cobol
(4)
The Machine That Refuses to Guess
Mechanical Orchard found a lucrative use for AI: distrusting it. Its software rewrites the mainframe one proven behavior at a time - because the old machine, however awkward, is still the only witness everyone believes.
IBM's Bob Grows Up: From Coding Assistant to Agentic Development Partner
On July 9, 2026, IBM unveiled major enhancements to IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform. The updates introduce multi-agent coordination across the full software development lifecycle, model-native parallel tool calling, subagents for context management, cost-and-productivity visibility via Bobalytics, and pre-built premium modernization workflows for IBM Z (COBOL/PL/I), IBM i (RPG), and Java (migration to Java 25). The release responds to a shift in enterprise bottlenecks from code generation to code review and validation, aiming to help teams ship production-ready software faster while optimizing the total cost of AI-driven development.
Fresche Solutions
Fresche Solutions is a Montreal-based enterprise software and services company that helps organizations manage, maintain, and modernize their IBM i (AS/400) and Microsoft systems. With more than 40 years of IBM i heritage, Fresche combines proprietary modernization tools such as X-Analysis, Presto, and Newlook with managed services, cloud hosting, and AI-driven data analytics to help legacy-dependent businesses move to modern web UIs, contemporary languages, and cloud platforms without disrupting operations.
Anand Kulkarni
Anand Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of CoreStory, a Berkeley-based AI company that decodes legacy enterprise codebases - turning decades-old COBOL and other ancient software into living, queryable specifications. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and NSF PhD fellow out of UC Berkeley, he previously co-founded LeadGenius (Y Combinator S11) and built Crowdbotics into a platform serving Fortune 500 companies and U.S. government agencies. In October 2025, CoreStory raised a $32 million Series A to modernize the world's mission-critical legacy software.