We said MAYBE on August 3, 2026. Not settled — due August 3, 2027.
Read this with the caveat. We tested the engine that produced this verdict against 292 launches whose outcomes we already knew, and could not show it predicted which survived. Some of its data sources were also dead at the time of scoring. The verdict stays up, dated and unedited, because a record you can quietly revise is not a record — but it is worth less than it looked when it was written.
Demand is genuine and multi-channel — active refactoring pain, a hot COBOL/mainframe Show HN, growing commercial keywords, and four paying competitors. Winnability is moderate: there's a real product-shaped gap between blog/consulting incumbents and enterprise IBM, but the core engineering is hard and the richest buyers hide behind procurement. A solo founder should attack a narrow, verifiable slice (one language pair, test-guarded refactors) rather than 'migrate anything.'
Multiple channels align: real Reddit refactoring pain (117 + 14 + 11 upvotes), a high-signal Show HN (97 points), growing search with commercial keywords, and 4 competitors already selling into the space. This is proven, cross-channel B2B demand.
A clear wedge exists — incumbents are either blog/consulting-only (Coder.com, VirtusLab), general-purpose (Copilot), or heavyweight enterprise (IBM), leaving room for a focused product. But reliable automated migration is research-grade engineering and the highest-value buyers sit behind enterprise procurement, which caps how far a solo founder can push.
Legacy migration is one of the hardest correctness problems in software: getting an LLM to reliably translate 50k+ lines without breaking behavior is a deep, unsolved engineering challenge, and the buyers who pay real money (banks, insurers with COBOL) demand enterprise trust, audits, and procurement cycles a solo founder can't service. The generic-tool weaknesses look like a wedge, but they persist precisely because the last-mile reliability is brutally hard, not because incumbents are lazy.
What is worth more than this page. The register records what became of 6,266 real launches. No engine has to be right for that to be true.