• Bob 1.0 Users Bugged By Lack Of One Feature

  April 6, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The launch of the Bob AI coding tool in late March has been met with considerable amount of hoopla by IBM, as well as anticipation by the IBM i community. The early reception to Bob has been mixed, due in part to the lack of one particular feature.

  Bob is a new AI tool from IBM that’s designed to help developers understand, document, and generate code in a variety of languages and platforms. On the IBM i server, Bob supports RPG, as well as CL, SQL, DDS, and COBOL, while it supports other languages on other platforms. IBM introduced Bob …

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• Here Come The AI-Based Code Modernization Offerings

  April 6, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are stuck with old code but don’t have the manpower to modernize it themselves are now considering the use of AI to handle much work. This new era of AI-assisted application modernization that we are now entering has the potential to be a boon for understaffed IBM i shops, but it raises new questions and concerns that IBM i professionals should keep in mind.

  The capability of AI to understand, document, and generate computer code has increased significantly over the past year. Thanks to fundamental improvements in large language models (LLMs), we’re now at the point …

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• Guru: Cohesion First – What A Procedure Should Be Responsible For

  April 6, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  One of the easiest mistakes to make in procedure-driven RPG is assuming that small procedures are automatically well-designed procedures. They are not. Size and cohesion are related, but they are not the same thing. A cohesive procedure has a single, clear responsibility. It exists to answer one business question or perform one business action. When a procedure tries to do more than that, it stops being a reusable building block and starts becoming a liability.

  In procedural RPG, nothing enforces this discipline. There is no compiler warning when a procedure quietly takes on a second responsibility. There is no language …

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• IBM Offers Trade-Ins On Storage To Grease The Upgrade Skids

  April 6, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Business partners who want to help customers upgrade their flash storage are pleased that Big Blue has updated a long running trade-in program for various flash, disk, and tape storage products.

  As we previously reported, IBM has just revamped the FlashSystem all-flash array lineup, with the idea of helping customers make-do in a market where prices of main memory and flash memory have all skyrocketed because of exuberant demand on behalf of the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and AI model builders who are all trying to build gigawatt-scale systems to create better models and higher performance inference engines to turn …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 14

  April 6, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Happy Easter, everyone, and may the spring renew everyone. There’s only one security vulnerability this week, so let’s get to it.

  That would be Security Bulletin: IBM i is Affected by Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key, Cross-site Scripting, and Prototype Pollution Vulnerabilities in IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty [CVE-2025-14923, CVE-2025-12635, CVE-2026-29063], which you can find out more about here. The affected releases and their PTFs are as follows:

  IBM i Release	5770-SS1 Option 3 	PTF Number(s)
  7.6					SJ09013	
  7.5					SJ09014
  7.4					SJ09015 
  7.3					SJ09016	
  7.2					SJ09017
  

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since …

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• What IBM i Ideas Are Cooking In IBM’s Ideas Portal?

  March 30, 2026 Alex Woodie

  It is early spring, which means we are getting close to Technology Refresh (TR) time. What new functionality will IBM add to the IBM i operating system and related products? Nobody knows except IBM and its closest business partners, but we can get an idea of what might be cooking in the next IBM i TR by checking out the IBM Ideas Portal.

  The IBM Ideas Portal was implemented back in 2022 to replace the IBM Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, which IBM formalized with a Web-based voting and ranking system back in 2016. The Ideas Portal works as …

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• Early Bob Excels In Medhost IBM i Tryout

  March 30, 2026 Alex Woodie

  One of the early testers of the IBM Bob AI tool is Medhost, the longtime developer of an integrated IBM i-based healthcare applications for community and rural hospitals. According to a joint presentation between IBM and the software vendor last week, the beta test was a success, as Bob assisted Medhost in not only understanding its RPG and SQL codebases, but modernizing and enhancing them.

  IBM i chief architect Steve Will was joined by Michael Bowen, the senior vice president of technology at Medhost, in a webinar last week to discuss how the provider of electronic health records (EHR) …

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• Counting The Cost Of AI Inference – And Projecting It Far Out

  March 30, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is probably a good thing that most IBM i shops did not spend a lot of money trying to figure out AI in the past decade. It was enormously expensive to develop first generation machine learning algorithms, and they had limited applicability. With large language models and their generative capabilities, the use cases for AI have skyrocketed, but the costs for training have been crazy expensive since the end of 2022, when the chattybot eureka moment – some might say emergent behavior – happened.

  The cost of training what are called foundation models – very large models with hundreds …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 13

  March 30, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to Monday and a whole new batch of security vulnerabilities with the IBM i platform, all thanks to the open source variant of the venerable Apache Web server embedded in the WebSphere Application Server Liberty edition.

  That’s the good thing about open source software: When there are problems, people find them and they fix them. The bad thing is that a lot of really smart people are constantly looking at the code for issues, and they are always find them. Think of it as Continuous Vulnerability/Continuous Patching, I guess.

  Let’s go through them, and all of the vulnerabilities affect …

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• The Next Generation Of IBM i Talent in GenAI Action

  March 30, 2026 Laura Ubelhor

  The future of IBM i is not just being imagined – it is actively being built by the next generation of IT professionals.

  The IBM i Agentic iMPACT AI Student Project provided Pennsylvania School of Technology network and technology students with a unique opportunity to participate in a real-world, industry-sponsored innovation challenge. This hands-on initiative focuses on implementing agentic artificial intelligence (AI) within the IBM i environment, giving students exposure to cutting-edge integration and automation technologies while building valuable, real-world experience.

  The project was offered as an extracurricular component of the curriculum; the project launched its first challenge with participation …

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