Articles
Articles.
What we learn building and proving software for organisations: legacy modernisation, cybersecurity and enterprise software.
SovereignShowing all 8 articles
Legacy modernisation
How to prove a rebuilt system does exactly what the old one did
How to tell whether a rebuilt system has been proved to behave exactly like the old one: five questions to ask any supplier, three ways organisations prove a move today, and a checklist.
Legacy modernisation
We rebuilt a public mainframe credit card system and proved it works the same
We rebuilt the 13 batch programs of CardDemo, a public mainframe credit card application, and compared every printed line and every written record with the originals. All thirteen match.
Cybersecurity
Proving what AI agents can reach, instead of watching for trouble
Most security tools for AI agents flag behaviour that looks unusual; Kern proves in advance what a set of agents can and cannot reach, and issues a certificate others can re-check.
How we work
A team cannot reliably judge whether its own idea is new
Twelve ideas that had passed our internal checks went to an outside reviewer told to disprove them; all twelve were rejected or downgraded, mostly because someone had already published them.
Enterprise software
The most important software is usually the part nobody sees
From bookkeeping to AI agents, the systems that matter most work out of sight; this note explains why all six Syntaxe products are built for that hidden layer.
Enterprise software
AI agents change the main question in software design
Software used to wait for a person's click; now AI agents act on their own, so their limits must be set and proven before they are released.
How we work
Good ideas are rarely unique
When an outside reviewer checked twelve of our own ideas, almost all had been thought of before; lasting value comes from data, methods and engineering that others cannot easily copy.