AI agents crack old software as decompilation milestones hit games and COBOL
In recent weeks, matching decompilation projects for GoldenEye 007, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Halo: Combat Evolved hit milestones, and one developer reported that a fleet of 17 Claude Code agents made the 2009 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 fully playable, consuming roughly 600–700 billion tokens over three months. The article credits matching decompilation's unambiguous pass/fail check, which lets coding agents loop unattended for hours, along with maturing tools such as Ghidra, objdiff, N64Recomp and ReXGlue. The same pattern is reaching enterprise legacy code: Anthropic claimed Claude can automate COBOL analysis work, IBM countered that translating COBOL is not the same as modernizing an enterprise system, and Gartner warns over 70% of mainframe migrations started this year will fail.
Where a verifiable pass/fail signal exists, AI agents can reconstruct legacy code at far lower cost — potentially speeding up ports and enterprise modernization, though the piece also flags 'cognitive debt' and high migration failure rates.