Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Brief: 🚀 IBM Bob 1.0 goes GA — the wait is over for IBM i developers. ⚡Nestlé cut data mart refreshes 5x. 🤝 Izzi expands IBM i partnerships.
AI: 🤝 IBM BOB is now live — and it’s more teammate than tool. 🦮 AI Still Needs a Guide Dog.
Career: 🎉 PUB400 nears 52,000 users and 25th anniversary.
Development: ☕ AI workspace methodology transforms IBM i development.
Database: 🏆 IBM i shops already have what AI actually needs.
Learning: 🔌 imPower’s new REST API workshop is built for IBM i developers.
Modernization: 🔌 APIs fail when the foundation is legacy-first.
Trends: IBM i isn’t legacy — it’s the platform AI is being built on.
Vendor: 🤖 CoderFlow supercharges IBM Bob on IBM i.

IBM i Brief

🚀 IBM Bob 1.0 goes GA — the wait is over for IBM i developers

IBM’s Bob — the AI software development partner purpose-built for enterprise codebases — reached general availability on March 24.

For RPG, CL, COBOL, SQL, Java, and Python developers on IBM i, this marks the end of a long wait and the beginning of something genuinely new. Bob lives inside VS Code, understands your repo, flags security issues inline, and brings agentic workflows to the full software development lifecycle.

IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will had been signaling this moment for over a year.

Ready get started? Start your free trial of Bob.

⚡Nestlé cut data mart refreshes 5x

IBM and Nvidia helped Nestlé accelerate SQL analytics by running the Presto query engine in watsonx.data on Nvidia GPUs, shrinking updates of 44 tables from about 15 minutes to roughly 3 minutes and enabling more frequent refreshes.

While Nestlé’s use case doesn’t involve IBM i or Db2 for i, it does provide an example of how any of IBM’s enterprise customers could potentially improve query performance. IBM i customers are adopting IBM Storage Scale (formerly Spectrum Scale) storage arrays to store their data and potentially even to house data in a data lake environment.

IBM says the shift delivered about an 83% cost reduction and a 30x price-performance gain, using Velox plus Nvidia’s cuDF to tap GPU parallelism for structured data.

Takeaway: While not IBM i-specific, it’s IBM i-adjacent. IBM is building an AI-ready storage ecosystem and IBM i shops are will have every opportunity to leverage it.

🤝 Izzi expands IBM i partnerships

Izzi Software struck partnerships with Capricorn Information Systems and Bluehouse to speed IBM i services and broaden distribution. Bluehouse adds a global reseller network and a GSA schedule for U.S. federal sales, while Capricorn brings deep IBM i modernization and development talent across RPG, COBOL, CL, Java, and Db2 for i.

AI

🤝 IBM BOB is now live — and it’s more teammate than tool

IBM BOB has reached General Availability as of March 24, 2026, bringing stability, full feature access, and IBM-backed support to IBM i teams.

BOB’s shared AI workspace standardizes coding rules, captures team patterns, and embeds testing into every workflow. It doesn’t just generate code — it enforces quality before a human reviewer ever sees a line. For RPG shops managing decades of legacy logic, that’s not an upgrade. That’s a system change.

🦮 AI Still Needs a Guide Dog

Here is a job posting for a non-IBM i position. It’s telling an interesting story about where we are, where we are going — and more importantly, it signals that the IBM i developer is already there (just not at $300K new-grad pay).

Mechanize is paying a new grad $300K. Not to write code — to direct AI and evaluate its output.

Their own job description says humans writing code is now too slow. The real skill?

Knowing when the AI is wrong. Understanding how it reads a prompt, where it cuts corners, what it misses.

That’s not a new skill for IBM i developers. RPG developers have been reviewing output, catching logic gaps, and protecting business-critical systems for decades. The vocab is changing. The instinct isn’t.

Career

🎉 PUB400 nears 52,000 users and 25th anniversary

Holger Scherer’s free public IBM i environment has transformed careers across the community.

Users credit PUB400 with enabling professional development, learning, and career advancement when workplace access wasn’t available. Industry leaders praise the platform’s impact, with some professionals stating their IBM i careers wouldn’t exist without it. The community celebrates this milestone achievement.

Why This Is Important: When a candidate mentions PUB400 in our first conversation, I pay attention.

Not because it’s impressive. Because it’s revealing.

It tells me they’re curious. It tells me they take their craft seriously. It tells me that being an IBM i developer isn’t just a job to them — it might be a passion. Maybe even a hobby.

Most importantly, it tells me they don’t wait for permission.

IBM i Devs: Don’t Wait For Permission

They’re not sitting around hoping their employer approves a training budget. They approved it themselves. They went and got it.

It’s someone who treats their career like a business they own.

Nearly 52,000 users over 25 years. That’s a lot of people who decided not to wait. 👏

Development

☕ AI workspace methodology transforms IBM i development

IBM i development is evolving through the integration of AI tools like GitHub Copilot and IBM Bob working in tandem. Rather than treating AI as separate tools with isolated prompts, these systems can operate from a shared workspace containing unified rules, context, and patterns.

Both tools access the same living knowledge base—standards, historical decisions, and reusable solutions—creating consistency across your development work.

The AI scaffolds code structure, validates quality against your standards, and continuously evolves its understanding of your environment. This approach delivers consistent outputs, persistent memory of your practices, and expertise that compounds with each work item you complete.

Database

🏆 IBM i shops already have what AI actually needs

Most enterprise AI projects fail not because of the model — but because of dirty data. Rick Hurckes of mrc argues that IBM i environments, with decades of validated DB2 data, built-in governance, and a single source of truth, are better positioned for AI than modern cloud stacks still scrambling to clean up their data pipelines. The “legacy” platform turns out to be the head of the line.

Learning

🔌 imPower’s new REST API workshop is built for IBM i developers

Jim Buck and imPower Technologies launched a 30-hour self-paced workshop with instructor Patrick Behr covering everything IBM i developers need to work confidently with APIs — from REST fundamentals and JSON parsing to OAuth, TLS/SSL, and OpenAPI documentation. Learners build both API consumers and providers using RPG and DB2 HTTP functions, with real-world scenarios and hands-on labs. A practical foundation for connecting IBM i to the modern API economy.

Modernization

🔌 APIs fail when the foundation is legacy-first

IBM i API efforts often break when teams wrap screen-driven RPG, expose files directly, and rely on stateful or batch workflows that do not translate to stateless, real-time calls.

The fix is modernization before exposure: add domain services, separate business rules from data access, design stateless procedures, and centralize logic into a single source of truth.

Trends

IBM i isn’t legacy — it’s the platform AI is being built on

At WMCPA iCON 2026, 17 sessions converged on a single message: the IBM i community isn’t watching the AI revolution from the sidelines.

Tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and IBM’s open-source MCP Server are connecting AI directly to IBM i systems today — using SQL developers already know.

From modernizing decades of RPG code to securing the platform with built-in MFA, from Power 11’s hardware-level AI acceleration to attracting the next generation of developers — the platform is evolving fast.

The future of IBM i isn’t about replacing what works. It’s about plugging it into what’s next.

Vendor

🤖 CoderFlow supercharges IBM Bob on IBM i

CoderFlow now supports IBM Bob as an agent, letting teams run autonomous compile-test-fix loops inside their own IBM i environments.

The integration gives Bob deep access to RPG, COBOL, CL, DDS, DB2 SQL, Git, and 5250 testing, with orchestration that can run multiple models and multiple Bob instances in parallel.

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