Escape Velocity

Your legacy systems are holding you hostage. You already know this.

Seventy percent of your IT budget disappears into maintaining systems built before the internet existed. The three people who actually understand that COBOL codebase are retiring within five years. Every modernization initiative you've launched has died — killed by complexity, cost overruns, or an organization too afraid of the risk to follow through.

You've been told escape is impossible. That the downside is too catastrophic. That the smart move is to keep the lights on and hope nothing breaks on a Friday afternoon.

That calculus has changed.

AI has fundamentally altered the economics of legacy modernization. Analysis that took months now takes days. Knowledge that walks out the door with retiring engineers can be captured before it's gone. Migration patterns that required years of careful human effort can be compressed by a factor of three to five. The escape velocity that was genuinely out of reach is now achievable — not as a moonshot, but as a managed program.

What's inside:

• Why AI-powered code analysis can develop a working understanding of your legacy systems faster than your best engineers
• How to extract and preserve critical knowledge from retiring experts before it disappears forever
• The four migration patterns — and how AI accelerates each one by 3-5x
• Practical workflows using Claude Code and GitHub Copilot for real code transformation
• How to generate comprehensive test suites that prove your new system actually works
• Data migration strategies that don't lose a single record
• The parallel path approach that eliminates cutover risk entirely
• How to actually decommission systems — not just "replace" them while they quietly keep running in the background
• Building permanent modernization capability so your organization never gets trapped like this again

This book is for you if you're a CIO, CTO, or technology leader who owns the legacy problem, you've tried modernization before and watched it fail, your best people are approaching retirement, or you're spending more on maintenance than on anything that moves the business forward.

Shane Larson has led digital transformation initiatives at Fortune 500 companies for over two decades. He's seen what works, what collapses, and what's genuinely different now that AI is part of the toolkit.

The legacy trap has held enterprises hostage for decades. The tools to escape now exist. The patterns are proven. The path is clear.

The only question is whether you'll walk it.