Context maturity is a capability, not a project

The word legacy describes your technology. It does not describe your problem.

AI makes backward context creation feasible at estate scale for the first time. Extracting attested context from existing code was not economically viable before. Now it is.

This dissolves the category. A twenty-year COBOL estate and a three-year platform whose team left are the same problem wearing different technology. What matters is whether attested context exists. With it, governance can be proportional. Without it, every change is treated as equally dangerous.

What remains is a spectrum: code with mature context and code without it. The technology is incidental.

The strategic agenda item is not “modernise the legacy.” That is a project. Projects end or fail.

The agenda item is “achieve context maturity across the estate.” That is a capability. Capabilities compound.

We are testing this pattern now. No quantitative proof yet. The structural argument holds.