| name | cobol-o-matic |
| description | Reverse-engineer COBOL systems into structured requirements, business rules, and dependency maps with cobol-o-matic. |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"author":"dsheard","version":"1.0.0","source":"https://github.com/dsheard/cobol-o-matic"} |
cobol-o-matic
Overview
Use this skill when a legacy COBOL codebase needs to be understood before a rewrite, migration, or documentation effort. The upstream project, dsheard/cobol-o-matic, focuses on reverse-engineering COBOL applications into requirements, business rules, and dependency graphs using agentic analysis.
Compatibility: COBOL, Claude Agent SDK, and legacy modernization assessments.
Workflow
- Inventory the COBOL entry points, copybooks, JCL, file layouts, screens, batch jobs, and external integrations.
- Run a read-only analysis first. Treat generated requirements and rules as hypotheses until they are reconciled against source code and production SMEs.
- Extract business logic by program, paragraph, data structure, condition, file operation, and job step.
- Build dependency maps that separate call relationships, data dependencies, batch sequencing, and external system touchpoints.
- Produce migration-ready artifacts: glossary, business-rule catalog, interface inventory, data lineage notes, and test scenarios.
Guardrails
- Preserve original COBOL semantics, especially packed decimal fields, implied decimals, EBCDIC assumptions, record layouts, and batch restart behavior.
- Do not treat AI-generated requirements as authoritative without source-line evidence.
- Keep modernization recommendations separate from reverse-engineering findings so stakeholders can review factual discovery independently from proposed changes.
- Link every extracted business rule back to source files, paragraphs, or data definitions.
Expected Output
Return a concise modernization discovery pack with the source inventory, extracted rules, dependency graph summary, open questions, and recommended next analysis steps.
