Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb
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Guru: A Modernization Experiment Using IBM Bob 2.0
October 5, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb
The most common use case for business applications is the CRUD model. The Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations, performed against a business database, are found almost everywhere. Behind every fancy inquiry dashboard with all the graphical bling you can muster are a slew of tried and true so-called “maintenance programs” doing the heavy lifting over the data being presented. Whether it is back-office parameter tables, customer maintenance, or order entry applications, the CRUD model is fundamental. Most of us can whip out a simple green-screen maintenance program with our eyes closed in, oh, a couple hours or so, depending …
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Guru: Deterministic Application Development With AI
July 27, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb
Perhaps the key feature of AI is the way answers are obtained by virtue of a conversation with the AI. Contrast this with using a search engine where each “ask” is an independent request with a response.
An AI conversation has context while search engine interactions do not. More and more, we use AI to create applications through the contextual, iterative, conversational process. As we have ideas we add these to the conversation and our application changes accordingly. Our customers are getting in on the action too. They are providing us with AI generated prototypes for new software or new …
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GenAI Is The Death Of Deterministic Project Budgeting
June 15, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb
Like many of you in the IBM i community, we have been treading the AI waters for a couple of years now, starting with small proof-of-concept applications such as chatbots but progressing to far more advanced and complex code-to-AI interfaces.
One such project leveraged AI for recurring Jaccard similarity index processing over large sets of business data. The small projects fool a person into thinking that the large projects are just more of the same but, in reality, large projects take you into the world of proprietary AI APIs and can be complex engineering efforts.
We mostly use ChatGPT because …
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