Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

> HyperDocs ingests COBOL, JCL, and PL/I codebases to generate documentation, architecture diagrams, and dependency graphs.

Lots of tools available that do this already without AI.

> The goal is to build digital “twins” of the experts on how they debug, architect, and maintain these systems in practice.

That will be a neat trick, will the output be more than sparsely populated wiki?

My experience is there’s not a lot of Will or money to follow these things through.

Edit to add there was a lot of work around business rule extraction, automatic documentation, and static analysis of mainframe systems in 90s leading up to Y2K, but it all fizzled out after that. You all should search the literature if you haven’t.

How do you consolidate this knowledge across disparate teams and organizational silos? How will you identify and reconcile subtle differences in terminology used across the organization?

Perhaps I misunderstood, but on your website you primarily identify technical implementors as SMEs. IME modernizing legacy data systems in high-stakes environments, the devil is more on the business side -- e.g. disparate teams using the same term to refer to different concepts (and having that reflected in code), or the exact stakeholders of reports or data systems being unknown and unknowable, and discerning between rules that are critical to a particular team or workflow that are opaque to you because e.g. you don't know who all relies on this data or are missing business context, or because the rule is not actually used anymore, or because the implementation of the rule itself is wrong.

Besides, both technical and non-technical stakeholders and SMEs lean heavily on heuristics to decision with the data they are looking at, but often struggle to explicitly articulate them. They don't think to mention certain conditions or filters because for them those are baked into the terminology, or it doesn't occur to them that the organization deals with broader data than what they interact with in their day-to-day.

And unfortunately in these settings, you don't get many chances to get it wrong -- trust is absolutely critical.

I am skeptical that what you will end up with at the end of the day will be a product, at least if your intent is to provide meaningful value to people who rely on these systems and solve the problems that keep them up at night. My feeling is that you will end up as primarily a consultancy, which makes sense given that the problem you are solving isn't primarily technical in nature, it just has technical components.

Generalizing — if the company had enough need for it 30 years ago, was big enough to but a mainframe and the thing they used it for barely changes — chances are it’s still there, if the company is still there.

Banks absolutely do have it in house, in a dedicated secure site with a fence and a moat