The COBOL Coding Assistant is an artificial intelligence tool currently in development by the Canada Revenue Agency to support software developers working with COBOL programming language. This system is designed to address the challenge of a declining pool of experienced COBOL developers by automating routine coding tasks and improving code quality.
The assistant helps developers by generating COBOL code snippets, creating documentation and test cases, detecting coding errors, and providing syntax assistance. In its current stage, it offers targeted support for specific coding tasks. The long-term vision is to integrate this capability into a comprehensive development environment that will increase development speed and improve code maintainability through automated analysis and generation of code, documentation, and test cases.
This tool is intended for use by Government of Canada employees only and does not process personal information. The system is built using open source technology and draws from internal government mainframe code repositories. Citizens and the public should know that this system is designed to improve the internal efficiency of government software development and is not used to make decisions that affect the public.
