Legacy Modernisation

A twenty-year COBOL estate has the same problem as a three-year microservices platform whose team rotated out. The variable is context maturity.

When AI analyses existing code, the output looks like documentation. It is not. Validation means checking whether an interpretation matches observed reality.

AI makes backward context creation feasible at estate scale. What matters is whether attested context exists — the technology is incidental.

The first time AI solves a migration pattern, it is novel. The second time, a recipe. The tenth time, deterministic. Context maturity is what makes this compound.

Context maturity turned out to be the governing variable for code estates. It may be the governing variable for every enterprise value stream where AI accelerates change.