• Big Blue Finally Unveils First IBM i Tech Refreshes Of 2026

  July 20, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Well, that took a little longer than usual. Last week, IBM finally made its first IBM i Technology Refresh announcements of 2026, formally unveiling the group of updates that collectively will make up IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8. With the fall TR ostensibly just three months away, the good news with the two new TRs is that the general availability date is this Friday.

  Since IBM moved to the TR cycle back in 2010, it has traditionally given the IBM i community two big updates per year, one in the spring (normally April) and one in the …

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• Big Blue Ships Bob 2.0 And Premium Package For IBM i

  July 13, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s push into the world of agentic coding continues, as Big Blue officially started selling and supporting major updates to its Bob agentic AI software. There are two separate but related pieces of news to cover, including the release of IBM Bob Premium Package for i and the release of Bob 2.0.

  As it is wont to do, IBM generated some confusion with its Bob launches, as both Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages became available on the same day, June 24. However, Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages are not the same thing, and their announcements were …

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• Your IBM i Jobs Don’t Live On An Island Anymore

  July 13, 2026 Rob Newman

  When I am on a call with a prospective customer, one of the first questions I ask is: Are you looking to schedule and automate IBM i jobs specifically, or do you need to incorporate all of your cross-platform dependencies? That question tends to land with a thud. Not because people don’t understand it, but because often they have never really thought about it that way.

  They have been running their IBM i jobs the way they always have, and somewhere else in the building, someone else is running Windows jobs a different way, and maybe a Linux process a …

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• Talking Git On IBM i With A Bunch Of IBM i Gits

  July 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is someone on planet Earth who is most definitely not a git, it is Linux operating system kernel and Git version control system creator Linus Torvalds. The term git was absolutely meant to be pejorative, but it has softened over the years in part because Torvalds chose the name for his version control system precisely to mock himself. The meaning of git is shifting from incompetent senile fool toward curmudgeon and is heading toward old fart.

  Torvalds manages one of the largest software projects in the world, and in the early 2000s chose BitKeeper, a proprietary source …

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• GenAI Is The Death Of Deterministic Project Budgeting

  June 15, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

  Like many of you in the IBM i community, we have been treading the AI waters for a couple of years now, starting with small proof-of-concept applications such as chatbots but progressing to far more advanced and complex code-to-AI interfaces.

  One such project leveraged AI for recurring Jaccard similarity index processing over large sets of business data. The small projects fool a person into thinking that the large projects are just more of the same but, in reality, large projects take you into the world of proprietary AI APIs and can be complex engineering efforts.

  We mostly use ChatGPT because …

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• PTC Adds Support For VS Code With Implementer 12.7

  June 15, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that rely on PTC’s Implementer software to manage their RPG development will soon be able to use the tool within the VS Code development environment. The upcoming release of Implementer 12.7 will introduce several other important features as PTC begins the process of modernizing the tool.

  Implementer is a well-established change management system targeting the IBM i environment. The software traces its roots to 1987, when four Pansophic (creators of the PRMS ERP system now owned by Infor) employees founded Silvon Software in Chicago. One of their first products was a tool to manage source code …

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• Guru: Where’s The Table?

  June 8, 2026 Ted Holt

  It began with an irritation. I considered it a simple request. “Which file did my SQL query read?” I was using the Run SQL Scripts tool to modify an SQL query with unqualified table names. And yet I knew of no ready way to determine the schema (library) name of any of the files. How was I to know which tables I had just queried?

  Let me back up a bit. My SQL client of choice is the Run SQL Scripts tool, which is part of IBM’s Access Client Solutions (ACS). It is not unusual for me to copy and …

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• Big Blue Unveils Bob Premium Pack For IBM i

  June 1, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Early Bob users who were frustrated with the inability to work with source code residing on IBM i will be happy to hear that the functionality will soon be available in the Bob Premium Package, which IBM announced in May and will start shipping in June. The Premium Pack also includes some other new capabilities that will be useful for IBM i developers, including new modes, skills, and tools.

  The first version of IBM’s Bob, the AI tool that help developers understand, document, and generate code in RPG and other IBM i languages, generally has been well-received by the IBM …

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• Guru: SQL Sequences In RPG Let Db2 Handle The Counting

  June 1, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  There is something deeply satisfying about letting the database do the counting for you. In a world where we have spent decades hand-rolling identifiers, guarding them with locks, and hoping no job collides with another, SQL sequences feel like discovering a patch of mushrooms that quietly regenerate overnight. You stop worrying about scarcity and start focusing on what matters.

  In a procedure driven RPG system, this is exactly the kind of responsibility we want to isolate. Generating a new identifier is not business logic. It is not validation. It is not formatting. It is a single, well-defined action that deserves …

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• From Green Screens To Smart Factories: Explaining DevOps To The Next Gen IBM i Developers

  June 1, 2026 Gaurav Khanna

  Over the past few years, many IBM i teams have encountered a surprising challenge when onboarding new developers. It isn’t platform complexity. It isn’t system performance. And it certainly isn’t reliability. The challenge is explaining how modern software development practices – things like CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and centralized repositories – fit into traditional IBM i development workflows.

  This gap often shows from both directions. For developers who grew up with Git and cloud-native tools, concepts like manual object promotion and library-based deployment can feel unfamiliar. At the same time, experienced IBM i professionals often hear terms like “shift-left testing” …

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