• Start Where the Data Lives: Best Practices for Taking IBM i Into AI

  October 5, 2026 Doug McMaster Ron Venzin and Gregg Rohaly

  The AI conversation has arrived at the IBM i shop, and in most cases, it did not come in through the computer room door. It came down from the boardroom, or over from finance, or sideways from a sales vice president who watched a demo at a conference and wants to know why the company cannot ask its own order history a question in plain English. The IBM i manager is then handed a question that sounds technical but is strategic: can our core platform play in this, or do we need to replace it to get there?

  That is …

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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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• 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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• 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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• RPG Code Generation And The Agentic Future Of IBM i

  June 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making progress with Watsonx Code Assistant for i, which is on track to become available as a public preview next month. And while IBM perhaps is running into some challenges with generating RPG code, the long-term potential of agentic AI on IBM i is brighter than ever.

  As we previously reported, IBM is now taking names for the folks who will be given access to the public preview of WCA for i, which you can sign up for here. According to IBM i CTO Steve Will, the preview will deliver RPG code understanding capabilities, which is …

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• How To Have The Wisdom Of Experts Woven Into Your Code

  October 14, 2024 Nicholas DeLessio

  No matter how far you are down the road with your DevOps automation journey, or even if you’re not yet starting that journey, it’s probably a good idea to have a code checker; not everyone can have a Linus Torvalds review their work (as famously happens with the open source Linux kernel), but there are automation tools available for various languages and platforms that do static code analysis and they are the next best thing.

  These tools, sometimes called “code linters” (because they remove the fuzzy bits out of application logic like actual linters remove imperfections stuck to our clothing), …

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• Where Do RPG Programmers Come From? And Other IBM i Questions

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community has faced a skills crunch off and on for the past decade or longer, as Baby Boomers retire and IBM i shops struggle to find replacements. One big reason for the hiring gap is that the old ways of finding new RPG programmers and other IBM i professionals no longer work like they used to, according to IBM i educator Jim Buck.

  “What they did for years was they just stole from the guys down the road,” said Buck, who is the president and CEO of IBM i training company imPower Technologies. ‘“I’ll go to …

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• How Long Before Big Blue Brings Code Assist To IBM i?

  August 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM Research and Big Blue’s Software group have been collaborating to bring generative AI capabilities to market through the Watsonx stack of large language models and related tools. Watsonx is a basis for customers to create customized LLMs based on data from their own businesses and to integrate the quasi-cognitive capabilities of LLMs into their applications.

  Watsonx is also being used by IBM to augment some tools of its own, and the most recent one that will be in tech preview in September and generally available sometime in the fourth quarter is called Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as …

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• Generative AI Is Part Of Application Modernization Now

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Generative AI is funny in that it is both an application in its own right when equipped with a chatbot interface and some intelligent prompting with guardrails to keep it from hallucinating and it can also be used as a tool to either generate chunks of applications based on large language models tweaked with a library of code.

  This is the first time that we can think of where the application is the tool or the tool is the application, and it presents a kind of chicken and egg conundrum for IT departments all over the world. Mainly: Where do …

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• How IBM Improved Application Development with the Spring 2023 TRs

  April 19, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers have a few exciting new features to look forward to with the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.5 and 7.4, including a new release of RDi and new RPG and COBOL functions in the compilers.

  As part of the Spring 2023 announcement for IBM i 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8, IBM last week unveiled a new release of Rational Developer for i (RDi), version 9.8, that brings new functionality to the Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE).

  According to IBM’s announcement letter, RDi RPG and COBOL Tools Edition runs on

  One of the new features with …

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