Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 🪜 One Retirement, A Whole New Bench. 📈 IBM Stumbled. Power Had Its Best Quarter in Years..
AI: 🧱 AI with IBM i. 🐝 BeeAI. 🔄 Why Multi-Model AI Is the Future of Enterprise Architecture.
Career: 🎮 Steve Will’s retirement schedule, revealed.
Development: 🚀 vscode-rpgle 0.33.9: Small Fixes, Real Relief.
Hiring: 🧩 Succession is a system, not a scramble.
Leadership: 🤝 The last act of a good IBM i leader.
Learning: 🔧 Free, Virtual, and Aimed at Your Next Skill. 🎤 Forty-Nine Sessions. One Platform. ⚖️ IBM i A Niche, Yes. Afterthought, No.
Modernization: 🧭 Google’s AI Pitch: Modernize Your Mainframe by Leaving It. 🔄 Stop Modernizing. Start Lowering the Cost of Change.
Security: 🔒 Shadow AI Is the New Shadow IT. 🛡️ IBM i’s New Superpower: Knowing What You’re Exposed To.
Commentary: 🤔 Two Naming Fights, One Distraction.

IBM i Brief

Steve Will retired. The bench barely blinked.

Kris Whitney, who built the popular Db2 Mirror, is the new chief architect. He shipped the product. Now he sets direction. And the handoff runs deeper than one seat: Keri Olson now directs IBM i development, with new senior roles for Brandon Pederson and Amy Blea.

IBM promoted builders from within. That is what succession looks like when you plan for it. Does your shop have a plan that deep? If not, reach out.

📈 IBM Stumbled. Power Had Its Best Quarter in Years.

IBM’s Q2 disappointed Wall Street. Revenue rose just 1 percent, guidance was trimmed, and a mainframe slump drove the miss. Underneath, the Power line that runs IBM i had its strongest quarter in years, with IT Jungle estimating Power revenue up about 41 percent on the Power11 cycle.

Our Take: The story Wall Street told and the story IBM i shops should hear are different. The hardware under your applications is not fading. It is accelerating.

AI

🧱 AI with IBM i

A new IBM guide maps how to bring AI to IBM i workloads: comparing stacks from IBM-native to open source, showing how Power hardware accelerates models on-premises, and profiling solutions IBM i teams know, like IBM Bob.

The IBM i Angle: Shops that never rushed to the cloud keep the edge. Your operational data sits in Db2 for i, and now the route to AI is documented. New words to learn: stack, MCP, agentic. Same platform underneath. A force multiplier, not a replacement.

🐝 BeeAI

BeeAI is a pair of open, Linux Foundation projects born at IBM Research: one framework for building rule-bound agents, one stack for deploying them. Both are MCP and A2A native, framework-agnostic, and free of vendor lock-in.

Our Take: That IBM i MCP server the guide points to? Here’s where those tools get orchestrated. Expose IBM i through MCP, then compose agents from open, vendor-neutral pieces instead of betting the shop on one platform. The blocks are IBM’s, and they’re open.

🔄 Why Multi-Model AI Is the Future of Enterprise Architecture

The winners built foundations, not demos.

Rapid AI experimentation has produced plenty of impressive demos and very few production systems. Enterprises keep optimizing for today’s model instead of designing for scale. Real progress requires architecture, governance, context, orchestration, and business ownership operating as one. Different workloads need different models, so orchestration matters more than raw model choice. As AI matures, architecture becomes the competitive advantage that lasts.

The IBM i Take: This is IBM i’s argument, made by an enterprise analyst. Integrated by design, governed at the core, one foundation instead of a hundred bolted-on services. The community’s patience with the hype now looks like foresight.

Career

🎮 Steve Will’s retirement schedule, revealed

His retirement schedule is heavy on video games.

That’s Steve Will’s own read on the weekday plan he just published, six months before retiring as IBM i’s Chief Architect. Alongside the games: Star Trek re-watches, morning workouts, and a deliberate absence of social media and phone games.

Breaking It Down: Funny how personal the exit is. Some leave the moment the passion fades or the culture sours. Others keep a hand in the craft. Some pivot, some travel, some return to work altogether. Steve is scripting his. Most of us won’t, and probably should.

Development

🚀 vscode-rpgle 0.33.9: Small Fixes, Real Relief

Community tooling for RPGLE keeps getting sharper.

The latest vscode-rpgle release adds quality-of-life wins for anyone editing RPGLE in VS Code. Jump straight from an opening block to its matching close on IF/ENDIF, DO/ENDDO, or SR/ENDSR, a real time-saver in dense legacy members. Bracket matching, fixed-format embedded SQL handling, and large-file performance all improved too.

From the Field: This is what open-source IBM i tooling looks like when the community shows up. See the full changelog, then update and give it a spin.

Hiring

🧩 Succession is a system, not a scramble

You cannot document a retirement at the exit interview.

Clean code stays easy to change. A ready bench works the same way. The plan comes first, not the panic. RPG veterans are heading for the door, and the important part of the job never made it into the docs. It lives in their heads. So talk to them now. Regular, honest conversations about what they touch and why. Then turn those answers into an onboarding template.

Let’s talk about your IBM i succession plan.

:Leadership

🤝 The last act of a good IBM i leader

This community gave you a career. Return the favor.

Hiring is the plan. Leadership is who carries it out. If you have led an IBM i team and retirement is close, you have one project left. Call it a duty or servant leadership. The platform treated you well. Pass the baton on purpose. Document what only you know. Mentor the next hire. Whether you gave this shop twenty-five years or two, the question is the same. Did you leave it better than you found it?

Learning

🔧 Free, Virtual, and Aimed at Your Next Skill

Curiosity is cheap. Reps compound.

Two IBM Bob events are live for the community right now: the AI Builders Challenge and the free Dev Day: Bob in Action hackathon, August 27 to 30, with IBM i and IBM Z tracks.

Breaking It Down: The prizes point to IBM TechXchange 2026 in October. The underlying current is talent. Shops facing succession gaps just got a low-cost way to build AI muscle before the retirements land.

🎤 Forty-Nine Sessions. One Platform.

IBM TechXchange 2026 is IBM’s flagship technical conference, spanning watsonx, IBM Z, storage, Red Hat, and the full portfolio. Inside that lineup, IBM i and Power claimed 49 sessions.

Not a booth. Not a hallway conversation. Forty-nine slots on the agenda of the company’s biggest developer event, competing for stage time against every brand IBM sells.

Hold that number. The next block is about what it signals.

⚖️ IBM i A Niche, Yes. Afterthought, No.

Know the difference.

Our Take: Forty-nine IBM i and Power sessions, inside an event running more than a thousand, is a small slice. Call it niche and you are right. Call it an afterthought and the agenda disagrees. Afterthoughts do not get 49 sessions and deep expert time at IBM’s marquee developer event. The community has spent years feeling overlooked. This lineup says otherwise.

Modernization

🧭 Google’s AI Pitch: Modernize Your Mainframe by Leaving It

The IBM i world runs the same playbook.

Google Cloud is using AI to crack open legacy mainframe code: reverse-engineering applications, extracting business rules, and transforming them, then running old and new side by side before retiring the IBM Z system for the cloud.

Our Take:

IBM i has the same capability, pointed the other way. IBM Bob modernizes RPG on the platform, while a mature vendor ecosystem grounds AI in deep code analysis. Google modernizes to leave. IBM i modernizes to stay.

🔄 Stop Modernizing. Start Lowering the Cost of Change.

We have been chewing on this one.

Modernization is the narrative everyone reaches for, us included.

But what does it actually mean? We keep coming back to this: legacy was never about age. Legacy is code that is expensive to change. A clean 40-year-old RPG program is not legacy. A three-year-old service nobody understands is.

So the better questions are the ones nobody asks. How do companies end up there in the first place? And can it be prevented?

We think it can, if you treat change as an investment made over time, not a bill that comes due all at once. Staying current is how you spread the cost. AI is how you shrink it, making code simple to change again.

This is a thread we will keep pulling in the issues ahead.

So how do you lower the cost of change?

Security

🔒 Shadow AI Is the New Shadow IT

Every leap forward drags a new attack surface.

Red Hat’s new asago project automates AI governance, translating policy into live guardrails backed by Microsoft, IBM Research, and the Alan Turing Institute.

The IBM i Angle:

Seasoned shops have seen this movie. When smartphones arrived around 2008, business users pulled enterprise data into apps IT never sanctioned. Shadow IT was born. Agents and LLMs are running the same play now, only faster. The teams that govern early will not be the ones cleaning up later.

🛡️ IBM i’s New Superpower: Knowing What You’re Exposed To

Security was the loud theme this refresh.

IBM i 7.5 TR8 and 7.6 TR2 shipped July 24 with more zero-downtime migration tooling, but security stole the show. A new CVE Info Service lets admins query their system to see which published vulnerabilities affect their release. Key Protect adds bring-your-own-key management for the first time, and SMTP now supports OAuth 2.0.

Commentary

🤔 Two Naming Fights, One Distraction

Nobody renames Java every few years.

IBM i culture runs on two naming fights. One camp insists it is still the AS/400. The other swears RPG and RPG ILE are different languages.

Both miss the point: the language evolved, it did not die, and today it is RPG 7.6.

Can you guess who has this take?

Our thoughts: While I refer the platform as IBM i. I have never cared what people call it. AS/400, iSeries, IBM i, the name someone picks just tells me their perspective.

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