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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#52

Post by teruakohatu »

martyheyman wrote: post #42

Mainframe COBOL to POSIX native machine language or Java is largely a solved problem. 40 year old code that hasn't been touched in 30 years "ain't broke" and likely doesn't need fixing IMHO. Our take is get it to POSIX/Java so you can sort out all the OTHER STUFF and then rewrite/re-architect at your leisure. {disclosure: we're the GCC COBOL team}.

> The challenge is the institutional knowledge that never made it into code or documentation and has walked out the door.

This is a problem a compiler cannot fix, and is a very real problem.

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

#54

Post by antonvs »

sai18 wrote: post #12
koolba wrote: post #10

Neat stuff. For more esoteric environments that could use this type of automated leg up, check out MUMPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS There's a bunch of mainly legacy hospital and government (primarily VA) systems that run on it. And where there's big government systems, there's big government dollars.

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

I was offered a MUMPS job in the 1980s. I took one look at the code and very quickly concluded that life was too short for that.

Later I got into programming language theory, and took another look at MUMPS from that perspective. As a programming language, it’s truly terrible in ways that languages like COBOL and FORTRAN are not. Just as one example, “local” variables have an indefinite lifetime and are accessible throughout a process, i.e. they’re not scoped to functions. But you can dynamically hide/shadow and delete them. It would be hard to design a less tractable way of managing variables if you tried.

MUMPS’ value proposition was how it handled persistent data as a built-in part of the language. In that sense it was a precursor to systems like dBASE, which were eventually supplanted by SQL databases. MUMPS was a pretty good persistent data management system coupled with a truly terrible programming language.

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

#55

Post by cess11 »

sai18 wrote: post #36
cess11 wrote: post #15

All I can think about when reading this presentation is that Glamorous Toolkit pretty much has this and more.

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 ways, but our focus is on vertically specializing in the mainframe ecosystem and building AI-native tooling specifically for the problems in this space.

I'm not sure what "AI-native" would mean but GT has LLM-integrations, support for working in distributed systems and a COBOL-bridge that has been used in managing transitions of legacy systems.

Here's a talk about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8TSPED0alY

If you load the code referenced here, https://book.gtoolkit.com/analyzing-cobol--the-aws-carddemo-... , you can explore the demo used in the talk.

I'm sure you'll manage to figure out the LLM-integrations.

Edit: The Feenk folks also have a structured theory for why and how to do these things that they've spent a lot of time and experience on refining, visualising and developing tooling around.

I think it is a good idea for anyone working with large legacy systems to have such a theoretical foundation for how to communicate, approach problems and evaluate progress. Without it one is highly likely to make expensive decisions based on gut feeling and vague assumptions.

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

#56

Post by spratzt »

sai18 wrote: post #11
1970-01-01 wrote: post #7

This is weird. Mainframes are the dinosaurs of tech. Never would I think, 'let's add some AI' to a mainframe. It would be like adding opposable thumbs to dinosaurs. You are still solving the wrong problem, but it sure will be interesting watching the systems cope.

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 focus is different: we’re using AI to understand these 40+ year-old black box systems and capture the knowledge of the SMEs who built and maintain them before they retire. There simply aren’t enough engineers left who can fully understand or ma…

Isn’t strange that this talent shortage never translates itself into decent rates?

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

#58

Post by crackez »

martyheyman wrote: post #42

Mainframe COBOL to POSIX native machine language or Java is largely a solved problem. 40 year old code that hasn't been touched in 30 years "ain't broke" and likely doesn't need fixing IMHO. Our take is get it to POSIX/Java so you can sort out all the OTHER STUFF and then rewrite/re-architect at your leisure. {disclosure: we're the GCC COBOL team}.

What about CICS? What about JES?

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

#60

Post by kjs3 »

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

The goal is to replace people to 'save money'. And I'm always amused at startup founders who so obviously never worked with real people in real environments (outside of the startup bubble) that they think people are too stupid to see this for what it is. I look forward to their explanation to their investors as to why their product didn't meet expectations because after taking 5-6 seconds to figure out what this new 'tool' was intended to do, the users spent all of their time figuring out how to feed it garbage so it didn't become their besty twin replacement.

We’re curious to hear your thoughts and feedback, especially from anyone who’s worked with mainframes or tried to modernize legacy systems.

Lol.

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