Talsco Weekly: The IBM i: Still Ahead of Everything

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 👋 Steve Will is retiring from IBM. 🏛️ IBM i’s Chief Architect calls it a career. 🌏 IBM Bob just showed up in Bangkok.
AI: 🔧 IBM Bob just got a serious upgrade for IBM i. 💡 AI is now writing most of its own code.
Career: 🔑 RPG gets you in the room. This gets you the job. 🎓 IBM i and agentic AI, taught at the college level.
Development: 🟦 The development platform of the future?
Leadership: 💡 It’s not technical debt that kills you. It’s something else.
Learning: 🔧 From Idea to Implementation Plan: IBM Bob + SDD. 🕹️ IBM i on a Power6 from 2008? Someone did it.
Security: 🔒 Two Vulnerabilities IBM i Shops Should Not Ignore. ⚠️ IBM i ACS Remote Code Execution Flaw.
Vendor: 📡 IBM Power Monitoring Has Come a Long Way.
They Finally Noticed: 🔭 eWeek once called IBM i a “new product.” They weren’t entirely wrong.

IBM i Brief

IBM i’s CTO and Chief Architect announced he’ll retire at the end of July 2026. It’s a bittersweet moment for the IBM i community: congratulations on a long career and a well-earned next chapter.

🏛️ IBM i’s Chief Architect calls it a career

Steve Will announced his retirement after 41 years at IBM, effective at the end of July. Kris Whitney steps in as the new IBM i Chief Architect, appointed by Director of Development Keri Olson. Will shaped the platform, championed its community, and leaves on his own terms. That says something about the man and the platform he spent a career defending.

Who Is Kris Whitney?

Kris Whitney is a deep IBM i insider, not an outside appointment. He has worked at IBM Rochester for over 19 years and has spent much of that career at the intersection of availability, database, and cloud infrastructure.

His most visible contribution is Db2 Mirror for i. In 2015, Whitney and other members of the IBM i high availability team were approached by long-time clients about their need for a continuous availability solution, and he and Mark Anderson co-designed a database replication system using low-latency RoCE adapters. That was a genuinely hard technical problem solved in direct response to client demand.

Within the IBM i development organization, Whitney held the role of cloud architect, working alongside Scott Forstie on database, Tim Rowe on app dev, and Tim Mullenbach on security, meaning he already knew the full team and the platform’s strategic direction before this appointment.

🌏 IBM Bob just showed up in Bangkok

Metro Systems and IBM Thailand hosted a dedicated IBM Bob seminar in May, bringing together RPG developers, IT executives, and system administrators to explore AI-assisted IBM i modernization. The message was straightforward: teams can adopt IBM Bob without platform migration or code rewrites. The fact that an IBM Platinum Partner in Thailand is building full-day events around this tool tells you something. The IBM i AI story is no longer a domestic conversation.

AI

🔧 IBM Bob just got a serious upgrade for IBM i

The Bob Premium Package, shipping June 24, finally delivers what IBM i developers have been waiting for: native QSYS source file support.

The update also adds an IBM i Developer Mode, roughly 40 new skills, 30 specialized tools, and RAG functionality trained on IBM i-specific resources.

Pricing starts at $20 per user per month for the base Bob Pro tier.

But what do those features actually mean for IBM i developers?

Skills are pre-built workflows that give Bob specific context and instructions for completing a defined IBM i development task, such as converting fixed-format RPG to free-format or writing unit test cases.
Specialized tools are purpose-built capabilities that allow Bob to interact directly with the IBM i environment, such as reading and writing to QSYS or the IFS, running CL commands and SQL statements, launching 5250 sessions, and managing library lists.
RAG functionality supplements Bob’s built-in AI knowledge with curated IBM i-specific resources, including RPG Café content and SQL services documentation, so Bob can produce more accurate and platform-aware responses.

💡 AI is now writing most of its own code

Anthropic revealed that over 80% of the code merged into its production systems in May 2026 was written by Claude, not humans. Engineers now ship eight times the code they did in 2024.

That number will grab headlines.

But Anthropic builds on modern cloud-native stacks. IBM i shops run RPG, COBOL, and decades of business logic baked into production systems.

Whether AI coding tools will deliver anywhere near that kind of velocity in legacy environments is genuinely unknown.

Worth watching closely.

What do you think?

Career

🔑 RPG gets you in the room. This gets you the job.

Hiring managers do not separate great candidates from good ones based on tools. They separate them based on how candidates think.

Anyone can list RPG, SQL, and APIs. What managers are really listening for is whether you understand the bigger picture. There are three layers to every IBM i role:

The Technology: the code, the tools, the languages
The Glue: how technology connects business processes, what breaks if a program fails, why the system was built the way it was
The Business: what the company actually does, who depends on the system, what success and failure look like

If you are early in your career, lead with curiosity about all three layers, not just the first one.

If you have not interviewed in years, you already live in all three. The mistake is burying that knowledge inside technical answers. Surface it. Connect your experience directly to business outcomes.

The takeaway. Do not just say what you built. Say what it did for the business, and what would have broken without it. Book a 20-minute call.

🎓 IBM i and agentic AI, taught at the college level

A pilot competition challenged Pennsylvania College of Technology students to build agentic AI solutions on IBM i for real business needs. Six students and their instructor attended POWERUp 2026 in New Orleans as their reward. The winning entry automated sales trend analysis and visualization using IBM watsonx. COMMON and the IBM Power Skills Academy backed the effort.

Two Key Takeaways.

First, next-generation talent is engaging with IBM i at a serious level. Second, collegiate IBM i programs exist. They are rare, but they exist. Both points push back on a perception that persists in parts of this community: that no new blood is coming. Stories like this one say otherwise.

Development

🟦 The development platform of the future?

IBM’s Adam Shedivy used the term “agentic-native” at POWERUp 2026 to describe IBM i, and the case holds up.

Integrated OS, Db2, security model, audit journals, and SQL services on a single platform means AI agents work within established governed boundaries rather than around them.

Enterprise IT is racing to build what IBM i already has.

For developers on this platform, the crossroads is not a warning. It is an advantage.

Leadership

💡It’s not technical debt that kills you. It’s something else

A sharp distinction worth sitting with:

Technical debt is what engineers inherit; decision debt is what organizations create through years of deferred choices, undocumented rules, and knowledge that lives only in people’s heads.

AI is now exposing both. The backlog explosion that follows is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem.

The organizations that win will not have the best tools. They will have leaders who act on what AI reveals.

Learning

🔧 From Idea to Implementation Plan: IBM Bob + SDD

This training video walks through a specification-driven development workflow built on top of IBM Bob. Custom modes, GitHub integration, and a structured path through requirements, system design, user stories, and implementation planning.

The framing matters: engineering before coding. Not faster code generation. A more traceable, repeatable process.

If your shop is thinking about how to bring AI into the development workflow without losing discipline, this is a practical starting point.

🕹️ IBM i on a Power6 from 2008? Someone did it

A retro tech YouTuber recently spent two hours getting IBM i installed on an IBM Power6 520 Express, and the journey is exactly what IBM i veterans would expect: three install attempts, hard drive format experiments, sector size changes, and a deep dive into LPARs.

If you have ever lost an afternoon to IBM i’s very strong opinions about which drives it will recognize, this one hits different.

A walk down memory lane is worth the watch.

Security

🔒 Two Vulnerabilities IBM i Shops Should Not Ignore

IBM’s latest PTF Guide covers two security vulnerabilities affecting WebSphere and IBM i across releases 7.3 through 7.6, with patches available now.

⚠️ IBM i ACS Remote Code Execution Flaw

CVE-2026-7770 (CVSS 8.8 HIGH): IBM i ACS versions 1.1.5.0–1.1.9.12 are vulnerable to remote code execution via IBM i Navigator listener.

Vendor

📡 IBM Power Monitoring Has Come a Long Way

What began as a Nagios plugin for IBM i is now a full IBM Power monitoring ecosystem. AAG from Shield Advanced Solutions has expanded to cover IBM i, HMC, VIOS, and now AIX, all from a single platform.

The recent innovations are worth noting. Version 3.0 delivers 2-3x faster response times and supports environments running 10,000+ checks. Passive check integration reduces overhead. Automated monitoring suspension during controlled operations like PWRDWNSYS cuts false alerts. And AI-assisted analysis is now part of the picture, helping admins identify anomalies faster.

This is what organic, customer-driven innovation looks like. No big vendor announcement. No splashy rebrand. Just a team solving real IBM Power problems, year after year, until a plugin becomes a platform.

That kind of commitment deserves attention.

They Finally Noticed

🔭 eWeek once called IBM i a “new product.” They weren’t entirely wrong

In 2019, analyst Rob Enderle walked out of an IBM Think briefing and filed his IBM i review under “New Product Analysis.” The irony is real. But so is the point. For the majority of the enterprise technology world, IBM i is effectively new. They have never heard of it, never evaluated it, and have no idea what it can do.

What Enderle saw stopped him cold. A fully integrated, hyper-converged software platform. Virtually immune to ransomware and trojans. Scaling from a five-person shop to a multinational bank. Thriving in banking, manufacturing, retail, and healthcare. His conclusion: IBM i is the closest thing to a software platform superhero he had ever seen.

The IBM i community already knew this. What is new in 2026 is AI, and it turns out the platform that was already integrated, already secure, and already running the world’s most critical data is exactly where AI belongs. The rest of the enterprise world is still figuring that out. That gap is not a weakness. It is an opportunity.

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