Talsco Weekly: RPG alone no longer carries a career

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 👋 Looking to Reach Steve Will? 🎯 IBM just told you where it is going.
AI: 🔓 The gated-API era of powerful AI is over.
Career: 🔄 RPG alone no longer carries a career.
Development: ⚙️ RPG adds built-in assertions for defensive programming.
ERP: 🏢 AI is quietly hollowing out the ERP model.
Hiring: 👥 How you define the role decides who you get.
Leadership: 👔 Your best RPG dev is not automatically your best manager.
Learning: 📘 Turn a 1990 IBM manual into your AI tutor.
Security: 🔍 The industry just named a problem it cannot solve.
Trends: 🌍 The remote vs office fight has a third answer. 👀 A small-business site just broke down IBM Power.

IBM i Brief

He’s retired. Here’s who to contact instead.

Steve Will has stepped away from IBM i. In a short note to the community, he pointed people to two contacts for the questions they used to bring him. For development, reach Keri Olson, Director of IBM i Development. For architecture, reach Kris Whitney, IBM i Chief Architect. Same platform, new points of contact.

Steve closed with his own sign-off: be well, be curious, be yourself.

🎯 IBM just told you where it is going

IBM sold its entire blockchain patent portfolio to Circle. Years of investment gone in one clean break. Watch what a company drops, not just what it launches. The money is moving to software, hybrid cloud, and AI. On the security side, IBM is folding fresh threat intelligence into QRadar and pitching it as the hub for AI-ready security data. The direction is set. AI is the center now.

The IBM i Angle

The headlines scream mainframe meltdown. Read carefully. That is IBM Z, not IBM i on Power. The useful signal here is direction. IBM is reorganizing around AI and security. Your platform sits inside that same shift. The tools coming next will be AI tools. Plan for that, not the stock chart.

AI

🔓 The gated-API era of powerful AI is over

Governments spent the spring locking down cyber-capable AI from US labs. Then as this Forbes report explains, China’s Z.ai shipped GLM-5.2 under an open license. It matches leading models at vulnerability discovery, runs locally, and answers to no vendor. Security researchers already report it chaining exploits like an elite attacker. Boards are being told to compress patch cycles from quarters to days.

Our Take: This might not feel like an IBM i story. It is. The most capable AI is no longer locked behind vendor gates. Open models now run locally, for both sides of the fight. ERP and development move slow. AI does not. Every CIO and technologist needs to watch the frontier models and the open source ones. Staying in the loop is the job now.

Career

🔄 RPG alone no longer carries a career

IBM i predictions roundup said it plainly. Developers who bridge modern RPG with open source tools will earn more. The advice to employers was just as direct. Hire the intern. Hire the sixty-year-old willing to share what they know and pick up a few new tricks. The knowledge is transferable. The willingness to move is the variable.

Our Take:

In twenty-five years recruiting this platform, the pattern repeats. Fixed format to free. SEU and PDM to RDI to VS Code.

Every leap met resistance, and every time the ones who moved came out ahead. AI is the newest test.

What’s different now is who is calling.

People who drifted away are circling back. Some lost roles elsewhere. Others never stopped loving the platform.

That is what a second-wind looks like.

Development

⚙️ RPG adds built-in assertions for defensive programming

IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8 introduce two new opcodes, ASSERT-T and ASSERT-F. One sends a message when a condition is true, the other when it is false. The ASSERT control keyword decides what happens next: throw an exception, log a diagnostic warning, call a handler procedure, or stay silent. The feature traces back to an IBM idea from two years ago. Vielen Dank to IBM Champion Daniel Gross for the heads-up.

ERP

🏢 AI is quietly hollowing out the ERP model

For decades, ERP was the backbone of corporate computing. AI is loosening its grip. A new IT Jungle piece, leaning on McKinsey and Goldman Sachs research, lays out how the pressure is building:

The SaaSpocalypse. Early 2026, the fear that companies could vibe-code their own business software with tools like Claude Cowork triggered a massive sell-off. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and others shed hundreds of billions in value.
Point products fall first. Any single-function tool, tax prep, expense tracking, photo editing, is easy for AI to copy. The tightly coordinated suite is harder, but no longer untouchable.
Agents replace the screen. Users start setting intent and validating outcomes instead of keying transactions. The interface you trained on goes headless.
Logic becomes a commodity. Vendors like SAP are freezing customization. When rules are locked and agents do the work, application logic stops being a differentiator.
Data leaves the big tables. The radical view stores data in microservices with a semantic layer an AI operating system reasons across, not the monolithic schema ERP was built on.
Implementation pain collapses. Agents handle the grunt work of modernization and migration. McKinsey estimates up to a 90% cut in effort, and much of the need to customize disappears.

Here is the catch the piece keeps circling back to. The one thing AI struggles to replace is a deeply integrated core system and the freedom to build custom software around it. That is not a weakness to modernize away. On IBM i, it is the whole point. We said the same thing in May when Constellation’s research argued AI doesn’t replace your core system, it depends on it.

Our Take

AI is not lining up to end the IBM i customer base. If anything, it is lining up to solidify it. The shops that have quietly wondered whether to leave now have a reason to stay. The core they were told was a liability is the exact thing AI depends on. And the shops that stayed committed all along are not behind. They are blazing the trail others are about to follow.

Hiring

👥 How you define the role decides who you get

This week’s Trends piece splits work into office-first, hybrid, and location-flexible. That is a hiring decision before it is a workplace policy. Lock a role onsite when the system truly needs it. Open it up when it does not. Each choice sets the size of your pool. The RPG talent is out there. Whether you can reach it often comes down to how you wrote the job.

Let’s talk about your IBM i talent strategy.

Leadership

👔 Your best RPG dev is not automatically your best manager

The old reward system is broken. Promote the top technician, skip the training, and wonder why leadership is weak. A sharp Ask The Headhunter column names the dysfunction: companies train managers to fill out forms, not to develop people. Coaching, evaluating, mentoring. None of it is taught. Titles get handed out. Talent walks out the exit interview.

Our Take: There are a lot of pretty good IBM i managers out there. Having been technical helps when you lead an IBM i team. But it does not guarantee anything. Some of the brightest IBM i technologists are horrible managers. Some so-so RPG devs turn out to be incredible ones. The best I have seen are both. Technical skill and leadership skill are different muscles. Train for both.

Learning

📘 Turn a 1990 IBM manual into your AI tutor

Bitsavers has IBM’s AS/400 Command Language Programmer’s Guide from 1990. On its own, it is a dense reference. Loaded into a Claude or Cowork skill, it becomes something better: a patient tutor grounded in the source. Ask it to explain a CL command, walk through error handling, or check your logic.

New to IBM i? Start here.

Been around for decades? Use it as instant, accurate lookup. The manual has not aged. Now it can teach.

Security

🔍 The industry just named a problem it cannot solve

The Hugging Face breach report landed. Its hardest problem was not stopping the agent. It was reconstructing what the agent did. 17,600 actions over 4.5 days, rebuilt after the fact with an AI pipeline of their own. The industry calls this new frontier “agent visibility.” Right now it is mostly a name. Seeing what an autonomous agent does, while it does it, is a problem no platform has solved yet.

Why It Matters

This changes the question you ask. For years, evaluating a tool meant asking what it can do. An autonomous agent flips that. The new question is what it can show you it did. When a vendor pitches you an agent, ask how you would reconstruct its actions after something goes wrong. If they cannot answer, you have your answer. Nobody has fully solved this. The shops that ask early will be ready first.

Trends

🌍 The remote vs office fight has a third answer

Return to office mandates are everywhere, yet the tech nomad workforce keeps growing, up 153% since 2019. Both trends are real because neither is universal. The emerging fix is to sort roles into office-first, hybrid, and location-flexible, based on what the work needs. A parallel shift called slowmadism has nomads settling in one place for months at a time, which makes remote teams far easier to coordinate.

👀 A small-business site just broke down IBM Power

Here is a quiet signal. Small Business Trends, a mainstream SME publication, ran a full breakdown of IBM’s new Power lineup. The message for its readers: AI on Power is now within reach for smaller shops. Autonomous Operations resolves capacity issues up to 15 times faster. Bob widens the RPG talent pool, with one co-op reporting 60% faster developer onboarding. The entry-level S1112 brings Power11 AI acceleration on-prem. The platform is reaching a new audience.

Our Take

IBM i has been the backbone of small and midsize businesses since day one. Quiet, reliable, running the shop while nobody watched. This trend continues. New tools, same role.

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