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With agentic systems that are extremely proficient in the mainframe ecosystem, the failure rates for modernization should dramatically go down. What we're attempting was not possib…

Throwing bodies has been the primary way to approach mainframe modernization and a majority of them do end up failing ( https://softwaremodernizationservices.com/insights/mainframe…

> I often wonder why mainframes never had a more modern easier to maintain and manage programming language designed for them. Although COBOL is one of the primary programming langu…

That is the current landscape today. Mainframe engineers are in high demand and good ones are paid quite well. I've heard from a global bank, they have one mainframe developer in t…

The problem here is that people who understand these systems are all retiring. Majority of the devs are over 60 and there's simply not enough new talent coming in to replace them. …

That’s what we’ve seen with our customers. Some have only one or two COBOL developers left in some teams, and they are often the only people with the operational knowledge needed t…

Hi HN, we’re Sai and Aayush, and we’re building Hypercubic ( https://www.hypercubic.ai/ ), bringing AI tools to the mainframe and COBOL world. (We did a Launch HN last year: https:…

You’re describing the pattern we’re seeing across most companies who are still on COBOL. The shortage of COBOL engineers is real but the harder problem is enterprise scale system u…

This is accurate to what we've seen in the market. If they were large enough to need compute 30-40+ years ago, they certainly have some mainframes running today. Think Walmart, Uni…

Like Bloop, we’re also focused on modernization, but our approach extends beyond code to include the people behind these systems and capturing the institutional knowledge they hold…

Absolutely true, and the challenge is that a large portion of modernization projects fail (around 70%). The main reasons are the loss of institutional knowledge, the difficulty of …

Curious why the COBOL devs were laid off if they're in the middle of a modernization or some sort of replacement project?

Reminds me of this comment on the Dropbox HN launch thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 There are may be other general-purpose tools out there that overlap in some wa…

There isn’t enough COBOL data available to reach human-level performance yet. That’s exactly the opportunity we have in front us to make it possible through our own frontier models…

I’d also note that COBOL is only one layer of the stack. The real complexity lies in also understanding z/OS (mainframe operating systems), CICS, JCL, and the rest of the mainframe…

There’s a live playground you can try out here: https://hyperdocs-public.onrender.com/ — built just for the HN crowd.

Mechanical Orchard is a major player in this space, though their model is closer to professional services than a true end-to-end AI modernization platform.

Thanks for sharing. It seems MUMPS is just as old and legacy as some of the COBOL systems!

Looks like it's already been pointed out. We’re not applying AI to these systems — IBM is already pursuing those initiatives ( https://research.ibm.com/blog/spyre-for-z ). Our focu…

Given how far back these systems go, the real challenge isn’t just the code or the lack of documentation, but the tribal knowledge baked into them. A lot of the critical logic live…

Thank you! The decision makers we work with are typically modernization leaders and mainframe owners — usually director or VP level and above. There are a few major tailwinds helpi…

Hi HN, we’re Sai and Aayush and we’re building Hypercubic ( https://www.hypercubic.ai/ )! Hypercubic is an AI platform that helps Fortune 500 companies understand, preserve, and mo…