Field notes from the estate: bytes, batch windows, and proof.
| Date | Post |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | Claude's Code Modernization Playbook, in Plain Words — and How to Run It End to End on SteelFrame Anthropic's modernization playbook and its zero-trust guide for agents say: understand the code first, write the tests before you change anything, run old and new side by side, and give the agent a scoped identity, an audit trail and a sandbox. Here is what that asks for, and how a team runs all of it on SteelFrame, a mainframe-compatible place where Claude can read, run, test and compare legacy COBOL, CICS, DB2 and JCL behaviour. |
| 2026-10-15 | The AI Tsunami and the COBOL Ark: Mely Lerman's New Book, and Where a Practice Mainframe Fits A book by a programmer who started in 1965 launches on 20 October: COBOL's history, why rip-and-replace projects stumble, and AI as a tutor and comprehension engine for the next generation. What it says, what an early reader says, and where a safe practice mainframe fits. |
| 2026-10-10 | AWS CardDemo on SteelFrame: AWS's Sample Mainframe Application, Run from Its Own Source AWS CardDemo counted from its repository, our installed copy diffed line by line against upstream, the upstream bugs it reproduces, and two business days run. |
| 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. |