Engineering notes
What we look for in a design partner
We are building Stratamend with a small group of design partners, and we are still adding a few more. This note explains…
Keeping source code inside your cloud account
The first question security teams ask us is where their source code goes. For a bank or an insurer, the codebase of…
Java 6 to Java 21: the migration nobody budgets for
COBOL gets most of the attention in modernization conversations, but many of the systems we hear about are just as constrained by…
Writing PreToolUse hooks that keep an agent in scope
Telling an agent “only edit files in this module” works most of the time. In a regulated codebase, most of the time…
How we plan to run many Claude Code agents without collisions
Parallelism is where agents can outpace a manual migration, and also where things can go wrong quickly. One agent migrating one module…
COBOL numeric semantics that break naive translations
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…
AI-written code in regulated industries: what an audit trail needs
Singapore’s MAS Technology Risk Management Guidelines expect financial institutions to control change management, access and third-party risk. AI agents that write production…
Copilots versus agents for legacy migration
We often get asked why we build on an autonomous coding agent rather than an autocomplete-style assistant. Both are useful. They solve…
Mapping a legacy codebase: what goes into an Atlas
Before any agent edits a line of code, we want a map. We call it the Atlas: a structured description of a…
Why golden-master tests come before the first agent edit
Legacy systems rarely have a specification. The code is the specification, including quirks that other systems now depend on. A batch job…