• GenAI Brings A New Kind Of Agile Computing That Needs Controls Even More

  October 19, 2026 Michel Mouchon

  As if trying to make use of a whole new computing architecture and coming up with the budget to experiment and roll features into production were not enough, there are a slew of issues when bringing GenAI to the IBM i datacenter.

  There are those who say that people cannot learn from the experience of others. We have never believed that. Which is why we want to share some of the hard-won wisdom we have developed four years after the ChatGPT moment that rocked the world and that is changing many things. But not everything needs to change or will …

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• IBM i, AI, And The Cost Of “We’ve Always Done It That Way”

  October 19, 2026 Peg Tuttle

  I’ve spent more than 30 years in the IBM i community, and I’ve heard one phrase more times than I can count: “We’ve always done it that way.” Sometimes it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Other times, I think it might be one of the most dangerous things we can say about a technology environment.

  Think about it. IBM i has been running mission-critical business applications for decades. Manufacturing, distribution, financial services, healthcare, retail. These systems process orders, manage inventory, run financial applications, and support operations that cannot afford to stop.

  And they do it remarkably well.

  That reliability is one …

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• Guru: When RNF0722 Won’t Let Your Legendary RPG Program Compile

  October 12, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Some RPG programs have been around for decades. They started small enough. Then another calculation was added here, another subroutine there, a /COPY member or two, and years of enhancements, fixes, and changing business requirements.

  Eventually, some of them became colossal. And let’s face it, we all have “legacy” or, as some would argue, “legendary” programs that are older than a lot of our new hires.

  We all know these programs. They’re the ones everybody agrees should be broken apart someday, but they’re also important production programs that still need to be maintained today. And sometimes “today” presents a very …

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• IBM’s Bob AI Assistant Can Now Live In Your Datacenter

  October 5, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Bob, the AI assistant developed by Big Blue for IBM i and other environments, is now available for deployment on-prem, IBM announced last week. The news is a boon for enterprises, government agencies, and other organizations that can’t risk sending sensitive data off site.

  IBM announced Bob about a year ago to help with application development tasks, including understanding, explaining, generating, refactoring, transforming, and testing code. When Bob 1.0 launched in April, Bob supported IBM i-specific languages like RPG, CL, and DDS, as well as SQL and COBOL. However, it lacked a native connection to IBM i code residing …

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• 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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• Guru: Two More Small But Handy RPG Enhancements: LIKE(*EXT) And %LOOKUPNE

  September 28, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Not every trip into the field calls for hauling the whole pack, and not every search calls for scanning everything by hand. Two of the smaller enhancements in this batch of July PTFs for IBM i 7.5 and 7.6 are exactly that kind of quiet convenience: tools that let you reach for just the piece you actually need instead of doing more work than the job requires.

  DISCLAIMER: The mushroom names and file/field names used in the examples below are purely to give the sample programs some context and make them more interesting. Before foraging for or consuming any wild …

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• Rocket Automates Manual IBM i Tasks With AI

  September 14, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software has a multi-pronged AI strategy that spans multiple products and platforms. When it comes to the IBM i platform, this AI push has resulted in Rocket adding AI features that will automate previously manual tasks across its application modernization, change management, and high availability products.

  AI continues to be the elephant in the IT room, but unlike those quiet elephants in that expression, which no one admits is there, this is the elephant that nobody can stop talking about and for good reason: The 2026 edition of AI appears to be the real deal.

  Take a KPMG survey …

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• Guru: Where’s The Table?

  September 14, 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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• Guru: Putting Failure Handling In Its Place

  August 24, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  One of the things I enjoy most about procedure-driven RPG is that it encourages us to think about responsibility. Every procedure should have a clear purpose. It should perform one task well and leave unrelated concerns to other parts of the application.

  That sounds straightforward enough, yet one responsibility often finds its way into nearly every procedure we write: failure handling.

  If you have worked with RPG for any length of time, you have probably encountered applications where nearly every procedure begins with a MONITOR operation. The procedure performs its work, catches any exception that occurs, logs an error, returns …

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