Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

In This Issue

• IBM i Briefs: 🔄 IBM i can now tell you which patches you're missing. 🩹 Before TR3, make sure TR2 didn't cut your network. 🏷️ One of IBM i's oldest vendors just doubled down.
• AI: 🪪 At TechXchange, AI agents got a badge. ⏹️ Every agent now needs an off button.
• Career: 💼 AI won't end your developer job. It promotes it.
• Development: 🛠️ Stop scrolling the job log. Ask it for the last five.
• Database: 🗄️ Four conferences, one roof, and Db2 for i in the room.
• ERP: 🔌 AI agents don't care how old your ERP is.
• Hiring: 🧑‍🎓 The hiring shortcut IBM i shops already paid for.
• Leadership: 🚦 The IT project that stays green too long.
• Learning: 🎓 The free IBM i classroom most shops never use.
• Modernization: ☕ Seven places RPG and Java quietly disagree.
• Open Source: 🌿 Git for IBM i, explained without the jargon.
• Security: 🔒 Hackers sent AI agents to check for the guard. 🇬🇧 Four doors, 88% of attacks.
• Trends: 🛡️ Is obscurity IBM i's new superpower? 🚪 Before you move IBM i to the cloud, plan the exit.
• Did You Know: 🎬 Hawkeye sold the AS/400.

IBM i BRIEFS

🔄 IBM i can now tell you which patches you're missing

On schedule this time, with security up front.

IBM is back on track. After a three-month slip in the spring, IBM i 7.6 TR3 and 7.5 TR9 were announced October 27 and ship November 20.

Security leads. A new SQL service, CVE_CURRENCY, checks your system against known IBM i vulnerabilities and flags the PTFs you're missing. Both releases get it.

Also inside: potential TCP speedups with no setup, APIs to manage certificates without the DCM GUI, and authenticated Telnet printing.

Plus updates to the RPG and COBOL compilers, Db2 Mirror, BRMS, and PowerHA.

🩹 Before TR3, make sure TR2 didn't cut your network

One HIPER PTF worth checking this week.

Rob McNelly's post-TechXchange column carries a warning from IBM Support worth acting on before November 20.

Installing IBM i 7.6 TR2 or 7.5 TR8 can cause a complete loss of network connectivity on partitions using Virtual Ethernet adapter type 268C.

IBM has released HIPER PTFs: MJ11726 for 7.6 and MJ11725 for 7.5, applied along with the cumulative and group PTFs that carry the TR.

Missed Atlanta? The same column points to TechXchange general sessions on demand.

🏷️ One of IBM i's oldest vendors just doubled down

170 people. One platform. Still hiring.

Fortra, the company that grew out of Help/Systems and the Robot line, used NAViGATE to debut Power by Fortra.

It's not a spinoff. It's a business unit that puts every Fortra IBM i product, and the 170 people who work only on the platform, under one name.

The group hired more than 20 people in 2026, IBM Champions among them, and plans to keep growing in 2027.

Next up: a TCO calculator built to show the C-suite what IBM i saves compared to industry-standard servers.

AI

🪪 At TechXchange, AI agents got a badge

IBM's answer: give the model less to guess.

IBM's Dinesh Nirmal summed up Atlanta: last year was about building agents, this year is about scaling them.

The math explains why. One IBM customer's agents make 8.5 million model calls a day. At 99.9% accuracy, that's still 8,500 wrong answers daily.

So IBM wrapped the model in four layers: current facts, approved functions, permissions, and a log of every action.

The permissions layer is the headline. Each agent gets its own verified identity, separate from any human, with short-lived credentials scoped to one task.

Ask it to touch something else, and the call fails.

Our Take: IBM i shops have run this playbook for decades. It's called a user profile.

Every job runs under one. Object authority decides what it can touch. The audit journal records what it did.

So the agent question isn't new. It's the old question with a much faster user.

Which profile does your agent run under, and what can that profile actually reach?

One caveat from the analyst: no customer has shown all four of IBM's layers running end to end yet. Your user profiles, on the other hand, are already there.

⏹️ Every agent now needs an off button

A kill switch for agents that go off script.

CrowdStrike launched an AI Kill Switch on November 3. When an agent breaks from its intended behavior, a security team can terminate it, block it from relaunching, and cut its network access.

CEO George Kurtz's pitch: everyone is building agents, but "they never had the off button."

An identity on one side, a shutoff on the other. Agents are getting the same controls we've always put on people.

CAREER

💼 AI won't end your developer job. It promotes it.

Typing code was never the valuable part.

Carol Juel, who leads digital platforms at Synchrony, makes a case worth reading if you write code for a living.

When building gets easier, the world needs more builders. AI makes code simple to produce and moves the value to the decisions it can't make.

Synchrony's early pilots back her up: an estimated 25% faster delivery, 30% fewer defects, 120% more unit tests, and nearly 40% fewer security vulnerabilities.

Her bigger point is about people. Juniors speed up only when companies invest in real mentorship, and accountability stays with humans.

The Talent Angle: That's the IBM i job description we see forming.

The developer who only types RPG is exposed.

The one who designs the change, directs the agent, tests the result, and signs off is getting scarcer, and more valuable.

Know the business process behind the code, and you're the hardest person in the building to replace.

Writing RPG and building with AI? Let's talk about where that's worth more. Book a call.

DEVELOPMENT

🛠️ Stop scrolling the job log. Ask it for the last five.

Three new JOBLOG_INFO parameters do the sorting.

Simon Hutchinson calls this one of the best changes in the last round of Technology Refreshes, IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8.

The JOBLOG_INFO table function picked up three new parameters.

MESSAGE_ORDER can return the newest messages first. MESSAGE_LIMIT caps how many come back. MESSAGE_TIMESTAMP starts the results at a point in time, like just before an error hit.

The payoff is less work. Before, getting the last five messages meant generating the whole job log, sorting it, then trimming it with ORDER BY and LIMIT.

His walkthrough shows each parameter with working SQL you can paste and run.

DATABASE

🗄️ Four conferences, one roof, and Db2 for i in the room

Atlanta mixed the Db2 tribes on purpose.

Db2 veteran Craig Mullins came back from Atlanta with a clear read: four conferences under one roof worked.

IBM TechXchange shared the October 26 to 29 week with COMMON NAViGATE, the IDUG Db2 Tech Conference, and HashiConf. COMMON and IDUG kept their independence. They co-located. They didn't merge.

One detail stands out for IBM i. NAViGATE gave Db2 professionals Db2 for i sessions that IDUG, built around z/OS and LUW, usually doesn't offer.

Mullins' bigger takeaway: cloud, DevOps, and AI engineers got exposed to platforms they'd otherwise never see, IBM i included.

What to Watch: Exposure is how talent pipelines start.

A cloud engineer who wandered into a Db2 for i session is a cloud engineer who might take an IBM i interview.

That matters, because the pipeline is the problem in Hiring below.

ERP

🔌 AI agents don't care how old your ERP is

Plug in the agent. Leave the ERP alone.

Tencent is wiring its WorkBuddy AI agent directly into ERP, CRM, and other core business systems through MCP, the model context protocol.

Agents pull data from several systems at once, run the analysis, and write results back.

A batch of reimbursement claims gets filed in one go, not one at a time.

The pitch from Tencent's cloud chief: put years of accumulated data to work for AI "without changing systems, moving data or redesigning their processes."

Our Take: Swap in IBM i and the argument gets stronger.

Your business rules already live in RPG. Your data already sits in Db2 for i. IBM has an open source MCP server that lets agents query that data where it lives. What would it take to point an agent at your Db2 for i data?

So ask the hard question. Why migrate?

If there's a real business need, great. Make the move.

If there isn't, count the cost. The budget, the years, and the risk of rebuilding business rules nobody wrote down.

Spend that time cleaning up your data instead. An agent is only as good as what it reads.

HIRING

🧑‍🎓 The hiring shortcut IBM i shops already paid for

Cut the juniors now, run out of seniors later.

This week's Washington Business Journal looks at what AI is doing to entry-level hiring, and to the talent pipeline behind it.

The logic is tempting. If AI handles the junior work, why hire juniors?

Here's the catch. Every senior developer you'll need in ten years is a junior someone hires today.

IBM i shops know this one firsthand. For a long stretch, many stopped bringing in new developers. Now the veterans are retiring, and the bench behind them is thin.

The cost of skipping a hiring class doesn't show up for years. Then it shows up all at once.

The fix isn't glamorous. Hire juniors who already work with AI, and pair them with your veteran while the veteran is still here.

Building your next IBM i developer before you need one? Let's talk. Book a call.

LEADERSHIP

🚦 The IT project that stays green too long

Status colors lie when assumptions change.

Most shops track project health in green, yellow, and red. The trouble starts when a project stays green after its assumptions stop holding.

Five experts weigh in on when to escalate, and who should make the call.

One warning sign comes up again and again: rebaselining without re-approving the business case. The date slips, the scope shrinks, and nobody re-runs the numbers.

The fix starts early. Write down what "red" means while the project is still green, and make raising the flag safe.

As one CTO put it, "Red should trigger a decision, not another round of status meetings."

Reality Check: IBM i migrations are a classic case.

The rewrite that was pitched at eighteen months turns into three years, and the original business case is still on the slide.

Define red before you sign. And if the business need was never there, reread ERP above.

LEARNING

🎓 The free IBM i classroom most shops never use

Free IBM i training, for both ends of the career.

IBM's academic push for IBM i has come and gone in waves for years.

Gregory Simmons, who writes IT Jungle's Guru column, has been a registered instructor with the IBM Academic Initiative since 2007. The work never fully stopped. The pieces just got spread out. Here's where to look:

• IBM Power Skills Academy: IBM's program for students and educators, including free remote access to Power systems for teaching.
• IBM SkillsBuild: 1,000+ free courses with digital credentials across AI, cybersecurity, and cloud. IBM's old Academic Initiative address now lands here.
• Kisco U: Free IBM i security training, from audit journals to AI and exit points.
• Simmons' latest Guru column: Environment variables as a cleaner way to pass data down the call stack.

New to IBM i? If you're a student or teach one, start with the PSA IBM i catalog and its IBM i Ready badge. Everyone else, SkillsBuild is open to adult learners.

Veteran? Kisco U and the Guru column sharpen what you already know. Then ask who you could teach.

MODERNIZATION

☕ Seven places RPG and Java quietly disagree

The bugs hide in the data types.

Add 0.10 ten times in RPG and you get 1.00. Do it with a Java double and you get 0.9999999999999999.

That's the first of seven type-mapping traps this MC Press piece walks through, each with RPG and Java code.

The rest: account numbers that lose their leading zeros, timestamps with no time zone, CCSID mix-ups, blank padding, JSON nulls that turn into zeros, and skipping round-trip tests.

One example stings. An order placed at midnight on January 1 lands in the prior year's revenue report.

Before you convert a line of RPG: These traps rarely show up in the demo. They show up at month-end close.

Ask your converter how it handles all seven, then run a round-trip test with real data.

And ask the ERP question first: is there a business need to leave at all?

OPEN SOURCE

🌿 Git for IBM i, explained without the jargon

Source members, meet branches and pull requests.

If Git still feels like something the Linux team does, this plain-English explainer is a good place to start.

It breaks Git-based DevOps into two ideas. Git tracks every change, who made it, and when. DevOps builds on that history to test changes and move approved ones toward production.

For IBM i teams, the pitch is practical: one shared source of truth, a change history new hires can actually read, and fewer manual steps between a fix and a release.

None of it requires leaving the platform.

What AI can't see: An agent can't review, test, or roll back code it can't find.

Source in a repository is what makes the rest of this issue work: the agent's badge, the audit trail, the rollback.

It's also the cause Aaron Bartell, in Trends below, spent years championing on IBM i.

SECURITY

🔒 Hackers sent AI agents to check for the guard

The new attack still walks through old doors.

A China-linked group used an AI-powered pentesting framework to hit more than 200 organizations in at least 14 countries over 11 days starting October 17.

At one pharmaceutical company, the agents checked running processes and folders to see whether an endpoint security sensor was even installed.

The way in wasn't exotic. At a Greek government agency, attackers used authentication keys from a 2022 directory export that likely were never rotated.

Analysts say humans still steer the key decisions. The speed is what changed.

Why It Matters: IBM i rarely runs the same endpoint sensor as the Windows fleet. So ask the attacker's question yourself: what's watching this box?

Then ask the old one. When did the passwords on your FTP, ODBC, and service profiles last change?

The obscurity argument in Trends buys you time. Unrotated credentials give it back.

🇬🇧 Four doors, 88% of attacks

The UK's cyber chief says AI scales the basics.

Britain's NCSC expects AI-powered malware to show up in ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure within two years.

The sharper point in its annual report: up to 88% of attacks start at four doors. Phishing, exposed public-facing applications, misuse of valid accounts, and external remote services.

AI doesn't build new doors. It finds the ones you left open, faster.

TRENDS

🛡️ Is obscurity IBM i's new superpower?

A 20-year RPG veteran asks a pointed question.

Aaron Bartell spent the first 20 years of his engineering career working with RPG and IBM i. Today he writes Ruby on Rails.

After weeks of rampant security vulnerabilities, he's rethinking things. Maybe the answer isn't patching open source packages faster. Maybe it's switching platforms.

He asks whether an obscure language with few downloadable packages, on a closed operating system, is now a superpower.

What if security is about obscurity, and "playing a shell game with AI-equipped hackers"?

Déjà vu: We said IBM i was built for this moment. Now a 20-year veteran who left is asking the same question.

His old frustration was real. Need email, XML, or HTTP? You built it yourself, and it cost you weekends.

AI just removed that hurdle.

So the friction that pushes developers off the platform is fading. And the closed design outsiders called a weakness is starting to look like armor.

One caution: obscurity buys time, not immunity. A misconfigured box still gets breached.

If your shop is even thinking about leaving IBM i, reconsider. You may be trading a platform attackers barely know for one they know cold.

🚪 Before you move IBM i to the cloud, plan the exit

Two questions to answer before you sign.

A practical checklist for IBM i cloud hosting starts with two questions. How hard will it be to leave? And who owns the problem when something breaks?

Lock-in builds quietly, through provider-specific tools and automation, and documentation that lives in their systems instead of yours.

The real test happens at 2 a.m. When a subsystem hangs or a job queue backs up, does the provider's support team know IBM i, or do they hand it back to you?

Cut through the pitch: Ask for a sample data export and a walk-through of a hypothetical move before you sign.

A provider that can't explain how you'd leave is telling you something about how you'll stay.

DID YOU KNOW

🎬 Hawkeye sold the AS/400

Alan Alda pitched IBM's new midrange in 1988.

On June 21, 1988, IBM announced the AS/400. It grew out of the Silverlake project, named for Silver Lake in Rochester, Minnesota.

To launch it, IBM put MAS*H's Alan Alda, Harry Morgan, and Gary Burghoff in a TV ad.

It arrived with more than 1,000 software packages. In 1995, it moved from 48-bit CISC to 64-bit PowerPC, and applications kept running without recompiling.

Today it's IBM i. And RPG, born in 1959 on the IBM 1401, is still running the business.

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