Enterprise contribution / synthetic illustration
A read-only way into COBOL
Making established business behavior easier for QA, Support, and engineering to investigate.
What I built at Global Shop Solutions
I built a security-filtered, read-only Model Context Protocol (MCP) interface to COBOL business logic, and supported it with training and documentation. Eight years of manufacturing ERP work, strongest in COBOL and VB.NET, gave me the context to work with the business behavior behind the code.
This account establishes the purpose, read-only scope, filtering, and internal audience. The original transport, retrieval method, schemas, authentication, and deployment are not documented in this public case study.
Proposed illustration: one fictional rule
The following flow, code, and data are newly authored synthetic examples. They illustrate one possible design and do not reconstruct the GSS implementation.
A fictional QA question: “What makes this example work order require manual review?”
01Ask
Request the fictional rule ID DEMO-REVIEW-RULE.
02Bound
Accept an exact known ID. Reject unknown IDs; accept no paths, SQL, or commands.
03Inspect
Return only the built-in synthetic excerpt and its fictional source label.
04Explain
Tie the answer to the returned rule instead of guessing at missing behavior.
*> SYNTHETIC PORTFOLIO EXAMPLE
IF HOLD-FLAG = "Y" OR
ITEM-COUNT > REVIEW-LIMIT
MOVE "Y" TO REVIEW-REQUIRED
ELSE
MOVE "N" TO REVIEW-REQUIRED
END-IFIn this fictional rule, a hold flag or an item count above the review limit sets REVIEW-REQUIRED to Y. Otherwise it is N. The illustration returns a built-in excerpt; it does not execute COBOL or inspect an employer codebase.
Evidence and limits
The synthetic companion checks a known-ID response and an unknown-ID rejection. Those checks describe the toy example only. The illustration does not implement the MCP wire protocol, authentication, production filtering, a COBOL runtime, or a complete security design.
No comparable latency, accuracy, coverage, time-saving, or business-impact measurements are supplied for the original work. Employer source, customer records, internal screenshots, and proprietary architecture are not included.
The engineering lesson
Understanding legacy behavior comes before modernizing it. A useful assistant interface needs a clear access boundary and enough source context for a person to check the explanation. The public example makes that reasoning inspectable while keeping the original implementation private.