Gregory Simmons
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Guru: CRTSRVPGM Parameters That Can Save or Sink You
January 12, 2026 Gregory Simmons
It was 2 a.m., and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. A production job had failed, and the error logs weren’t making any sense. After an hour of digging, the culprit finally revealed itself: the wrong procedure had been bound in a service program. Somehow, a silent duplicate had snuck through, and everything downstream was broken. If you’ve ever been in that situation, you know that “it compiles, it runs” is the worst mindset you can have when creating service programs. The parameters on CRTSRVPGM exist for a reason, and ignoring them can turn a simple build into a nightmare at …
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Guru: A First Look at Bob, The IBM i Assistant That’s Closer Than You Think
December 8, 2025 Gregory Simmons
I recently was granted early access to IBM’s new Project Bob, and I have been putting the Bob-IDE through its paces to understand what IBM is aiming for and what IBM i developers should expect as the offering matures. Bob is IBM’s emerging AI-powered development assistant and IDE ecosystem designed to modernize how developers work on the IBM i.
One of the first things that stands out is that the Bob-IDE is not an extension like the older WCA4i project, which was in extension form. IBM learned a lot from that experience, and those lessons led them to take a …
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Guru: When Attention Turns To You – Writing Your Own ATTN Program
September 22, 2025 Gregory Simmons
Most IBM i users press the Attention key without much thought. They’re used to the familiar system-supplied menu popping up, or maybe a command line depending on how their profile is configured. But buried in the system is a powerful customization point: you can assign your own ATTN program. Doing so gives you the ability to intercept that key and provide functionality tailored exactly to your shop’s needs. There are three main ways to establish an attention program, each with its own strengths and tradeoffs.
The most obvious method is at the user profile level. Within the profile’s attributes is …
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Guru: WCA4i And Granite – Because You’ve Got Bigger Things To Build
September 15, 2025 Gregory Simmons
They said AI would change everything. Then most of it turned into chatbot demos and marketing decks. But watsonX Code Assistant for i (WCA4i for short), backed by IBM’s own Granite large language model, is doing something IBM i developers might actually care about: Helping you understand, transform, and evolve legacy code without tossing decades of business logic into the fire.
WCA4i isn’t trying to slap a web UI over your green screens or auto-generate JavaScript for the sake of buzzwords. It’s aimed at something deeper – leveraging an AI foundation model that’s actually trained on IBM i code and …
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Guru: When Procedure Driven RPG Really Works
July 14, 2025 Gregory Simmons
In the vast and varied ecosystems of Earth, few interactions between species have captured the imagination of scientists and casual observers alike as much as the relationship between bottlenose dolphins and puffer fish. This curious dance, often involving the deliberate provocation of the puffer fish to trigger its natural defense mechanism, has led to many interpretations – from simple play to speculative pharmacological experimentation. I submit to you today, that in the digital ocean of RPG development, developers should interact with their procedures in ways that, to the outside eye, might seem equally cryptic, yet are deeply intentional, meticulously orchestrated, …
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Guru: Unlocking The Power Of %CONCAT And %CONCATARR In RPG
April 14, 2025 Gregory Simmons
When working with strings in RPG, especially in modern free-format code, the %CONCAT and %CONCATARR built-in functions (BIFs) offer efficient and readable solutions for combining strings. These functions simplify the process of concatenating multiple string values, making your code cleaner and easier to maintain. In this article, we will explore how they work and demonstrate their practical applications.
The %CONCAT BIF allows you to combine multiple strings. It’s a more efficient and readable alternative to traditional concatenation using the + operator.
Here’s a simple example:
**Free Ctl-Opt Main(CONCAT_1) ActGrp(*Caller); Dcl-Pr pause ExtProc('sleep'); time_to_sleep Uns(10) Value; End-Pr; Dcl-Proc CONCAT_1; Dcl-S firstName… Read more -
Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With Continue
March 10, 2025 Gregory Simmons
In my last article, I shared a brief introduction to the GitHub Copilot extensions. These extensions provide an easy way to get up and running with an AI coding assistant to aid you in your RPG development. Being cloud based, it’s lightweight in terms of system resources, but it does cost a little money per month, per user.
For this article, I would like to share with you what I have learned about a newer extension for VS Code named Continue. Continue runs locally on your PC, is 100 percent free, and as of this writing, is the leading …
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Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With GitHub Copilot
February 17, 2025 Gregory Simmons
If you have been meaning to give VS Code a try, but just haven’t had a chance, I encourage you to avail yourself today. Yes, for you RDi users, it will take a little bit to migrate your favorite settings, code snippets, and compile commands – but I promise, you won’t regret the move.
In my article, Getting Started With The Code 4 i Extension Within VS Code, I offer a few more insights to help get you started. And if you are an SEU user, yes, the switch may seem daunting, but one of the great things about …
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Guru: RPG Receives Enumerator Operator
November 11, 2024 Gregory Simmons
The RPG language now (some would argue, finally) has an enumerator operator. This was introduced in IBM i 7.5 TR3 and IBM i 7.4 TR9.
DISCLAIMER: The edibility of the mushrooms listed in my test program are purely to give the program some context and make it interesting. Their edible status is based on information from the Missouri Department of Conservation’s publication A Guide to Missouri’s Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms. Before foraging for or consuming any wild mushroom do your research and be safe.
Let’s dive right into a code sample. We’ll start with a simple linear-main program …
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Guru: RPG Select Operation Gets Some Sweet Upgrades
September 23, 2024 Gregory Simmons
I have always been a fan of RPG’s Select operation. Any time I’m coding an If statement and think there’s a chance that there could be a third situation other than the If-Else conditions, I will go ahead and code the Select operation instead of the If statement. The RPG language’s Select operation got a pretty sweet upgrade in V7R5 TR2 and V7R4 TR8. Now, the Select statement can be presented with a value and we have two new op-codes to use within the Select operation; When-is and When-in.
DISCLAIMER: The edibility of the mushrooms listed in my test …
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