Startup Seeks The “Golden Path” for IBM i Modernization

April 13, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops looking for a partner to help with RPG modernization may want to check out Golden Path Digital. The startup recently announced a modernization initiative dubbed AS/Forward that includes a mix of code documentation and AI-powered code conversion tools, all wrapped up with professional services, to give IBM i shops a lifeline for aging RPG apps.

Golden Path Digital was founded last year in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, by two business partners, Aaron Balentine and Ty Woods. An AI engineer at a local lumber company that runs on the IBM i platform, Valentine is the technical one, while Woods handles the WordPress system, business development, and marketing.

The company previously provided general IT services, such as QuickBooks migrations, building Web portals, and WordPress services. That changed recently following the experience that Balentine had helping to modernize his employer’s RPG applications, which was the inspiration for AS/Forward.

The lumber company had lots of RPG, but it was poorly documented and they didn’t have a good way to extract business rules. “That piqued my interest because at the time it was the company’s biggest business risk,” Balentine told IT Jungle. “So I learned RPG to make an attempt at writing an Open Access handler.”

Balentine and Woods still work at their day jobs, but they both recognized that a bigger opportunity existed for helping other IBM i shops to get a handle on their source code. The combination of a workforce cliff from aging Baby Boomers exiting the workforce and poorly documented RPG source code means that many IBM i shops are facing serious business risks.

“The workforce is shrinking, for RPG development specifically, and so it makes sense to provide businesses with tooling that would allow them to easily convert themselves, if they wanted to,” Balentine said.

AS/Forward bundles several in-house developed tools with professional services for code modernization (don’t worry; there’s no RPG Open Access involved). The software includes a source code analyzer that provides cross-referencing and impact analysis for RPG code, and an AI-powered source code conversion module that can run either on-prem or in the cloud. The goal of AS/Forward engagements is to leave the customer with better documented RPG code at the least, while a full engagement would result with the migration of codebase to Free Form RPG, Python, or other target languages.

The AS/Forward’s cross-reference tool generates a map that allows a developer to easily see what the “blast radius” will be if any changes are made to the source code. The goal helps customers what’s going on with the RPG code, which is critical to know before the source code is converted or modified, Balentine said.

“The first thing we would do on any deployment is, we have an ingestion layer that would ingest their code base and build out a deterministic dependency map,” he said. “It uses all the system commands on the IBM to get the details about programs and objects – what fields the program contains, where it prints to, what physical files and logical files it uses.”

Once the RPG is documented, the client is ready for the next stage of the AS/Forward engagement, which is connecting the code, via Model Context Protocol (MCP), to a large language model (LLM) for code conversion. The offering supports multiple LLMs, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama. For customers who don’t want their source code going to AWS’s Amazon Bedrock or other AI development environment in the cloud, Golden Path Digital supports Ollama, which allows users to download and run LLMs on their own Linux instances.

AS/Forward leans on AI models to do the actual conversion of RPG to either modern Free Form RPG or open languages, like Python, PHP, Java, etc. The LLMs have gotten much better at understanding RPG over the past year, Balentine said. But the real crux of these engagements is the prior step, in his opinion. That is where having quality code analysis really pays off, Balentine said.

“We use our ingestion layer and our dependency analysis tool to provide meaningful ground truth context to the AI model,” he said. “For a developer who’s never worked in RPG, this would allow them to query in natural language ‘What happens if I change X field in Y?’ And the AI model can use its tooling to go and pull the impact analysis and pull the parsed versions of the programs, and it gives a solid ground.”

While AI models have gotten much better at understanding RPG, they are still prone to hallucinations, Ballentine said. That is one of the reasons that Golden Path Digital invests a lot of time and effort in the cross-reference and impact analysis – to provide better context for the AI models to (hopefully) keep them on the right path, he said.

“You take the same input, you can get similar output eight out of 10 times, and then two out of 10 times, they’re way out of left field,” he said. “And so what we need to do is run it through a layer that is the same input, the same output every time. And then we provide that as context to the model so that when it does ingest your code, it’s got a ground truth that it can rely on and not hallucinate and not make things up. Because in these situations, accuracy is paramount. You have to know every little detail of every program. And so we’re aiming to provide tools that assist AI models in doing that.”

Another trick that Golden Path Digital uses in its code analysis is vector search. Vector similarity search is a key component in many retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, where customers will “vectorize” the data in their database to enable the AI engine to pull up relevant information very quickly. In AS/Forward’s case, Ballentine is using vector search as a “fuzzy search” that allows customers to find similar components of their source code without knowing its exact name or location, Balentine said. (It is not applied to IBM i data.)

“It seems to me that a lot of IBM shops are sort of at a point where, if they don’t have documentation at this point, they’ve got a workforce that’s dwindling and they’re trying to figure out what their next move is,” he said. “In order to do that, you need to know what your business rules actually are. And so this tool will help ingest your code base and figure out what your programs actually do, so that, alongside the code base analysis, you can it out and help steer your company.”

Balentine and Woods initially created AS/Forward with the intent that customers would want to migrate their applications entirely off the IBM i. But now the company is positioning the program as a way for customers to stay on the IBM i and gain a better understanding of their code, perhaps running as Free Form RPG as opposed to older fixed-format RPG III or RPG IV that is much harder for newcomers to understand.

“Our focus has become to allow companies to help onboard future developers who may not have experience in RPG, to help them understand the code and what it does so that the business at that point can make the decision of what they want to do,” he said. “In my mind, the ideal for these companies is for them to be able to stay on their systems.”

AS/Forward is still fairly new, and Golden Path Digital is looking for IBM i customers who are willing to partner with the firm with early deployments. For more information, see the company’s website at www.goldenpathdigital.com.