The Atlantic 2026-05-08-1
The Secret to Understanding AI
The most economically important AI deployment in America right now is the IRS migrating 60-year-old COBOL with Claude, Llama, and ChatGPT as pair programmers: what took months on the Individual Master File now takes days on the Business Master File. Tyrangiel's tech-counterculture framing collapses on inspection, because Pandya's team runs entirely on tech-company products, just under different incentives. The real opportunity is that multi-trillion-dollar mainframe modernization across financials, insurance, telecom, and government is bottlenecked on a deployment posture that neither Big Four nor AI-native shops have productized.