Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 🗓️ The Spring TR is late. 🌐 The reputation of the IBM i.
AI: ⚙️ AI’s real bottleneck.
Career: 🔒What does Direct Table Access and your Career have in COMMON?
Development: 🛠️ Stop using commands like this.
Hiring: 🤝 AI is changing hiring for everyone in the room.
Security: 🔐 Traditional encryption, breaking down IBM i workflows. 🏛️ IBM’s access problem is not the platform.
Vendor: 💾 Cobalt Iron modernizes backup. 🏗️ AI will not replace your RPG developers, but make them more important. 🔧 A lumber company’s RPG problem, became a start up.
Our Take: The Question IBM i Shops Stopped Asking.

IBM i Brief

🗓️ The spring IBM i TR is late — on purpose

IBM is delaying its traditional spring Technology Refresh, expected as IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, to align with an upcoming Power11 hardware announcement. IBM Think 2026 in Boston (May 4–6) is the likely stage. The delay isn’t a setback — it’s a signal. New entry-level Power11 iron is coming, and IBM wants the software and hardware story told together.

🌐 The IBM i reputation just showed up where you least expect it

Mac users were commiserating this week about a 49-day uptime crash bug. Someone asked what system never has that problem. The answer came back as a riddle: “three letters followed by a lowercase i.” Some reputations don’t need advertising.

AI

⚙️ AI’s real bottleneck isn’t cost — it’s choice

Ben Thompson of Stratechery argues that AI has shifted tech’s fundamental economic challenge from marginal costs to opportunity costs. When Microsoft allocated compute to its own Copilot products instead of Azure customers, it was a deliberate tradeoff — not a capacity failure. Anthropic faces the same tension with its new Mythos model. Every GPU cycle spent on one customer is a cycle another doesn’t get. Compute scarcity is now a strategic decision, not just an infrastructure problem.

Career

🔒 Direct table access is silently breaking your IBM i system

When multiple programs hit the same physical file — each with its own assumptions — a routine field change can trigger cascading failures across workflows you never expected. George VanEaton makes the case for a clean architecture rule: no program touches a physical table directly. Views, stored procedures, and service programs become the only path in. One controlled layer. No drift. No surprises.

The takeaway: This story came from a large dev shop with a team to catch the fallout. If you’re a one-man shop, who’s catching yours? Most RPG developers never see this conversation. The fact that you did puts you ahead of the majority. That gap is real — and it’s exactly why community matters.

With that in mind, it’s not too late to head on down to New Orleans for PowerUp26.

Development

🛠️ Stop using commands you can’t do anything with

Tracking PTF groups on IBM i with DSPPTFGRP and WRKPTFGRP has always had one frustrating limitation — you can’t do anything with the output. The GROUP_PTF_INFO SQL view changes that. With a few well-structured SQL statements, including a Common Table Expression, you can drill into individual PTFs, track apply timestamps, and actually act on the results.

Hiring

🤝 AI is changing hiring — for everyone in the room

Candidates are using AI to build flawless resumes.

Hiring teams are using AI to screen them out before a human ever looks. The result? Both sides are talking to machines and wondering why nothing feels right.

A perfect resume doesn’t mean a perfect fit. And a filtered-out candidate might be exactly who you need.

It’s the nuance, the instinct, the conversation that closes the gap. And that’s not something an algorithm delivers, but analog does.

That’s what we’re here for. Schedule a live call.

Security

🔐 Traditional encryption is breaking IBM i workflows — here’s the fix

Most encryption solutions force sensitive data onto disk in an unprotected state just so applications can read it. PKWARE’s SDK-based approach changes that — embedding encrypt and decrypt functions directly into applications, keeping data protected in memory.

IBM i is explicitly supported, making this a compliance-forward solution for shops running GLBA, PCI DSS, or HIPAA workloads without the workflow disruption.

🏛️ IBM i’s access problem isn’t the platform — it’s the framing

When organizations govern IBM i through cloud-style identity tools, they lose the native business context the platform already provides. Auditors flag ALLOBJ. Approvers rubber-stamp HLQs they don’t understand. Capability-centric governance fixes this by defining access as what someone can actually do — using telemetry IBM i already generates.

Vendor

💾 Cobalt Iron modernizes IBM i backup

Cobalt Iron has introduced a software-defined virtual tape library aimed at IBM i workloads, positioning it as a way to modernize tape-based backup without changing established processes. The offering is designed to simplify backup and recovery operations while adding more flexible, scalable storage options. It also targets stronger resilience against outages and cyber threats, with an emphasis on faster restores and easier management.

🏗️ AI won’t replace your RPG developers — it will make them irreplaceable.

Profound Logic’s CoderFlow can absorb six months of IBM i onboarding knowledge in minutes. The compile-test-fix loop that once consumed a junior developer’s first year runs autonomously — while your senior developers focus on judgment, architecture, and the institutional knowledge that no AI can fully encode. One seasoned RPG developer, working alongside an AI agent that already knows your environment, can now supervise work that used to require a team.

This connects to a pattern we’re tracking across the ecosystem. Last week,RPGLens covered how Audi blocked its developers from using AI tools— a variation to what Profound Logic is building here. IBM i vendors driving this kind of innovation are pulling ahead. The ones that don’t may be handing the future to someone else.

🔧 A lumber company’s RPG problem just became a startup

Golden Path Digital, an Arkansas-based startup, launched AS/Forward after co-founder Aaron Balentine spent years watching undocumented RPG code quietly become his employer’s biggest business risk. The platform ingests a codebase, builds a deterministic dependency map, and connects it via MCP to the LLM of your choice — giving developers a “blast radius” view before any code is touched. Originally built to help shops migrate off IBM i, the positioning has shifted: the goal now is helping customers stay on the platform with a clearer understanding of their code.

Our Take

🔄 The Question IBM i Shops Stopped Asking

There’s a pattern here that’s hard to ignore. For years, the conversation in IBM i circles started in the same place — how do we get off this platform?

A decade later, that question has quietly flipped. Not because vendors failed, but because the market kept answering back.

Migration is harder than it looks, the business case rarely holds up, and IBM i shops simply don’t want to leave. What’s accelerating that shift now is AI.

Suddenly the platform’s stability, integrated data, and deep business logic aren’t liabilities — they’re assets.

The narrative isn’t moving off IBM i. It’s figuring out how to move forward on it.

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Talsco Weekly: 🔄 The Question IBM i Shops Stopped Asking