This page goes deeper on the three phases introduced in Welcome to Catalio: Extract, Understand, and Evolve.
The Three Phases
Phase 1: Extract
Catalio connects to your platforms and surfaces every business rule, process, and dependency automatically. Whether it’s a legacy ERP written in COBOL, a heavily customized Salesforce org, or an internal tool built over 15 years of patches – Catalio pulls in the full picture.
What gets extracted:
- Components: Fields, endpoints, rules, objects, UI elements with full metadata
- Business rules: Validation logic, workflow automations, calculated fields
- Dependencies: How components relate to and depend on each other
- Processes: End-to-end workflows and their decision points
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Phase 2: Understand
Once extracted, every component gets AI-enriched with summaries and semantic tags – searchable by purpose, not just name. The result is a living specification: a complete picture of what your system does today.
This isn’t a static document that goes stale the moment it’s written. The living specification:
- Updates as your system changes
- Organizes business logic into features, requirements, and acceptance criteria
- Provides a real-time PRD for your entire application
- Makes institutional knowledge searchable and shareable
Phase 3: Evolve
With a complete understanding of your current state, you can plan and deliver changes with full context. Catalio’s AI performs gap analysis on every initiative – comparing what exists today against where you want to go.
For modernization projects:
- Map legacy business rules to target architecture components
- Identify gaps before they become production issues
- Trace every requirement through implementation
- Keep the specification current as you ship changes
For the step-by-step version, see How It Works in Practice or the Quick Start Guide.
What’s Next?
- Learn about the Living Specification concept in depth
- Understand Gap Analysis for risk-free modernization
- Follow the Quick Start Guide to connect your first application
- Drive Catalio from your IDE with the MCP technical workflow
- Set up your client with MCP Authentication
