What we extracted from 40 years of undocumented COBOL - before the developer retired.

When someone says 'there's no documentation,' they usually mean: there are no documents.

They don't mean the logic isn't there. It's there - in the code, in the structure, in 40 years of decisions made by people who no longer work there.

Reading it is the work.

To be direct: we're not COBOL operators. We're not going to walk in and run your policy system. That's not what we do.

What we can do is lead the process of understanding what's inside.

One of our team sat with the COBOL developer for three weeks before he retired. Not to replace him. To learn from him. To surface the decisions that only existed in his head.

We combined that with AI-assisted source analysis - tools that map logic, trace decision trees, find patterns in legacy code at a scale a human couldn't cover alone.

The output: a documented logic map. A migration roadmap. Something the next team could work from.

Not perfect. Documentation is never perfect. But sufficient.

The developer retired knowing the work wasn't going to disappear with him. The organisation had something they'd never had before: a clear picture of what their system actually did.

If your key developer is also approaching retirement - don't wait for the regulatory letter.