The Race to Fix Aging Computer Systems Heats Up With AI’s Help

Kresimir Mudrovcic and his team of programmers spend months on end trawling through computer code that can be three times as old as the crew’s youngest members.

Mudrovcic specializes in mainframe technology, involving computers tracing their roots to the dawn of the digital age and the ancient software that sometimes runs on them. Upgrading such systems is painstaking work, often entailing sifting through millions of lines of code to understand how specific functions operate. Mudrovcic, an IT consultant, compares it to archeology.

But the work is getting easier, thanks to the widening use of generative artificial intelligence to do ...