Talsco Weekly: AI runs through every lane for RPG developers

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 💰 The pricing model under your ERP is quietly changing. 🧩 IBM’s 60-year merger attempt might finally stick.
AI: 🖥️ The $600 box quietly running a private AI.
Career: 🧰 Every RPG developer has a lane. AI runs through all of them.
Development: 🧪 Validate a CL command with one SQL call.
Database: 🔎 The search engine already sitting inside Db2 for i.
ERP: 🧱 The AI project that stalls before it starts.
Hiring: ⏳ The IBM i hire everyone’s chasing at once.
Leadership: 🧭 The first 100 days cut both ways.
Learning: 🔮 The “legacy” platform hosting a quantum and AI night.
Modernization: 📘 IBM just published 810 pages on modernizing IBM i.
Open Source: 🌊 Open source’s new denial-of-service attack is AI.
Security: 🔒 One SELECT answers the auditor’s question. 🛡️ Your IBM i HA might just copy the ransomware.
Trends: 💰 The software industry is quietly telling on itself. 👀 If your IBM i vendor hasn’t shipped AI yet, wait a minute.
Did You Know: 💡 Your IBM i binaries outlive the hardware under them.

IBM i Brief

💰 The pricing model under your ERP is quietly changing

In one year, Oracle, Salesforce, and the wider SaaS category all began repricing around AI agents, a shift from per-seat licensing toward paying for consumption or outcomes. We go deeper on what it means for IBM i shops, and why owning your stack changes the math, in Trends below.

🧩 IBM’s 60-year merger attempt might finally stick

IBM has tried to converge its system architectures once a decade for sixty years, succeeding only twice, with System/360 and the AS/400. The latest attempt surfaced at Hot Chips. A former Z chief architect confirmed the next mainframe chip, likely “Telum III,” will run Z and Arm v9.3 instructions natively, side by side on the same core. Analyst Timothy Prickett Morgan argues Power12 needs the same treatment, and that a fully converged Power, Z, and Arm chip family could follow. One platform instead of three.

The IBM i Angle: If Power12 gets the same Arm fusion as Telum III, IBM i and native Arm AI workloads could share one box. That is a stronger retention argument than any roadmap slide, and a skills question nobody is asking yet.

AI

🖥️ The $600 box quietly running a private AI

Local, always-on, private AI is here.

People are turning a Mac mini into an always-on private AI server. It sits on a shelf, draws roughly 12 to 20 watts, and runs a capable model locally around the clock. No API bills. No data leaving the box. A base $599 M4 mini handles 7 to 8B models at conversational speed. Add memory and it runs far larger ones, with one review clocking a 70B model at quality near GPT-4o-mini, fully local. The author’s own use case is the tell. Businesses processing sensitive documents, who do not want that data going to anyone’s cloud, keep inference on hardware they own.

Our Take: A consumer just rediscovered the always-on box an IBM i shop already owns. Privacy objection answered: run inference next to the data you control, on the machine already racked. The mini proves the concept; Power runs it.

Career

🧰 Every RPG developer has a lane. AI runs through all of them

I have spent 25 years talking to RPG developers about their careers.

They are never just “RPG.” They are RPG and JDE. RPG and Infor XA, or LX. RPG and HFA, PRMS, Island Pacific. RPG and SQL. RPG and PHP. RPG and JavaScript. RPG and EDI. RPG and APIs and web services.

The lane changes. The pattern does not.

The best RPG developers always pick up the next thing. And the next thing is usually already in the building, sitting in your own IBM i shop.

But not every shop moves at the same speed. Some never change. Some change carefully, once in a while. Some are in constant motion.

You already know which one is yours.

Now the next thing is AI.

Some dove in headfirst. Many are cautious, but quietly experimenting. Almost nobody is ignoring it.

Here is the bottom line. AI is not a trend you wait out. It is a tool.

Cautious is fair. Sitting back is not. Whatever your specialty, it is getting hard to picture the RPG developer who does not have it on the belt.

From the Field: The developers who thrive are not the ones who guessed the right lane. They are the ones who kept adding to the tool belt. AI is simply the next tool.

Curious where AI fits your RPG career? Let’s talk. Book a call.

Development

🧪 Validate a CL command with one SQL call

A new Db2 for i function checks CL syntax for you.

The latest Technology Refreshes, IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, add a Db2 for i scalar function that validates a CL command string. CHECK_COMMAND_SYNTAX takes the command, up to 32,000 characters, and returns a simple true or false for whether it is valid.

It runs anywhere you can run SQL, including ACS Run SQL Scripts, and replaces an older validation API that was never simple to use. A thank you to IBM i Champion Simon Hutchinson for the walkthrough.

Database

🔎 The search engine already sitting inside Db2 for i

Db2 for i hides a full-text search engine.

Most IBM i shops never switch it on. OmniFind Text Search Server runs full-text queries over documents stored in the database, using plain SQL.

Two functions do the work. CONTAINS finds the matches, SCORE ranks them by relevance, both running against a text search index you build on a column. It even handles XML, and it can reach past Db2 to index non-database data too. No third-party search platform to license, and no data leaving the box.

Our Take: Before you pay for an outside search tool, check what 7.5 already hands you for free.

ERP

🧱 The AI project that stalls before it starts

Integration debt is the AI blocker nobody names.

Every ERP shop knows this quiet problem. Integrations built 10 or 15 years ago pile up. Point-to-point partner feeds, EDI maps added to hit a deadline, custom glue nobody wants to touch.

Each made sense at the time. Together they turn expensive to run and hard to change.

A new piece argues this integration debt is now the real blocker to AI. AI only works with the data it can reach, and fragmented systems bury that data in silos the tools never see.

Our Take: Read this as an IBM i shop and one line flips. The article casts legacy as the liability.

On IBM i, the system of record is often the most integrated data you own. Decades of validated Db2 for i in one place.

The debt is not the platform. It is the sprawl of partner feeds and one-off integrations bolted around it over the years.

So the AI-ready move is not ripping out the system that works. It is untangling what surrounds it, so data that is already good can finally flow.

Hiring

⏳ The IBM i hire everyone’s chasing at once

The retirement math is catching up.

I keep seeing the same setup. A senior developer or working manager is retiring, the shop is committed to the platform, and the baton has to move before the knowledge walks out. That calls for a senior hire, fluent in RPG, the OS, EDI, and the admin side from day one, plus enough runway that you are not filling the same seat again in a year.

Now add a five-day on-site mandate. The candidates you need to hire, have the most options, and they are drifting toward the shops that give them flexibility.

Our Take: I get it. If your shop has always run on-site and that is the culture, you know your business. But if you are open to a change, the flexibility you offer often decides the talent you land. Once you land the senior hire, start the clock on the next generation. Bring in a newer developer who is on-site, curious, and coachable, then train them up while your expert is still there to mentor. That is the Hire, Train and Mentor model , and it is a solution we offer too. The on-site rule that works against you on the senior search works for you here.

Backfilling a retirement, or building your next developer? Let’s talk about which boxes matter. Book a call.

Leadership

🧭 The first 100 days cut both ways

A CEO’s 100-day audit, flipped for IBM i.

A recent playbook for incoming CEOs lays out a 100-day audit. Rate the team, align on three priorities, find the single points of failure, move fast.

Solid advice for a company with functional VPs reporting in. It reads differently in an IBM i shop.

One line stops an IBM i reader cold. The audit says to find any role where losing one person would break the business.

In most shops, that person is the platform’s memory. Decades of business logic, undocumented, sitting in one head. And that head is often closer to retirement than to a succession plan.

A generic audit sees one foot out the door and marks a liability. An IBM i shop sees a keystone.

So the clock does not start when the new leader arrives. It starts the day someone at the top sees the retirement coming.

Before day one. This is the move we respect most. Define the role, protect the knowledge, and start the search while the veteran is still in the building. Not after the badge is turned in.

The incoming IBM i manager. The audit says listen for 30 days before deciding. On IBM i, make it the full 100. Map the estate. Sit with the veterans. Earn the context before you touch the system.

The existing staff. Here is the real flip. The audit is not done to you. If the new leader knows IBM i, you have common ground. If they do not, the value of the platform is yours to translate. Document it. Teach up. Make what you know legible to someone who has never seen a green screen. That is not guarding old turf. That is leadership.

The stop-doing question. Every new leader eventually asks what the team should stop doing. Fair question. On IBM i it is a landmine. The quiet nightly job nobody documents may be the one holding the business together. Before anything gets cut, the veterans and the new leader have to agree on what the platform actually does. Kill the wrong process and you learn what it did the hard way, in production.

From the Field: The single-person risk that reads as a footnote in a CEO audit is the whole conversation in an IBM i shop.

We work with forward-thinking IBM i leaders who understand that getting ahead of a pending retirements, by hiring for the handoff sure beats hiring for the vacancy.

That is exactly what we do.

Getting ahead of an IBM i retirement? Let’s talk before the clock starts. Book a call.

Learning

🔮 The “legacy” platform hosting a quantum and AI night

IBM i and Power, at the AI and quantum inflection point.

On September 16, LISUG hosts an evening on where AI and quantum are heading, and how they run on IBM Power and IBM i.

The keynote is Rebecca Gott, IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO for IBM Power. A pre-session covers the big-picture view: AI, quantum, and quantum-safe. The main session gets practical, on real-world AI running on IBM i and Power.

Here is the irony worth sitting with.

The platform people still call legacy is the one hosting the conversation about the two biggest shifts in computing. Not catching up. Keeping pace.

In person at The Grand Lobby, Amityville, September 16, 5 to 9 PM. Register here.

Modernization

📘 IBM just published 810 pages on modernizing IBM i

A new IBM Redbook maps IBM i modernization end to end.

IBM has released a Redbook, “Modernizing IBM i Applications,” with a deep bench of IBM and IBM i community authors. The 810-page guide covers modernization at every level of the OS, from the database to the front end, and where RPG and COBOL fit along the way.

It is a free PDF, and a vendor-neutral reference for a shop deciding where to start.

Our Take: Modernization is not one leap. Use this to sequence the work, lowering your cost of change on one layer first, then move outward instead of modernizing everything at once.

Open Source

🌊 Open source’s new denial-of-service attack is AI

AI is flooding open source faster than maintainers can keep up.

GitHub’s read on its 2025 data names the year’s real open-source problem: AI slop. That is the flood of low-quality, often wrong AI-generated pull requests and issues, the kind where fixing the submission takes longer than writing the code yourself. Volume is the story. Auto-generated contributions pile up faster than maintainers can review them, and review time is now growing faster than the maintainer pool. Even setting slop aside, the sheer load can read like an attack on human attention.

Our Take: Scale this down to IBM i. A slop flood that strains a huge project hits a one-person i project harder. The constructive read: maintainers are turning AI around to triage, defending their attention instead of draining it.

Security

🔒 One SELECT answers the auditor’s question

Every IBM i admin knows the drill. An auditor asks which known vulnerabilities hit the box, and you lose an afternoon opening IBM security bulletins one at a time, copying PTF numbers, then checking each against the partition. This walkthrough replaces all of it with SQL. It builds four stacked Db2 for i functions that pull IBM’s bulletin data, read the corrective PTFs off each page, and compare them against the PTFs actually applied on your system. The last function is the one that matters. A single SELECT returns your unpatched critical CVEs, PTF numbers included, ready to feed straight into a patching window.

🛡️ Your IBM i HA might just copy the ransomware

Here is the uncomfortable truth about IBM i high availability. Traditional HA replicates journals, so when ransomware encrypts your source files, the software faithfully copies that encryption to your target. Your failover becomes a second victim. A major IBM i HA vendor is now addressing this with continuous data protection in its next release. CDP adds point-in-time recovery, so teams can roll back to a clean state from before the corruption, not just the last synced one.

Why It Matters: Ask the real question of your HA setup. If ransomware hit the source right now, would your target hold a clean copy, or a perfectly replicated encrypted one? If the latter, failover alone will never close the gap.

Trends

💰 The software industry is quietly telling on itself

When everyone reprices at once, listen.

In one year, Oracle, Salesforce, and the broader SaaS category all started repricing around AI agents. When that many vendors move at once, it is not a coincidence. It is the industry telling on itself. For two decades the default was per-seat SaaS. AI breaks that. If an agent does the work, you are no longer paying for seats. You are paying for consumption, or for outcomes. That question has a familiar ring on IBM i. For years these shops were told they were behind for not going all-in on SaaS. The questions the SaaS vendors are suddenly forced to ask are questions an IBM i shop answered decades ago by owning its stack.

Our Take: This is not theory on i. IBM already shipped consumption pricing to the platform. Bob runs on Bobcoin, where usage draws down credits. That is consumption economics arriving natively. Be precise on ownership. IBM i shops own their applications and their data, so they are not exposed to someone else’s per-seat repricing on their core business logic. Three eras, one loop back to the consumption economics owned platforms never left. The buyer’s question is changing. Not what does this software cost, but what is it worth to the business.

Watching your ERP or modernization vendors shift to consumption or outcome pricing? Let’s talk about what it means for your stack. Book a call.

👀 If your IBM i vendor hasn’t shipped AI yet, wait a minute

The IBM i tooling vendors are in an AI race.

A major IBM i modernization vendor just added AI across its tooling. Code analysis, AI-generated unit testing, AIOps, and replication tuning for high availability and disaster recovery.

The testing piece is the standout. It claims to push code coverage past 90 percent, wired into Git and Azure Pipelines, so older code bases pick up modern CI/CD guardrails.

The framing is the tell. The vendor leans on research showing 57 percent of organizations answer the skills gap by upskilling the team they have, ahead of hiring new staff.

Our Take: Read this less as one launch and more as a signal. The IBM i tooling ecosystem is racing to add AI, and any vendor without an offering today almost certainly has one on the roadmap. For shops, that shifts the question. AI-assisted modernization is becoming standard, not exotic. And notice who these tools are built for. The bet is on upskilling the IBM i team you already have. That is the hire, train, and mentor story again, now backed by the vendors’ own roadmaps.

Did You Know?

💡 Did You Know: your IBM i binaries outlive the hardware under them

IBM i has a layer most platforms never had, a hardware-independent machine interface. Your programs are compiled to that layer, and the OS translates them down to whatever chip is actually underneath.

The payoff still surprises people. A program compiled on a 1990s AS/400 can run on today’s Power hardware without being recompiled from source, because the OS re-translates it to the new instruction set for you. It is a big reason “legacy” on IBM i so often means still running, untouched, and fast.

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