This week, I came across a few demos from IBM and others around IBM Bob — and they reinforced something I’ve been actively working on over the past year.
Impressive technology 👏
Genuinely exciting for the mainframe community 🚀
But something kept staring back at me — and nobody mentioned it 👇
GLBATCH1
PAYL0234
INVUPD22
ACCRPT01
Eight-character program names.
Still at the center of everything.
And no one flinched.
⚡ Because after 40 years… we’ve learned to live with it.
⚠️ Here’s the problem:
Every AI system touching a mainframe today starts blind 👁️
It sees GLBATCH1 and has to:
- infer meaning 🤔
- generate an explanation 🧠
- move on ➡️
- forget ❌
- repeat tomorrow 🔁
Same question.
Different answer.
Full token cost. Every time 💸
This isn’t a tooling gap.
It’s a missing layer.
Meaning doesn’t live with the artifact.
🧠 So what would it look like if meaning didn’t have to be rediscovered every time?
Over the past year, in my personal explorations, I’ve been working on this exact problem :
building and filing a patent-pending approach I call FirstLook™ 🧩
Not documentation.
Not another AI explanation.
👉 A persistent, governed baseline of meaning that travels with the artifact.
So instead of
GLBATCH1
You get:
“GLBATCH1 - Posts weekly payroll ledger entries to the General Ledger”
Once defined, it doesn’t change unless you change it.
And stays that way:
- in your IDE 💻
- in dependency graphs 🔗
- in JCL 📜
- in documents 📂
Same question.
Same answer.
Every time. ✅
The goal isn’t to explain better.
It’s to stop re-explaining altogether.
Git gave us version control.
CI/CD gave us delivery control.
We’re missing meaning control.
If you’ve explained what GLBATCH1 does even once this year —
you already understand the problem.
Patent pending 🧾
Working prototype ⚙️
Early — but increasingly convinced this layer becomes foundational.
Curious how others are thinking about this 🤝
PS: All views and work expressed here are my own and does not represent my employer in any way, shape or form.
#Mainframe #AI #Modernization #EnterpriseTech #SoftwareEngineering #Innovation #LegacySystems #AIDevelopment #ThoughtLeadership #IBM #BOB