Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

In This Issue

IBM i Briefs: 🕯️ Remembering Scott Klement.
AI: 🧾 The free AI meter you can't read.
Career: 🔄 IBM i careers just came full circle.
Development: 🔢 The barcode that rejects your order number.
Database: 🔎 Before your IBM i shop buys a vector database.
Hiring: 🤝 Hiring for IBM i in 2027?
Leadership: 📘 An IBM i shop's AI playbook, mistakes included.
Learning: 🏷️ The GitHub tag every RPG developer should bookmark. 📚 A reader one-upped last week's free IBM i classroom.
Modernization: 🏴‍☠️ The modernization debate is the wrong treasure map.
Open Source: 🧰 The original open source guy for IBM i.
Did You Know: 🛒 IBM invented the barcode. The IBM i ecosystem ran with it.

IBM i Briefs

The IBM i community lost one of its giants.

COMMON shared the news that Scott Klement has passed away. Take some time to read the comments on its post. You'll see the impact he made.

By his first COMMON talk in 2008, he was already a legend. Through forums and roughly 1,000 articles, he helped thousands of developers write better RPG, asking nothing in return.

His open-source tools, HTTPAPI and his IBM i port of YAJL, brought web services and JSON straight into RPG. More than 2,000 shops use HTTPAPI alone.

COMMON said it best: "He told you the truth because he wanted you to get it right."

From the Field: I spoke with Scott many times over the years. He was as good as they come.

His fingerprints are everywhere. When an RPG developer tells me they use HTTPAPI or YAJL, I know they're good. I hear it constantly.

To his family and friends, we are all thinking of you. And as Lee Dare put it in his own tribute, "I do hope you have a terminal up there fella."

AI

🧾 The free AI meter you can't read

Microsoft caps Copilot Chat, and won't say where.

If your company runs Microsoft 365 without paid Copilot licenses, Copilot Chat has come at no extra cost. It still does, with new fine print.

Microsoft is extending usage caps to more Copilot Chat features. It won't say which features, or where the limits sit. Hit one, and a notice tells you when access returns. Admins reportedly can't see, change, or override the caps.

The rollout started Nov 2 for smaller organizations and reaches those over 2,000 seats Nov 9. The way past the caps is a separate, paid Copilot license.

Our Take: This isn't Microsoft moving the goalposts. It's hiding them.

The pattern is familiar. A tool starts free, your team builds it into the workday, then the limits show up. Productivity dips, and the upgrade stops feeling optional.

Not good, not bad. It's how most SaaS works, and AI is following the script. How do you avoid vendor lock-in before the renewal?

IBM i shops built their edge by owning their code and their data. Hold the AI tools creeping into the workday to the same standard.

Career

🔄 IBM i careers just came full circle

Open source is your 2027 career move.

In 2001, if you wanted RPG to talk to the web, you often built it yourself. Scott Klement did, and gave it away.

Over the years, many shops bought instead of built. Now the builders are back. AI and open source make creating your own tools practical again.

The market is asking for exactly that. In Fortra's 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey, IBM i skills passed cybersecurity as the top concern for the first time since 2017.

Have we come a long way, or are we back where we started? Both. This issue's Modernization piece explains why.

Veterans: Your instinct to build is in demand again. Pair your business knowledge with open source and AI, and you become the person a shop can't replace.

New to IBM i: Open source is your on-ramp. VS Code has passed RDi in usage, per the same survey, and Python, Node.js, and Git all run on IBM i. Start with IBM's open source docs.

What's the top worry in IBM i shops? Finding people like you.

Rethinking your IBM i career for 2027? Let's talk.

Development

🔢 The barcode that rejects your order number

Pick the format, and you've picked the data.

A new hands-on lab builds a small Java service that generates eight barcode formats, from QR and PDF417 to Code 128 and EAN-13.

The lesson lands fast. Feed it an order number like ORD-2026-104829. Code 128 and Code 39 encode it. EAN-13 refuses, because it takes exactly 13 digits, the last one a check digit.

If your item numbers in Db2 for i carry letters, that rules out EAN-13 before anyone prints a label.

The lab validates input in the API, then decodes every generated barcode in tests to prove it reads back.

Database

🔎 Before your IBM i shop buys a vector database

Do AI agents still need vector databases?

Every AI pitch comes with a vector database attached. A new IBM Technology explainer asks whether you need one at all.

So what is it, actually? A vector database stores text as numbers that capture meaning. A search for "late shipment" can surface "delayed order," even with no words in common.

The video lays out a "retrieval pyramid" for picking a search strategy. It weighs when an AI agent running plain keyword searches wins, whether long context windows make retrieval obsolete, and the hidden costs of embeddings and indexes.

The verdict: it depends on the workload. Simpler often works.

Our Take: On IBM i, most of what an agent needs already sits in Db2 for i. Orders, customers, inventory. Structured data, and SQL finds it exactly.

That's the model coming to the data, not your data shipped off to a new store.

Vectors earn their place on the messy stuff: manuals, tickets, notes. Can Db2 for i store vectors today? Not natively, as of this posting. IBM said so in May, and the fall Technology Refresh announced Oct 27 didn't change that.

So before anyone sells you a vector database, ask what problem SQL isn't already solving.

Hiring

🤝 Hiring for IBM i in 2027?

IBM i skills are now the top concern in IBM i shops. If you're planning a hire, a retirement handoff, or your first AI-ready developer, let's talk about what the role really needs.

Book a call.

Leadership

📘 An IBM i shop's AI playbook, mistakes included

A real company, a real build, every mistake.

After 30-plus years in IT, Max Valdman, IT manager at The Hammock Source, a North Carolina hammock maker, wrote a book.

It's short, readable in an evening, and it tells the real story of building Foresight: AI that answers business questions from company data on IBM i, "without handing it the keys to the database."

The best part, by his own billing: every mistake his team made along the way, included so you don't have to repeat them.

Kindle and paperback, on Amazon.

For IBM i leaders: Most AI stories on IBM i come from vendors. This one comes from the IT manager who had to make it work, mistakes included. That's the version worth reading before your own pilot.

His guardrail is the right first move: let AI read, not roam. Start read-only, give it a narrowly scoped profile, and point it at views, not physical files.

Planning your first AI project on IBM i, and the people to run it? Let's talk. Book a call.

Learning

🏷️ The GitHub tag every RPG developer should bookmark

Git, decoded for RPG developers. Part 2.

Two weeks ago, we covered the five Git words that matter when AI hands you a change: repository, commit, branch, pull request, issue.

GitHub search has more tabs. Here's the rest.

Topics: tags on repositories, no spaces. Try "rpgle." It pulls up more than 100 projects, led by the IBM i extension for VS Code.
Discussions: a forum inside a project. Questions and ideas, separate from bug reports.
Users: the people and organizations behind the code. IBM is one.
Packages: ready-to-install builds a project publishes.
Wikis: a project's documentation pages.
Marketplace: apps and automated workflows you plug into a repository.

New to Git: Start with Topics. Bookmark "rpgle" and "ibmi," sort by recently updated, and you'll see where IBM i developers are working this month.

For IBM i veterans: Discussions is the closest thing GitHub has to MIDRANGE-L. What does it take to get Copilot working with Code for IBM i? That thread is live right now, and the extension's maintainers answer there.

📚 A reader one-upped last week's free IBM i classroom

More than 30 places to learn, one page.

Last week we pointed you to IBM's free IBM i classroom. Michael Mayer wrote back with a bigger list.

Michael runs the IBM i Reference Pages Blog. Its Education page gathers more than 30 places to learn IBM i on one screen.

IBM's two free "Getting Started" courses are there. So are COMMON's New2i, Jim Buck's IM Power Technologies, Partner400, RPGPGM, and Dawn May's systems training.

The sleeper pick: a spreadsheet of more than 1,600 free IBM i sessions in English and Hindi, updated monthly.

New to IBM i: What should you learn first? Michael keeps a short starter page for exactly that question. Start there, then work outward.

For IBM i veterans: Bookmark the Education page for your next new hire. It's the onboarding reading list you never had time to build.

Modernization

🏴‍☠️ The modernization debate is the wrong treasure map

A veteran IBM i engineer says build, not just buy.

For years, the IBM i conversation has been modernization. Jeffrey C. Williams, a veteran IBM i engineer writing as The Accidental Futurist, argues it has moved past that.

His new piece, a Goonies-themed rallying cry, makes a simple case. Veterans once built their own tools. AI and open source make that practical again.

His favorite use: AI as a business-rule extraction engine, pulling decades of logic out of RPG, COBOL, and CL so teams learn why the code works, not just how.

He's clear-eyed, too. AI still writes code that's "also going to destroy our inventory balances."

The Real Question: Modernization still matters, depending on where a shop sits in its journey. For many, it's no longer the whole conversation.

The bigger questions: How do you extend IBM i's reach? How do you make it interoperable? How do you put AI to work on it?

AI speeds development. It also brings new needs and new complexity. What happens when IBM i veterans join forces with AI?

Open Source

🧰 The original open source guy for IBM i

What Scott Klement's most-used tools actually do.

Long before open source was cool on IBM i, Scott Klement was giving his code away. A veteran engineer who worked with him called him "the original open source guy."

His two best-known tools, in plain English:

HTTPAPI lets an RPG program talk to the web. Call an API, get the answer back, in native RPG. He started it in 2001.
YAJL reads and writes JSON, the format most APIs speak. His IBM i port works with RPG's DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN.

Both are free, source included. So are his guides to sockets and the IFS in RPG.

The Open Source Lesson: This issue's Modernization piece argues that open source makes building your own tools practical again. Scott was doing it in 2001. He proved that one developer sharing freely can lift an entire platform. That idea now runs through IBM i: Code for IBM i, Git, and open source packages installed with yum.

Open source is where IBM i is headed. How do you call an API and handle JSON from RPG? Start with Scott's own slides. He'd want you to do your homework first.

Did You Know

🛒 IBM invented the barcode. The IBM i ecosystem ran with it.

One invention, fifty years of building on top.

IBM engineer George Laurer designed the UPC barcode in 1973. The first scan rang up a pack of Juicy Fruit in June 1974.

IBM kept building. The AS/400 arrived in 1988, and IBM i printer files still speak barcode. The DDS BARCODE keyword now covers QR Code and Data Matrix.

Vendors followed. TL Ashford's Barcode400 and CYBRA's MarkMagic run natively on IBM i, and MarkMagic ships inside Manhattan's IBM i warehouse system.

Now it's happening again. IBM is bringing AI to the platform with Bob and an MCP server, and new IBM i vendors are springing up around it.

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Remembering Scott Klement