Question: Do you know of any AI-powered solutions that can help me understand and navigate complex COBOL codebases?

If you want to use AI to help you comprehend and navigate your legacy COBOL codebase, bloop is a great option. It's a suite of tools for modernizing and maintaining legacy code, with a particular emphasis on converting COBOL to Java. The tool uses AI to generate equivalent Java code, ensuring it's safe and maintainable, and it produces human-readable output. It also has features for code navigation, comprehension, auto-complete and regex matching to help you better understand your COBOL code.

Another tool worth considering is /ask Swimm, a knowledge-sharing platform that helps teams quickly understand complex codebases. By combining team members' collective knowledge and static analysis, Swimm supplies answers to complex questions with context, improving productivity and code quality. This is useful if you need to understand parts of your codebase that aren't well documented and want to improve your team's overall efficiency.

For a more general-purpose coding assistant, Figstack provides AI tools to explain, translate and maintain code in multiple programming languages. Its features include natural language descriptions of code, code translation, documentation generation and performance optimization. That could be helpful if you have to deal with multiple languages and want to improve code understandability and maintainability. A free trial lets you try it out.