Talsco Weekly: 🟧 Your RPG skills just got a multiplier

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 🔧 Legacy transformation is still hard to simplify.
AI: 🛠️ The tooling race has arrived on IBM i.
Career: 🟧 Your RPG skills just got a multiplier.
Development: 💻Every IBM i shop has access to the same code.
ERP: 📡 ERPs rolling out new AI features
Hiring: 📅 The job you’re hiring for doesn’t exist yet.
Leadership: 🧭 Technical skills get you in, but not to the top.
Learning: 🌐 We asked. You answered.
Security: 🛡️AI just hacked a secure OS. 🔐 AI just found a 27-year-old bug

IBM i Brief

🔧 Legacy transformation is still hard to simplify

Yohan Bensoussan argues that new companies keep promising to make legacy modernization “simple,” but the same challenges keep resurfacing, which is why older guidance still holds up.

The post also calls out how much of today’s AI market remains driven by hype, while noting that reality eventually forces clarity as results and limits become impossible to ignore.

🤝 IBM just made AI patents a team sport

Patent wars are the silent tax on AI innovation.

IBM, Anthropic, Meta, and Microsoft moved to change that this week, co-founding the Shared AI License Foundation (SAIL) — a shared patent commons designed to clear the legal runway for foundation model development.

AI patent filings have surged by over 2,000% in a decade. Without a framework like this, the lawyers win. IBM i shops building on watsonx and IBM Bob just got a quieter path forward.

AI

🛠️ The tooling race has arrived on IBM i

AI-assisted code modernization is no longer a concept — it’s a market. A wave of vendors is now offering RPG developers real options for tackling legacy code that shops don’t have the manpower to modernize themselves.

Who’s showing up. IBM’s Bob leads the field with Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral under the hood. Profound Logic’s CoderFlow is reporting five to ten times productivity gains using a multi-agent framework. Fresche Solutions extracts business rules first, then uses AI to generate new code — a smarter approach to controlling hallucinations. ARCAD, Polverini & Partners, Remain Software, and newcomer Programmers.io’s TimeBridge round out a rapidly expanding vendor landscape.

What this means.

One take: more tools mean more noise, and IBM i shops will need to evaluate carefully before committing.
Another take: the window for figuring out your modernization strategy just got shorter. The vendors are ready. Are you ready?

The opportunity. Legacy RPG code has long been a constraint — undocumented, understaffed, and untouched. AI is changing that equation. The shops that move deliberately now will shed technical debt faster than they ever thought possible. The ones that wait will find themselves explaining to leadership why they didn’t.

Career

🟧 Your RPG skills just got a multiplier

Last week I mentioned RPGLens in the Learning section.

Then something better happened — I got on a Zoom call with Audi, the developer who built it.

I came away thinking about something bigger than the tool itself.

We’re in a renaissance for the RPG developer. Not a survival story.

Audi built RPGLens out of a real pain point — a documentation project that consumed his entire team for eight months. 800 programs. Years of accumulated enhancements. No documentation trail.

After building a prototype of the tool. He ran one of his most complex legacy programs through the finished tool — a 1998-era program with 74 enhancements and zero documentation — it did in less than 30 minutes what had taken a week and a half to do manually. That’s not a productivity improvement. That’s a shift.

But here’s what matters for your career: the tool only works in the hands of someone who actually knows RPG. Audi cautions junior developers in using AI until their fundamentals are solid—his thought is, if you can’t evaluate the output, you’re not productive, you just think you know what you are doing. There’s a difference.

His framing is simple:SME first, AI second.

Deep RPG knowledge plus AI on top of it puts you at a level that wasn’t possible two years ago. The developers who understand what’s actually running on these systems — the business logic buried in 40-year-old programs, the RPG patterns, the quirks — those are the people who can direct and validate what AI produces. That’s the unlock.

Your RPG foundation isn’t a legacy credential. Right now, it’s a superpower waiting for the right tools to amplify it. Those tools are here.

If you haven’t tested RPGLens yet, you probably should.

Development

🏗️ The next time someone asks “can we expose this?” be ready

That’s not a language problem — it’s a structure problem. IBM i tools like IWS, EXEC SQL, and native JSON support already enable service-based architecture. The shift is from programs that process data to systems that control how data is used. Build for exposure now, or get worked around later.

💻 Every IBM i shop has access to the same code

The same DB2. The same integrated OS. The same RPG compiler. Same bulletproof architecture.

So why does one IBM i shop run circles around the next?

It’s not the platform. We’ve been saying it for months — IBM i already has what AI actually needs. Decades of validated Db2 data. Integrated governance. A single source of truth. The “legacy” shop is at the front of the line.

The difference is what the developer — you — decides to do with it.

One shop exposed their RPG logic as APIs. Another plugged their Db2 data into the AI layer. A third treated IBM Bob not as a shortcut but as a thinking partner — and got to production faster because of it.

Same platform. Wildly different outcomes.

The developers winning right now didn’t wait for permission. Nearly 52,000 PUB400 users didn’t wait for a training budget. They approved it themselves. They went and got it.

💾 Save files are an IBM i Swiss Army knife

Administration: Save file objects let you back up and distribute libraries, individual objects, and IFS files using native commands like SAVLIB, SAVOBJ, and SAV. Whether you’re archiving or moving data across systems, save files handle it all. A new GitHub resource compiles helpful PASE and CL commands to simplify your save-and-restore workflows.

ERP

📡 Infor is rolling out new AI features — and showing them off live

Infor just announced a three-part webinar series tied to its April Release, covering updates across the Infor OS Platform. Sessions on April 23, 28, and 30 break down what’s new in Data & Intelligence, Integration & Automation, and UX & App Development. If your shop runs XA, LX, or System 21, this is worth 90 minutes of your calendar. Bonus: Infor’s Community Hackathon opens for sign-ups May 1 — teams of two to six can compete, building on the Infor OS Platform.

Our Take

AI isn’t a category placeholder anymore.

It’s woven into everything — the ERP, the integration layer, the document workflows, the UX. The enterprise software stack is being rebuilt around it in real time.

For years, IT was in a building phase. New systems, new integrations, new infrastructure. That work mattered. But the pace was manageable.

That’s over.

The acceleration is here. Staying informed isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a core competency.

Hiring

📅 The job you’re hiring for doesn’t exist yet

IBM i managers face a succession paradox: today’s requirements aren’t tomorrow’s.

Technical depth still matters — especially in lean shops.

But the next leader needs to do more than execute. They need to see around corners. Hire for the role the platform will demand, not the one it currently has. That’s a different conversation.

We can help.

Leadership

🧭 Technical skills get you in — leadership gets you to the top

A veteran IBM executive argues the CIO path mirrors the CFO’s: build technical credibility early, then deliberately shift toward management, trust-building, and business communication.

The biggest trap?

Believing deeper technical expertise is the differentiator. It isn’t.

The CIOs who thrive are the ones who stop being the smartest technologist in the room — and start leading the people who are.

Learning

🌐 We asked. You answered.

“Who do you lean on when you hit a wall?”

One reader cites:IBM i Reference Pages blog, global IBM i contacts, user groups, midrange.com threads, IBM Community, business partners, and LinkedIn.

Built over the years. Earned, not inherited.

The IBM i community doesn’t just share code. It shares context. That’s the real advantage.

Security

🛡️ AI pierced a fortress-grade operating system

No. Not the IBM i, but it’s worth taking note.

FreeBSD powers Netflix, PlayStation, and WhatsApp. For decades, it has delivered a rock-solid foundation — mature, audited, and hardened by serious security engineers. And yet an AI, given only a vulnerability advisory, constructed a complete attack chain and spawned a root shell in userspace. AI just hacked one of the world’s most secure operating systems.

If you can’t tell, security should be on every IBM i shop’s mind. While it boasts an incredible security profile, that’s only if you’re staying current.

IBM i shops: Have you had a security assessment? Have you done a pen test?

🔐 AI just found a 27-year-old bug — and that’s just the start

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview has identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major OS and browser — including a flaw hiding in OpenBSD for 27 years. Rather than release it publicly, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing, giving vetted partners like Apple, Microsoft, and Google controlled access to hunt and patch critical flaws. The same AI that can break everything may be the only thing capable of fixing it.

Anthropic’s Project Glasswing unites 12 major tech firms with $100M in credits to patch thousands of AI-discovered zero-day vulnerabilities.

📉 AI giants are becoming less transparent — not more

Stanford’s Foundation Model Transparency Index scored 13 major AI developers in December 2025, and the results are stark: the mean score dropped 17 points year-over-year, Meta fell 29 points, and engagement with the Index dropped from 74% to 30%.

It’s important to note that IBM topped the rankings with a 95.

There is a reason for this.

IBM’s AI products are positioned differently than OpenAI or Anthropic — more B2B and enterprise-focused — which may make transparency disclosures easier and more natural for them.

The Index also notes that B2B companies score considerably higher overall, so IBM’s top ranking reflects both a genuine commitment to transparency and a structural advantage in how they operate.

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