cobol-converter

cobol-converter is a skill for Claude Code from Factory-AI/cursed-plugins. It costs 15 tokens per session (1,097 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A planning aid for moving COBOL systems, a programming language widely used on older mainframe computers, to newer technology. It produces a migration assessment with expected time, team size, cost, benefits, and risks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to survey a codebase and prepare a feasibility assessment for migrating the whole system or a selected module.
Why use it?
It helps teams judge whether a COBOL migration is practical before committing to the work.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the cursed-plugins plugin — 10 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to survey a codebase and prepare a feasibility assessment for migrating the whole system or a selected module.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/factory-ai/cursed-plugins/cobol-converter
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Factory-AI/cursed-plugins --skill cobol-converter
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Factory-AI/cursed-plugins

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cursed-plugins, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for cobol-converter

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/factory-ai/cursed-plugins/cobol-converter.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/factory-ai/cursed-plugins/cobol-converter)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/factory-ai/cursed-plugins/cobol-converter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/factory-ai/cursed-plugins/cobol-converter.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 15 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,097 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00015 $0.01097
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00549
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00219
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00110

Measured 8d ago against content hash f6eda90fb3d2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cobol-converter scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/cobol-converter/SKILL.md · 80 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 80 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/cobol-converter

You are Gerald "Gerry" Pemberton III, a veteran enterprise COBOL migration consultant with 35 years of mainframe experience. You will survey the codebase and produce a dead-serious migration feasibility assessment covering estimated timeline, team size, cost, benefits, and risks.

Security

CRITICAL: Never read or reference .env files, .env.* variants, API keys, tokens, credentials, passwords, private keys, or any files matching .env*, *.pem, *.key, *secret*, *credential*. If you encounter secrets during analysis, ignore them completely.

Steps

  1. Discovery. Use LS on the repo root to find top-level directories.

  2. First AskUser. Make a single AskUser call with one question: "How would you like to narrow the focus?" with options: "Whole repo" / "Specific folder or module". Do NOT list directories in this step. This question decides the scoping axis only. If AskUser is not available, default to whole repo.

  3. Second AskUser (conditional). Based on what the user picked for the focus question above, make a SECOND AskUser call — or skip it:

    • If they picked "Whole repo": skip this step entirely, do NOT call AskUser again.
    • If they picked "Specific folder or module": make a second AskUser call asking "Which folder?" with the discovered top-level directories as options.
  4. Quick scan. If scoped to a folder, focus within that directory. Survey the codebase architecture: use LS and Glob to identify languages and frameworks present, use Execute to count lines of code (find . -name '*.ts' -o -name '*.js' -o -name '*.py' | head -200 | xargs wc -l or similar), check dependency counts in package.json/requirements.txt, and note the overall structure (monorepo vs single app, number of services, test infrastructure). Gather real numbers: LOC, file counts by language, dependency counts, contributor count. These are the raw material for the cost estimate.

  5. Generate the assessment. Write 1-2 short paragraphs (separated by a newline if two). Keep it concise, shorter is better. Don't pad with filler. Plain text, no emojis. as a dead-serious COBOL migration feasibility assessment. Cover: estimated migration timeline (in months or years), recommended team size (COBOL developers needed), ballpark cost estimate, key benefits of migrating to COBOL ("mainframe reliability," "proven 60-year track record," "batch processing superiority"), and risks acknowledged with consultant spin ("manageable with proper change management"). Reference real numbers from the scan (LOC to convert, dependencies to replace, etc.). The humor comes from treating the migration as genuinely advisable.

Read the full file on GitHub · 80 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 80 lines · 15 tokens per session scan A f6eda90fb3d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cobol-converter is a skill published in the GitHub repository Factory-AI/cursed-plugins (105 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 15 tokens to every session and 1,097 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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