• IBM Pulls The Curtain Back A Smidge On Project Bob

  October 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  We learned last week that Project Bob is in at IBM, and Watson Code Assist for IBM i is out. IBM is gung-ho about the prospects for Bob to function as a do-it-all, AI-powered junior programmer for all of its platforms. But what exactly does this entail for IBM i customers? IT Jungle talked to IBM i chief architect Steve Will to get some answers.

  When IBM eventually ships the AI code assistant that is currently called Project Bob, it will offer a range of AI-powered functionality for all IBM customers, including IBM i shops, mainframe customers, and Linux and …

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• IBM Just Killed Merlin. Here’s Why

  October 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The writing had been on the wall for some time, and IBM finally made it official as part of the Technology Refresh for IBM i on October 7. That was when Big Blue announced the immediate withdrawal from marketing and service for its Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration product, commonly called Merlin. It will likely go down in IBM i history as a well-intentioned product that got some things right, but which ultimately could not overcome its flaws.

  The introduction of Merlin back in May 2022 represented a sizable shift in IBM’s approach to application development on IBM i. Prior …

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• Guru: Playing Sounds From An RPG Program

  October 20, 2025 Mike Larsen

  I received a request to play audio sounds when an event took place on a display file. I hadn’t done this before, but I thought it was interesting to find out how it could be done. As with many tasks, it turns out there are more than one way to do this. My goal was to choose a method to make the process as seamless as possible.

  At first, the request was to play two sounds: one that would signal a positive event, and another to signal a negative event. But, as I started working with the project, I found …

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• A Bit More Insight Into IBM’s “Spyre” AI Accelerator For Power

  October 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If anything is clear right now, it is that Nvidia does not need to get any richer in the GenAI revolution, and neither does its foundry partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. But everyone else, including IBM and specifically its Power Systems business, desperately needs to do something to catch the GenAI wave and make some money in this once-in-a-millennia opportunity.

  Our thesis, as you well know, is that for IBM i shops, code assistants that can help document, update, modernize, or port RPG and COBOL application code to newer languages and modular programming techniques is the killer app for GenAI, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 42

  October 20, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Just a reminder that IBM’s System Planning Tool Version 6.25.287.0 is available for download. You can get the feeds and speeds of SPT 4, 6, and 6 at this link and the download for the latest version at this link. This one has features for adding the “Spyre” AI accelerator to Power Systems, among many other updates.

  Other than that update to SPT, it has been a pretty quiet week here at the IBM i PTF Guide.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.6:

  • HIPERs (High

  …

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• What You Will Find In IBM i 7.6 TR1 and IBM i 7.5 TR7

  October 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It’s early October, which means leaves are changing colors, nights are getting colder, and IBM developers in southern Minnesota and elsewhere are gearing up the autumnal Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system.

  With last week’s announcements of TR1 for IBM i 7.6 and TR7 for IBM i 7.5, which ship November 21, IBM has committed to delivering a slew of updates and new functionality across the range of IBM i system software, from application development to administration.

  Before we get into the specific areas of IBM i, let’s cover the general enhancements it made with I/O handling. For …

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• Three Things For IBM i Shops To Consider About DevSecOps

  October 13, 2025 Michel Mouchon

  Way back in the Great Recession, when money was getting tight and the technical debt was getting high, the concept of agile infrastructure evolved into DevOps, the synchronization and coordination of application development, which likes to move fast, with IT operations, which likes to have things running in a stable fashion. The idea runs counter to half of the philosophy of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has espoused the principle to “move fast and break things.”

  DevOps wants to move fast, but it most assuredly does not want to break things, and many millions of programmers and operations staff …

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• Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”

  October 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.

  Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified …

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• As I See It: Retirement Challenges

  October 13, 2025 Victor Rozek

  If you work long enough, eventually you’ll earn the right not to work. Well, maybe. Retirement has become an increasingly tricky proposition. The three-legged stool designed to support the financial weight of life beyond employment is collapsing. For millions of workers approaching retirement, the support once provided by pensions, personal savings, and social security is no longer reliable. Once thought to be constructed of sturdy oak, the stool now resembles something patched together with balsa wood and duct tape.

  For most workers, pensions are either a distant memory or an abstraction. According to figures compiled by everyone’s “favorite” research assistant, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 41

  October 13, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  I don’t know about you, but we figured there were Technology Refreshes coming, especially with IBM’s TechExchange 2025 developer conference going on last week. However, unlike in past years, we didn’t get any advanced warning. So check out the initial coverage of the new TRs for IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.6 and keep an eye out for the coming weeks of detailed drill-downs.

  There is also a pretty serious set of vulnerabilities in the IBM i platform that you need to deal with. Check out Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by Remote Code Execution, Deserialization of Untrusted …

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