The promise of automated modernization platforms is seductive: feed in millions of lines of COBOL, Natural, or Fortran, and get clean, idiomatic Java or Go out the other side. It sounds perfect. But for any enterprise with sufficient complexity, it almost never works.
The Context-Free Translation Problem
Most modernization platforms operate on a syntax-to-syntax basis. They can translate the words, but they miss the sentences. Legacy code isn’t just logic; it’s a historical record of business decisions, hacks, workarounds, and optimizations that were valid in 1990 but are baffling today.
When a platform blindly translates this, you don’t get modern code. You get 'Java written in COBOL', a codebase that inherits all the architectural flaws of the mainframe but loses the stability.
The Missing Engineering Judgment
True modernization requires deciding what *not* to migrate. Dead code, redundant logic, and deprecated business rules should be pruned. A platform doesn’t know that a specific subroutine was only used for a product discontinued in 2005. An engineer does, or at least, an engineer knows to ask.
This is why we believe in agentic workflows, not black-box platforms. Agents assist engineers; they don't replace the fundamental judgment required to re-architect a system for the cloud.