Talsco Weekly: The RPG Developer’s AI Moment

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 🔋 IBM’s new Power GM is all-in on IBM i and AI. 🌥️ The pilot-to-production gap has a name. IBM just built a bridge.
AI: 🖥️ IBM Bob offers a hands-on AI IDE start. 🏗️ What IBM said no to, the community is building anyway. 🟦 Context is what separates a useful AI agent from a costly one
Career: 👨‍💻 The RPG Developer’s AI Moment.
Development: 🛠️ IBM i has a command for that. It always has.
Open Source: 🔧 IBM is building toward safer code at the kernel level.
Security: 🔓 Your defensive stack may be an open book.

IBM i Brief

🔋 IBM’s new Power GM is all-in on IBM i and AI

Hillery Hunter, IBM’s new GM of Power, made her case at POWERUp 2026 in New Orleans: IBM i’s complete stack and its critical enterprise data in healthcare, logistics, and financial services sits in a uniquely strong position as AI ROI shifts from cloud-based experiments to crown jewel data. Hunter told attendees there is an “incredibly unique opportunity to move at the fastest pace in the industry.” The platform’s next leader is engaged, present, and making the case directly.

🌥️ The pilot-to-production gap has a name. IBM just built a bridge

Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud launches May 22. It is a fully managed inference service: models, GPUs, governance, and OpenAI-compatible APIs handled by IBM. No tuning runtimes to manage. No infrastructure overhead to absorb. IBM i shops running hybrid workloads or evaluating AI tooling should note what IBM is standardizing on. Granite 4.0 is in the catalog. The infrastructure story and the IBM i story are converging.

AI

🖥️ IBM Bob offers a hands-on AI IDE start

Wayne Leishman points developers to IBM Bob’s official tutorials as a practical introduction to the agentic IDE, which supports the full SDLC—writing, testing, upgrading, and securing apps. The walkthrough uses the Galaxium Travels demo to cover setup, architecture exploration, feature building with Bob, validation, and security improvements. They note that as models improve, context becomes the bottleneck, and share additional real-system demos.

🏗️ What IBM said no to, the community is building anyway

Andrey Klyachkin,

asked IBM about a Go port roughly two years ago. The answer was the one you’ve heard before if you’ve asked IBM for anything: “if you find a paying customer for it, we’ll do it.” No customers were forthcoming. The matter rested.

So he built one himself.

His patch series against upstream Go targets GOOS=ibmi as a first-class build target and no fork, no drift. Once stable, it unlocks a native node_exporter and Prometheus monitoring for IBM i. PUB400 made the testing possible. The community made it happen.

Further Reading

Prometheus — open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit
Go (Golang) — the language behind node_exporter and much of modern infrastructure tooling

🟦 Context is what separates a useful AI agent from a costly one

IBM’s Concert platform debuted at Think 2026 with a unified operations data model at its core. Entity catalogs. Relationship graphs. Policy state. Risk scoring.

IBM’s message: model layers change, but architecture has to last.

IBM i shops already know this. Integrated architecture, clean data foundations, and decades of structured operations are exactly what Concert requires. The shops that didn’t chase every new platform are ready.

Career

👨‍💻 The RPG Developer’s AI Moment

Something is different this time.

I have been talking to RPG developers for a long time. And over the years, a pattern emerged. When I would ask about modernization tools, open source languages on IBM i, PHP, Node.js, Python, Java, the conversation would often go quiet. Not because these developers were out of touch. They were heads down. Doing the work. Keeping the lights on. Delivering.

They heard about PHP, Node.js, Python, Java on IBM i. Some explored. Most wondered which one was worth the investment. Worth the risk of learning something they were not sure they would ever get to use in production. So for many, not all, but many, nothing happened. The system ran. The business ran. That was the job.

AI is different.

Every RPG developer I talk to right now knows about ChatGPT. They know IBM Bob. They are asking about Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor. They are curious about the models: GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, Llama, Mistral, Granite.

That curiosity is new. And it is real.

AI did not arrive gradually. It did not give the enterprise world a five-year runway to evaluate and committee its way to a decision. It landed fast. And it landed on everyone at the same time. The RPG developer with 30 years of experience and the college student who just learned Python are both figuring out prompt engineering in the same moment. That levels the field.

For the RPG developer who always knew the platform cold but never felt like the industry was moving toward them, AI is moving toward them right now.

Developers who stepped away from IBM i, for life reasons, for career pivots, for burnout, are coming back. AI gives them a way to fast track back in. The gap that felt too wide to cross is now crossable.

And the developers who never left? They are excited in a way I have not seen in years. The kind of excitement that looks a lot like when they first started coding. When the craft was new and the possibilities felt wide open.

That feeling is back.

The RPG developer who did not know what to learn next now has a clear answer. And they have a tool to help them learn it. Clarity plus acceleration. Most technology cycles offer one or the other. AI is offering both.

This is the RPG developer’s AI moment.

Development

🛠️ IBM i has a command for that. It always has

GENCMDDOC, Generate Command Documentation, is a native IBM i command that creates help text templates for your custom commands. Output options include HTML and UIM source code, which can be edited and compiled into a panel group attached directly to the command. A practical, time-saving tool most developers have never heard of. Built into the platform. No third-party tooling required. IBM i shops have been sitting on this one for years.

Open Source

🔧 IBM is building toward safer code at the kernel level

Rust entered the Linux kernel in 2022. Now IBM Z is joining the list of supported architectures after patches submitted May 12 wired up s390 for in-kernel Rust.

The language’s memory safety guarantees are the draw: fewer vulnerabilities, fewer surprises.

IBM i already runs on Power with its own modernization story unfolding. Knowing which languages IBM is betting on at the hardware level is useful context for any IBM platform shop.

Security

🔓 Your defensive stack may be an open book

TrustedSec’s Justin Elze delivers a hard finding: LLMs now compress weeks of reverse-engineering defensive tools into days. The old assumption that product complexity equals protection is gone.

This article offers a new perspective to the ever changing security landscape.

For IBM i security professionals, the takeaway is not platform-specific. Layered controls, continuous telemetry, and identity-based detection are the answer.

Our Take

Pen testing is a necessary start. It is not where security ends.

Exit point enforcement, native journaling, and network-layer monitoring are the controls that run every day. Together they build the layered posture the TrustedSec piece is calling for. No single tool closes the gap.

IBM i security is a specialty. The shops that get this right are working with people who know the platform deeply. If you need recommendations, let us know. We can point you in the right direction.

If EDR is new territory for your team, this primer from The AI Journal is a solid starting point.

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Contact us

If you are an RPG programmer looking to explore opportunities or a client who is looking for a talented IBM i professional, please contact us. We look forward to assisting you.

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