companies following the trend.

Some companies are even trying to incentivize employees to integrate AI into their workflows by tying it to career advancement opportunities. Accenture recently made headlines after a leaked internal memo to senior staffers revealed the consulting giant has linked the use of AI to promotion eligibility.

Earlier this month, The Information reported Meta’s AI-powered performance review platform will track and evaluate developers based on AI usage. Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, clarified in an email that they do not base performance reviews on AI usage, but rather the “impact generated by these tools.”

Use more AI to do what, though?—BM

Nothing about tech jobs over the past year has been easy to predict, a trend that continued in February when a complicated, contradictory picture emerged from federal data.

First, the bad news: National unemployment rose slightly to 4.4% as the US economy lost around 92,000 positions. With potential oil shock from the US-Israel war with Iran on its way, the rate could climb.

The tech industry offers a more hopeful, albeit mixed, picture. According to an analysis from tech training and certification company CompTIA, tech unemployment bumped up slightly to 3.8% from January’s 3.6%. But that was tempered by a 60,000-position increase in tech occupations across the economy, along with a 9% surge in active tech job postings to over 505,000.

Why tech employment might be cause for concern.—EH