• IBM Gets Bob 1.0 Off The Ground

  March 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM this month finally will get a coding co-pilot into the hands of its IBM i installed base with the launch of Bob. The general availability of Bob 1.0.0 on March 24 will mark the end of the long wait for IBM i customers – and in particular, the large population of RPG developers – to start using IBM-branded AI software to maintain and develop IBM i software.

  The world of generative AI moves quickly, as the large language models (LLMs) from frontier providers improve on a weekly, if not daily, basis. This is both exciting, as the capabilities of …

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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: Managing The Lifecycle Of Your Service Programs – Updates Without Chaos

  February 23, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  You’ve written your service programs, organized your modules, picked your activation groups, and maybe even set up a tidy binding directory. Everything seems perfect – until someone needs to update a procedure that half the shop’s programs depend on. Suddenly, that tidy structure can feel like a trap. Welcome to the reality of service program lifecycle management.

  The key principle here is simple: change with care. Any update to a service program can ripple across every program bound to it. Without a strategy, you’ll find yourself fielding calls about broken reports, failed jobs, or, worst of all, subtle logic errors …

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• Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 1

  February 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

  Longevity is an amazing thing. ARCAD Software has now amassed more than 34 years of expertise centered around everything related to DevSecOps transformations. To start off the new year, I would like to share six strategic ideas that will help shape 2026 in the IBM i market, and beyond it.

  The big new development for ARCAD is our fourth brand, called DISCOVER, which is focused on application intelligence. It’s the newest addition, and it’s very promising. We’re delighted to have convinced more than 25 customers by year 2025, and I think this will evolve significantly this year.

  DISCOVER is all …

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• Rolling The Die In 2026: IBM i Predictions, Take Two

  February 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  A traditional Chinese curse states “May you live in interesting times.” That curse may apply to IBM i shops in 2026, which opens with equal parts uncertainty and anticipation. Artificial intelligence looms large, not only over information technology, but life as we know it. Add in the other variables impacting the midrange in the second year of the second quarter of the 21st century Anno Domini, and what you get is…well, interesting.

  We start our second and final compilation of 2026 predictions with Bargav Balakrishnan, IBM’s vice president of product management for infrastructure. Balakrishnan took over the post …

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• Shaking The IBM i Magic Eight Ball For 2026

  January 26, 2026 Alex Woodie

  After one more trip around the Sun, the IBM i community is back at it for another turn. What will become of our favorite box in 2026, let alone the people who work on it? That is not easy to say. As the great ballplayer/philosopher Yogi Berra once said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But we try anyway.

  We kick off 2026 IBM i predictions with some targeted insight from Bill Langston, director of marketing, New Generation Software:

  “I feel like 2026 will be a quiet year with the most adventurous IBM i customers …

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• Profound Says New Agentic AI Dev Tool Delivers Huge Productivity Boost

  January 19, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic is rolling out a new AI-powered development tool that it says will increase the productivity of individual developers by five to 10 times. Dubbed CoderFlow, the software coordinates the work of multiple AI agents to assist with the development new IBM i applications or the maintenance and modernization of existing ones.

  Existing AI copilots provide some productivity gains for developers working in an IDE, somewhere around 20 percent, according to Profound Logic chief executive officer Alex Roytman. But CoderFlow is a different type of product. It is not a coding co-pilot, he said. Instead it is a framework …

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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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• Bob More Than Just A Code Assistant, IBM i Chief Architect Will Says

  December 1, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When IBM i professionals finally get their hands on Bob, the new AI-powered tool currently in development in Big Blue’s labs, they will find that it is much more than just a code assistant, IBM i chief Architect Steve Will said recently. “It has a lot of knowledge,” he said. “It knows things about IBM i.”

  While precise details about the timing of the release of Bob are slim, IBM is widely expected to release a public preview of the new AI-powered plug-in for VS Code in early 2026. The new software, which was unveiled in early October around the …

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• Rocket Delivers More DevOps Capabilities For IBM i

  November 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software recently put the finishing touches on a range of updates for Rocket DevOps, its suite of automation, change management, and testing solutions for IBM i. The top enhancements customers will find are two-way Git integration, AI-powered anomaly detection, unit testing enhancements, and support for IBM i DevOps workflows in Microsoft Azure Pipelines.

  It’s been a 2.5 years now that Rocket Software completed the rebrand from the old Aldon change management products, which it obtained with its 2011 acquisition, to Rocket DevOps. That Rocket DevOps rebrand involved taking the old Aldon Lifecycle Manager products – which helped automate …

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