sai18

7 ms·

1.
by sai18 4mo ago
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 possible two years or even a year ago.
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by sai18 4mo ago
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... ). Now bringing in AI agents that ar
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by sai18 4mo ago
> 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 languages for the mainframe, it can also run Java and Python a
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by sai18 4mo ago
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 the team who is past 70. She manages a critical credit c
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by sai18 4mo ago
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. So the real challenge companies are facing is will ther
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by sai18 4mo ago
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 to keep these systems running. They are either past retiremen
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Show HN: Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL(hypercubic.ai)
97 points by sai18 4mo ago|51 comments
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Hypercubic (YC F25) Is Hiring a Founding SWE and COBOL Engineer(ycombinator.com)
1 points by sai18 8mo ago
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by sai18 8mo ago
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 understanding. Most modernization efforts stall not because C
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by sai18 10mo ago
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, United Airlines, JPMC, Geico, Coca Cola and so on.
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by sai18 10mo ago
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.
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by sai18 10mo ago
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 untangling 20–30-year-old code that few understand, and, mos
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by sai18 10mo ago
Curious why the COBOL devs were laid off if they're in the middle of a modernization or some sort of replacement project?
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by sai18 10mo ago
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 speciali
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by sai18 10mo ago
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 and infra.
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by sai18 10mo ago
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 runtime, it’s an entirely parallel computing universe
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by sai18 10mo ago
There’s a live playground you can try out here: https://hyperdocs-public.onrender.com/ — built just for the HN crowd.
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by sai18 10mo ago
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.
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by sai18 10mo ago
Thanks for sharing. It seems MUMPS is just as old and legacy as some of the COBOL systems!
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by sai18 10mo ago
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 u
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by sai18 10mo ago
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 lives in conventions, naming patterns, and unwritten rules that
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by sai18 10mo ago
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 helping us get into these enterprises: 1. The SMEs who understand
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Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes
91 points by sai18 10mo ago|58 comments
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AI tool that responds to questions with human-like answers, not search results(wonderly.ml)
2 points by sai18 5y ago|0 comments
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by sai18 5y ago
Lots of times we get questions when browsing online whether it's for work or study and we end up opening lots of tabs Googling and looking through those links for answers. This is tedious and wastes a lot of time. Wonderly works wherev
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Tool to ask questions while browsing and get exact answers, not a list of links(wonderly.ml)
4 points by sai18 5y ago|3 comments
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Logify: Log out of all your online accounts with one click
2 points by sai18 6y ago|2 comments