October 01, 2026

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Thursday! And the first day of October. Have you started working on your Halloween costume yet? Consider going as an IT pro’s biggest terror: an unpatched system.

In today’s edition:

🤖 COBOL craziness

✅ Problem scope

⌨️ Good vibes only

—Eoin Higgins, Billy Hurley

IT STRATEGY

COBOL time

Blue and red keys on a computer keyboard on an orange surface

Unsplash

There’s a phrase that comes to Paul Holland’s mind whenever he thinks of IT pros using AI to modernize internal systems: May you live in interesting times.

Periods of transition can be difficult, the Amdocs Mainframe Modernization CTO continued, and present challenges for teams working to shift organizational posture with the help of AI. This is especially true when it comes to COBOL, the outdated, mainframe-centric computer programming language that still maintains a presence throughout organizations from financial institutions to governments.

AI agents have been assigned to convert COBOL syntax into more accessible code languages like Java. It’s not exactly converting code, Holland explained.

“I’m going to look at this program, this code base, and I’m going to ask AI to build me out a specification for what it does, and then I’m going to give a coded assistant an IDE like Cursor or Copilot or Kiro,” Holland said. “I’m going to give it that specification and say, ‘Write me a Java program that fulfills that functionality’; reverse engineer to a specification, forward engineer to a new program.”

Get writing.—EH

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IT STRATEGY

Scope floats

Getty Images

Agents can’t do everything. In fact, tech leaders at Constellation Research’s AI Forum in New York City on Sept. 24 seemed to prefer the idea of agents doing one thing.

In his work at AI consultancy Soul of the Machine, Kai Lee, VP of AI strategy and transformation, sometimes sees clients deploying agents that have broad responsibilities. An effective agent, he told the conference crowd, must be extremely focused in terms of its objective, what it needs to know, and what is considered “done” and an acceptable output.

“If you don’t set the right objectives up front, [the agent] can retrieve varied responses based on context and data,” Lee said.

A better understanding.—BH

SOFTWARE

Vibe shift

image of a black figure with glasses in front of colorful streamers on a brown background with the title card

Francis Scialabba

When you’re flying a commercial plane, the autopilot is on almost all of the time. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t two human pilots in the cockpit at all times, making sure that things are going right.

That’s an analogy Quickbase CTO Jon Kennedy uses to describe the role of engineers and other IT professionals in vibe coding.

“You have to know what the airplane’s doing,” Kennedy said. “At any moment, you might need to take control and hand-fly.”

Ease of flight.—EH

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 5%. That’s how few companies have enterprise-wide controls in place to allow AI agents to safely make decisions. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “As frontier models have become more capable, we continue to evolve our security practices, but recognize a need to move faster.”—Drew Pusateri, OpenAI spokesman, on the company’s struggle to provide appropriate parameters for its models (the New York Times)

Read: Cars and their companion mobile apps may be siphoning and sharing your data. (TechCrunch)

Know your agents: Govern your AI agents like you do your people and devices with JumpCloud. Their Agentic IAM gives your agents distinct identities, human owners, appropriate access, and activity history. Secure every identity.*

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Written by Eoin Higgins and Billy Hurley

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