Talsco Weekly: IBM i's AI-Powered Future

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 💚 Don't apologize for IBM i's green screen. 👷 IBM launches Bob 1.0 for enterprise developers.
AI: 🔝 Constellation names top AI development platforms.
Career: ⚡ Your IBM i skills are ready. Is your company?.
Development: 🐛 The IBM i command that will change your debugging life. 💻 VS Code overtakes RDi for IBM i development.
Data: 📊 Logical replication becomes IBM i HA/DR standard.
Hiring: 🧓 Your 30-year developer retires. Now what?.
Learning: 📚 IBMs comprehensive SQL learning resources.
Modernization: IBM i Shops Clash: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Open Source: 🔓 IBM i Open Source Resources hub.
Security: 🚨One foot in both worlds? That's your attack surface.
Trends: 💻 AI is making bespoke software the new standard.

IBM i Brief

💚 Don't apologize for IBM i's green screen

Embrace the Legacy and let's champion the platform's 40-year legacy of architectural elegance, featuring integrated database, single-level storage, and built-in security that modern systems still chase.

The "green screen" is just one interface to a sophisticated system powering global enterprise operations with unmatched uptime.

👷 IBM launches Bob 1.0 for enterprise developers

The AI-powered coding assistant helps developers solve problems within real codebases while offering proactive improvement insights.

Bob 1.0 is designed specifically for enterprise environments, providing context-aware suggestions and identifying potential issues before they become problems.

This marks IBM's latest move to integrate AI capabilities into developer workflows, aiming to boost productivity and code quality across large-scale enterprise applications.

Looking to learn more about how Bob is being used out in the wild? Check out the IBM Bob webcast with MEDHOST on March 25th, where Steve Will and MEDHOST CTO will show you how Bob transforms IBM i development and modernization.

Get ready, the future of IBM i Development is here.

AI

🔝 Constellation names top AI development platforms

Constellation Research released its 2026 ShortList for AI Application Development Platforms, recognizing 15 vendors enabling developers to build AI-native applications with generative and agentic capabilities.

The list includes AWS, Anthropic, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Salesforce.

These platforms provide the runtime, tooling, and orchestration needed to turn AI into production-grade applications—moving beyond isolated experiments to scaled adoption with governance, security, and observability built in.

Career

⚡ Your IBM i skills are ready. Is your company?

If your organization is still debating tools that forward-thinking IBM i shops already have in production — AI, open source, modern RPG, DevOps — that hesitation has a cost. To you.

The best IBM i professionals aren't waiting for permission to grow. They're finding companies that match their ambition. We specialize in connecting top IBM i talent with organizations that are actually moving forward.

👉 Let's find you the right fit.

Development

🐛 The IBM i command that will change your debugging life

Tired of scrolling through WRKACTJOB to debug ODBC issues? Eddie O. shares an IBM i command that gives you instant clarity on active connections and troubleshooting locks.

This practical tip can slash your debugging time by 70% and is the kind of knowledge senior developers use to work more efficiently.

💻 VS Code overtakes RDi for IBM i development

This is to no surprise.

Visual Studio Code has surpassed RDi in usage among IBM i developers, according to Fortra's 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey.

VS Code now sits at 58% adoption compared to RDi's 57%, marking a significant shift just two years after tracking began.

“We are investing in the open source tool base of Visual Studio Code because there are so many clients out there who have programmers who are using VS Code, developers who came from the world of doing VS Code. And so we are making sure that we’re supporting that environment as well.” - Steve Will

IBM's investment in open source tools like Code for i—downloaded over 70,000 times—is driving momentum, while DevOps tools like Jenkins, Ansible, and Git show increased adoption across IBM i workloads.

Want to explore the DevOps tools driving this transformation?

⚙️ Jenkins automates your entire software delivery pipeline. Jenkins is an open-source automation server that enables development teams to build, test, and deploy software reliably. It serves as the CI/CD backbone, triggering automated workflows whenever code changes occur—catching issues early and accelerating delivery cycles without manual intervention.
🔧 Ansible simplifies IT automation without writing complex code. Ansible is an agentless automation platform that uses simple, human-readable playbooks to configure systems, deploy applications, and orchestrate infrastructure. It eliminates repetitive manual tasks, ensuring consistent environments across development, testing, and production.
🌿 Git is the foundation of modern collaborative development. Git is a distributed version control system that tracks every change to your codebase, enabling teams to collaborate without overwriting each other's work. It powers branching, merging, and rollback capabilities—making it the bedrock of any DevOps workflow.

Data

📊 Logical replication becomes IBM i HA/DR standard

Logical replication solutions like Maxava HA ensure transactional integrity and application-aware recovery, addressing modern compliance and recoverability requirements better than disk-based approaches.

Whether it is this or another HA solution, replication software should not be overlooked.

Why?

Because, on the IBM i, the data is the business — orders, financials, and compliance records exist nowhere else. Replication software ensures that when systems fail, operations restart on data that is consistent, trusted, and verifiable.

Hiring

🧓 Your 30-year developer retires. Now what?

AI can read your code. It cannot ask the questions it doesn't know to ask — and your senior developer has 30 years of questions nobody ever wrote down.

That institutional knowledge doesn't live in documentation.

It lives in judgment. Succession planning isn't an HR conversation — it's a risk management one.

Do you have a backup? A plan? A next hire in motion? The clock is already running.

👉 Book a call — let's get ahead of it.

Learning

📚 IBMs comprehensive SQL learning resources

The Db2 for i SQL Tutor landing page aggregates tutorials, demos, and examples to help developers master SQL on IBM i.

Resources include SQL Gists by Scott Forstie, COMMON tutorials, and organized categories covering database topics, Db2 services, security, and SQL procedural language.

It’s just one of many hub aims to accelerate SQL proficiency for IBM i professionals across various skill levels.

Modernization

IBM i Shops Clash: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Think about how music has been delivered over the decades. Vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, MP3, streaming. Each shift felt disruptive. The artists who understood their craft was the constant — not the format — were the ones who thrived.

IBM i is the same story.

System/36. AS/400. iSeries. i5. IBM i. The data — your business logic, transactions, customer records, financials — has always been the same.

What evolved was the mechanism for accessing and moving it. Each name change wasn't a new product. It was a new delivery format for something that never lost its value.

Consider analog to digital.

A voice on an analog phone line carried the same conversation as a VoIP call does today. Organizations that understood what they were actually protecting — the information, not the infrastructure — made the transition without crisis.

The IBM i shops thriving right now aren't debating whether to stay or go. They recognized early that their data and business logic is the asset, and IBM i is the most reliable, proven mechanism for protecting and leveraging it — one that keeps evolving without forcing you to start over.

They recognized early that their data and business logic is the asset, and IBM i is the most reliable, proven mechanism for protecting and leveraging it — one that keeps evolving without forcing you to start over.

If you go, there will be trouble. If you stay, there will be none.

The question was never "should we modernize?" It's always been "what are we actually trying to preserve?" And what is the best way to do that.

Is your IBM i department clashing with the business on what to do?

Open Source

🔓 IBM i Open Source Resources hub

Open-source tools are transforming IBM i—expanding capabilities, accelerating modernization, and connecting the platform to the broader developer ecosystem.

Explore the resources shaping IBM i's future.

Security

🚨One foot in both worlds? That's your attack surface

AI models now operate at near-genius IQ levels — and agent swarms are rewriting the threat landscape.

Large enterprises running hybrid environments — legacy on one side, modern AI-connected systems on the other — are the primary target.

The seam between old and new is where attackers enter.

IBM i shops aren't immune.

The question isn't whether you'll be targeted.

It's whether your security posture was built for a world that no longer exists.

Trends

💻 AI is making bespoke software the new standard

MIT Technology Review named generative coding a 2026 Breakthrough Technology. AI now writes 30% of Microsoft's code and 25% of Google's.

For IBM i shops, this isn't just a trend to watch—it's a transformation you can leverage.

The same AI that builds bespoke applications from plain English can modernize RPG, generate APIs, and extend your legacy business logic without forcing you to rip out what already works.

The real question isn't whether AI-built applications are coming to IBM i. It's whether your team will be positioned to guide them.

And what does this mean for your ERP?

As the paradigm shifts, traditional software vendors will need to evolve from delivering "one-size-fits-all" platforms to offering specialized tools that seamlessly integrate with custom solutions. ERP systems will increasingly function as data hubs rather than primary business interfaces—rewarding vendors who enable flexibility and customization.

IBM i shops have long practiced this bespoke approach, customizing and bolting on applications to their third-party ERPs. But past coding practices created a hidden cost: each customization made upgrades harder, until many organizations stopped upgrading entirely. Now, they're straddled with significant technical debt.

The difference today?

AI is proving it can generate custom code that's maintainable, documented, and upgrade-compatible—transforming what was once a liability into a competitive advantage.

For IBM i shops, this shift represents a rare opportunity. Your decades-refined business logic becomes the foundation for AI-generated applications. You can extend, innovate, and personalize—without replacing the systems that power your business.

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