# Engineering notes

> Canonical: https://stratamend.com/category/engineering-notes/
> Last updated: 2026-10-08

- [What we look for in a design partner](https://stratamend.com/what-we-look-for-in-a-design-partner.md): We are building Stratamend with a small group of design partners, and we are still adding a few more. This note explains what the…
- [Keeping source code inside your cloud account](https://stratamend.com/keeping-source-code-inside-your-cloud-account.md): The first question security teams ask us is where their source code goes. For a bank or an insurer, the codebase of a core…
- [Java 6 to Java 21: the migration nobody budgets for](https://stratamend.com/java-6-to-java-21-the-migration-nobody-budgets-for.md): COBOL gets most of the attention in modernization conversations, but many of the systems we hear about are just as constrained by Java code…
- [Writing PreToolUse hooks that keep an agent in scope](https://stratamend.com/writing-pretooluse-hooks-that-keep-an-agent-in-scope.md): Telling an agent “only edit files in this module” works most of the time. In a regulated codebase, most of the time is not…
- [How we plan to run many Claude Code agents without collisions](https://stratamend.com/how-we-plan-to-run-many-claude-code-agents-without-collisions.md): Parallelism is where agents can outpace a manual migration, and also where things can go wrong quickly. One agent migrating one module is a…
- [COBOL numeric semantics that break naive translations](https://stratamend.com/cobol-numeric-semantics-that-break-naive-translations.md): If you want to know where a COBOL-to-Java migration will go wrong, look at the numbers. COBOL’s numeric model was designed for business arithmetic…
- [AI-written code in regulated industries: what an audit trail needs](https://stratamend.com/ai-written-code-in-regulated-industries-what-an-audit-trail-needs.md): Singapore’s MAS Technology Risk Management Guidelines expect financial institutions to control change management, access and third-party risk. AI agents that write production code touch…
- [Copilots versus agents for legacy migration](https://stratamend.com/copilots-versus-agents-for-legacy-migration.md): We often get asked why we build on an autonomous coding agent rather than an autocomplete-style assistant. Both are useful. They solve different problems,…
- [Mapping a legacy codebase: what goes into an Atlas](https://stratamend.com/mapping-a-legacy-codebase-what-goes-into-an-atlas.md): Before any agent edits a line of code, we want a map. We call it the Atlas: a structured description of a codebase that…
- [Why golden-master tests come before the first agent edit](https://stratamend.com/why-golden-master-tests-come-before-the-first-agent-edit.md): Legacy systems rarely have a specification. The code is the specification, including quirks that other systems now depend on. A batch job that rounds…
- [Why we started Stratamend](https://stratamend.com/why-we-started-stratamend.md): Stratamend was founded in Singapore in January 2026 around a simple observation: the systems that move money, pay claims and run public services are…