Ionate's platform can untangle and transform 40-year-old legacy code. I designed the self-serve, chat-based experience that lets a customer harness all of it by just talking, named it MIRA, and wrote its story.
A note. MIRA is a live Ionate product with public demos. Everything shown here uses mock data, and it is shared with Ionate's blessing.
A developer asks MIRA to modernize a wire-transfer module. Ionate's platform maps the ecosystem, extracts the buried business rules, converts the code, and runs the tests, all reached through one self-serve conversation. Mock data.
Ask any modernization team if they use Gen AI and the answer is yes. Ask if it works and the answer is a wince. A generic LLM sees a snippet, not a 40-year interconnected ecosystem, so it invents dependencies, forgets what a program does across its callers, and cannot actually convert, test, or ship anything.
"It gives me plausible Java. It's wrong in ways I won't discover until production."
Ionate's platform genuinely understands legacy code, how it connects and how to transform it safely. Real technology, years in the making. But wielding it took experts and a services engagement. A customer could not simply pick it up and use it.
That was the design problem I owned: not the modernization, but the access. Make that power self-serve, so a customer reaches the whole platform without a specialist on the call.
The power was there. It needed a front door.
Ionate had spent years building three engines: discovery, transformation, and delivery. Powerful, and separate, and expert-operated. I designed a single self-serve, conversational experience that puts all three within a customer's reach, so she stops running tools and starts talking to one teammate who runs them for her.
I named her MIRA, gave the name its backronym, and built the story that carries the product, from the cold open to the close.
MIRA / Modernization · Intelligence · Reasoning · Agent
A senior developer at a legacy bank, handed the wire-transfer module: 340,000 lines of COBOL written between 1987 and 2003. The original authors have retired. Documentation is sparse. The code moves $2.3 billion in daily transactions. The story is built around her, because the product only matters if it works for her.
Estimated timeline, the traditional way: 18 months.
The platform reads the actual code. My job was to make that trustworthy in the conversation, so every answer comes back with the line numbers it was drawn from, and a customer can verify instead of taking it on faith. Ask a generic LLM about a fee program and it guesses from "typical banking patterns." Ask MIRA, and the answer cites its source.
"MIRA doesn't guess. She knows."
For a bank, that promise is the whole sale. MIRA runs in a secure, isolated container inside the customer's own infrastructure, so trust is a property of the architecture, not a line in a contract.
In the wire-transfer demo, an 18-month migration becomes a 6-week conversion. That power is Ionate's platform; my part was the self-serve experience that puts it within a customer's reach, by just talking. MIRA is live at Ionate, and the story I built is how it introduces itself to the world.
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