Field notes from the estate: bytes, batch windows, and proof.
| Date | Post |
|---|---|
| 2026-09-26 | We Let Grok Test SteelFrame Over MCP: An Outside AI's Conformance Smoke Test We pointed Grok Bot, xAI's Grok desktop app, at SteelFrame's MCP server and asked it for a quick check of how our mainframe-compatible environment behaves against real-mainframe expectations: COBOL compile/link/run, JCL and JES2 spool, CICS-style transactions, VSAM, EBCDIC and COMP-3. It wrote its own suites and reported 45 passes, 1 fail and 1 skip. Here is what it ran and what it concluded. |
| 2026-09-25 | MCP on the Mainframe Already Runs: Answering the Architecture and Security Questions from Something We Built Can MCP have a place in the mainframe world? Yes, and it already runs. The post's six areas and its failed-batch-job flow, mapped to real MCP tools on SteelFrame, our mainframe-compatible environment. Then the questions that actually matter: direct exposure or an integration layer, and how you govern an agent's identity, scopes, audit trail and writes. |
| 2026-09-08 | The Ladder and the Map: What a 2030 Mainframe Career Looks Like, Rung by Rung and Region by Region The skills gap moved. It is no longer a COBOL gap — the estate can't hire the bridge: AI, cloud, integration, security. A rung-by-rung reading of the COBOL-developer-to-platform-architect ladder, and a region-by-region map of who is forcing the climb. |
| 2026-08-21 | Talent, Not Technology: A Field Guide to the 2026–2030 COBOL Estate The 2030 COBOL constraint isn't the code — it's the people who understand it. What a talent-first reading of the estate means for every service we run, and why proof is the through-line. |
| 2026-08-19 | The State of the Estate, 2022–2026: What Four Years Did to Mainframes, AS/400 and Modernization The platforms re-armed, the modernization scoreboard stayed brutal, AI made code cheap — and verification became the bottleneck. A cited tour of four years, and why equivalence testing decides who survives it. |