UK Enterprises Turn to Python to Replace Ageing COBOL Systems by 2026

·1 views

Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code still underpin financial, government, and enterprise systems across the UK, but the engineers who built them are retiring and organisations are under growing pressure to modernise. Python has emerged as the leading migration target in 2026, valued for its readable syntax, procedural compatibility with COBOL logic, and built-in access to AI and machine learning libraries. Enterprises can choose between automated transpilation, parallel rewriting, or domain-driven reimplementation, with most UK organisations opting for a hybrid of the latter two approaches. A mid-scale migration typically costs between £200,000 and £500,000 or more and can take one to three years to complete, with underestimating scope cited as the most frequent cause of failure. Automated transpilation tools are available but do not generate production-ready code, meaning manual review, testing, and business validation remain essential regardless of the method chosen.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

How to Run Local LLMs Privately Using Ollama and Spring AI

Developers can run large language models (LLMs) locally on their own machines using Ollama integrated with Spring AI and Spring Boot, eliminating the need to send data to cloud providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. This approach is particularly useful for building AI applications without API costs, working offline, and keeping sensitive company data within internal infrastructure. Ollama supports several open-source models including Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Mistral, and DeepSeek, and exposes a local API that Spring AI can communicate with directly. A practical use case demonstrated is an internal HR customer support assistant where employee queries are handled entirely on-premise. Developers are cautioned that running an LLM locally does not replace the need for proper authentication, authorization, and data security measures.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Developer Details 5 Real-World Failures When Self-Hosting Chatwoot at Scale

A developer running self-hosted Chatwoot for around a dozen small Israeli businesses documented five production failures not covered in the official documentation. One major issue was that media attachments are stored in Docker volumes via ActiveStorage rather than in the PostgreSQL database, causing disk usage to spike undetected by standard database monitoring. The operator also found that duplicate media files — some stored up to 325 times — were consuming significant disk space, and a deduplication pass reclaimed over 3 GB across more than 7,000 blobs. A third failure involved the POST /messages API returning a 200 status immediately upon row insertion, before actual delivery to WhatsApp via Meta, causing a Sidekiq job queue to back up with over 3,700 jobs and nearly 11 minutes of latency during a resend loop. The account was handling several thousand conversations per week across two servers, with a custom drip-sequence engine contributing to several of the edge-case failures described.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Seven-Step Framework for Structuring IoT Test Automation Effectively

IoT testing is complex because connected products rely on hardware, firmware, networks, cloud services, and applications functioning in unison. A seven-step automation framework recommends starting by mapping device hardware revisions, firmware versions, and network conditions to define the full test environment. Teams are advised to prioritize stable, repeatable interfaces like APIs and protocol validation before automating more complex scenarios, while keeping some manual checks for physical setup. The framework emphasizes combining device simulators for scale with real hardware for physical validation, and integrating the entire test pipeline into CI/CD workflows so tests run automatically with each development change. Field failures should continuously feed back into the test suite, ensuring that resolved issues are covered by automation and are less likely to recur.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Why Self-Correcting Agent Loops Are Essential for Reliable AI in Production

Large language models (LLMs) deployed in production environments are structurally prone to hallucination, meaning they generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect outputs with no internal mechanism to flag uncertainty. This is not a prompt engineering flaw or pipeline bug — it is an inherent property of next-token prediction systems that conflate plausibility with truth. Researchers warn that fine-tuning and prompt optimization alone cannot eliminate this fundamental uncertainty, yet companies continue integrating LLMs into high-stakes customer, financial, and legal workflows. A proposed solution called the COPS framework — Self-Correcting Production Systems — treats the LLM as one component in a multi-step pipeline that includes verification, criticism, and re-generation loops rather than a standalone answer authority. Experts argue that meaningful human oversight in high-stakes decisions, combined with these self-correcting architectures, represents the only viable path to trustworthy production AI systems.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community