RPG Code Assistant Project: Steve Will Gives an Update

Stressing IBM's commitment to the project, the IBM i CTO hopes for general availability in the second half of 2025

IBM i users keep asking to meet with Steve Will about the RPG Code Assistant (RPGCA) project that is under development. 

“I get this several times every day,” Will, IBM i CTO, said during a Dec. 11 informational session that was live-streamed (and archived here) as part of IBM’s Guided Tours program. By answering several frequently asked questions and providing a status update on the project, Will hoped the hour-long online session would satisfy the IBM i community’s curiosity about the incoming artificial intelligence (AI) tool. 

The code assistant, according to IBM’s official statement of direction, “helps developers of IBM i software understand existing code, create new RPG function using natural language and automatically generate test cases.” 

Hoping to achieve general availability for the code assistant in the second half of 2025, following a Q2 beta release, Will stressed IBM’s commitment to the project. “IBM’s behind this,” he said. “We’re talking about it as a big deal.”

But the project is still in its early stages. “This project is still in its definition phase and we are learning significantly new things,” Will said. 

What they do know is that developers who are fluent in RPG have become harder to come by, and shops need to be able to use the skills that are available to them as they work to modernize their IT ecosystems.

The goal for RPGCA is also to assist those who do know RPG but are “getting handed, for the first time, code that somebody else wrote a long time ago,” Will said. “And a code assistant should be able to help both kinds of programmers.”

The 3 Main Intended Functions of RPGCA

With the caveat that many of the features expected in RPGCA are still in the development phase, Will gave an overview of the three main functions that IBM hopes to include in the code assistant. Although the feasibility of Day 1 availability varies for each of these features, Will called the planned capabilities “the three things we’re going for immediately.”

Explain

“The code assistant should be able to read the existing RPG and then explain in a human language, English, what it is that that code is doing,” Will said, adding that this is the function he is most confident they will be able deliver upon initial general availability. 

With the Explain feature, users should be able to “click an RPG source file and a Git repository and then say, explain this, click a button that says explain,” Will said.

He added that it is unclear if the first version of RPGCA will allow retrieval automated generation (RAG), which would allow organizations to incorporate specific coding standards or access domain-specific information beyond the initial training data. 

“I’d love to be able to do that,” Will said, “so that organizations can add their own capabilities or their own sort of proscriptions on how the model should respond. At this point, we don’t know whether we’ll be able to do that right away, but it’s clearly a goal because in many LLM use cases, this is where the business customizes how they do things.”

Generate

It is less clear what RPGCA’s code generation capabilities will be, but the project team is aiming to include two variations of this feature. With one variation, Will said, the goal is to “be able to generate modern free-format ILE RPG based on a description.” 

The second kind of code generation would be akin to an auto-complete function. “While you are typing your RPG into the IDE, it can give you real-time suggestions for what you might need next.” 

The feature won’t do all of the developer’s work, however. “It doesn’t know exactly what you want to do, but if you start typing a procedure, it can then fill in all the stuff that makes the procedure syntactically correct so that you don’t have to remember to do all that stuff, and then you can fill in the logic,” Will explained. “Or, you’re starting to do some sort of counting loop. It’ll make sure that you have the right syntax to finish that loop.”

Write Test Programs for RPG

The third function is “going to be a little bit harder to get done,” Will said, but the RPGCA team is targeting the ability to write test programs for RPG. “There aren’t many assistants out there in the world who have focused on creating test programs for code.”

Will said his team is trying to gather information about widely used test methodologies and tool sets so that “you could ask the model to not just generate a test program, but to generate it for a particular environment that you’re using.” To accomplish that goal, “we’ve got to make sure we get enough test information and test building information, test framework information for all of it. But clearly customers would benefit from that.”

Much Work Remains

Will urged interested parties to stay tuned in the coming month as the RPGCA project comes into sharper focus. “There’ll be a lot more defined,” Will said. “You can expect that sometime in probably February [2025] I’ll update people…If I don’t do it in February, I’ll probably do something in early April to let people know where we are. And then, by the time we get to that second quarter, things will start really flowing, and you’ll want to pay attention.” 

Will told his audience to follow his social media channels for updates. “We’ve got to figure out a whole bunch of things,” he said. 

That includes “how we host that model, how we deliver this stuff, how we offer new functions, figuring out when a model is good enough but it meets the expectations of our client base—that is a science that’s also an art.”

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