• 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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• After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

  February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

  It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.

  It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) …

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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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• Beta Of MCP Server Opens Up IBM i For Agentic AI

  October 27, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When Anthropic quietly released Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024, it didn’t garner a whole lot attention. But as the agentic AI wave grew in early 2025, the protocol suddenly was hailed as the new standard for integrating AI applications, tools, and data sources. A good indication of just how far MCP has come is the fact that IBM released an early version of the MCP server for IBM i this month.

  Project Bob got the big headlines at the IBM TechXchange conference, which took place the second week of October in Orlando, Florida. And for good reason, as …

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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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• With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles

  July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been noodling how it might tweak the subscription pricing for the P20 and P30 tiers since getting feedback on the first pass it did on its big iron Power Systems machines way back in February 2023. That feedback from the company’s biggest IBM i customers was not entirely glowing, but IBM has been clear that it would in the fullness of time move from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing on all of its software, and that IBM i would not be an exception.

  To cushion the blow – and there is one because customers keep machines …

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• Remain Begins Migrating DevOps Tools To VS Code

  June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

  For years, Remain Software was 100 percent devoted to Rational Developer for i (RDi) IBM’s flagship development tool for IBM i. It was a good bet, as the bulk of the market used RDi. However, in recent years, popularity of VS Code has soared, and now Remain is embarking upon a major project to redevelop all of its DevOps functionality to work with the browser-based IDE.

  Wim Jongman, the managing editor of Remain Software, started working on the company’s flagship change management product for AS/400, TD/OMS back in 1992. During its iSeries years in the early 2000s, Remain pivoted …

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• Remain Bolsters Development Options with TD/OMS

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software recently rolled out a major upgrade to its change management software for IBM i. The big enhancements with TD/OMS 16.1 include the availability of Remain’s Web-based development framework, dubbed Octo, as well as support for the popular Web-based IDE, VS Code.

  Remain Software introduced Octo more than two years ago as a lightweight Web-based framework to unite its various IBM i offerings. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo was initially put forward as a way to integrate and display information from other Remain Software applications, such as TD/OMS, Gravity, API Studio, and MiWorkplace, its lightweight, Web-based …

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• How Polverini Enables End-to-End Testing on IBM i

  August 5, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Testing is one of the most time-consuming and least glamorous parts of software development. But doing it well is important, as the July 19 CrowdStrike outage so potently reminded us. When it comes to ensuring that IBM i programs are thoroughly tested, a relatively new end-to-end testing solution from Polverini & Partners can potentially take some of the drudgery and error out of the process.

  Polverini & Partners recently announced ReplicTest, a new product aimed at automating all aspects of the software testing process on IBM i, including unit testing, acceptance testing, regressing testing, security testing, integration testing, and stress …

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• What’s Cooking In Code For IBM i?

  July 15, 2024 Alex Woodie

  With IBM beginning to pull back on green screen development tools for IBM i, the importance of Code for IBM i to the IBM i development community has never been greater. The good news is that there’s a lot of development activity at the moment around the Visual Studio Code plug-in, with new features to replace some of the outgoing greenscreen functionality.

  IBM announced that it was killing off some of the green screen development tools in its Application Development Toolset (ADTS) as part of its Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 in early May. Among the …

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