IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i—the Journey Begins
IBM i CTO Steve Will shares his excitement for the product formerly known as RPG Code Assistant
A year ago, at the COMMON POWERUp conference, I spoke to the IBM i community about the need for an AI-powered code assistant which would focus on helping clients with their massive inventory of code, especially code written in RPG. At the IBM THINK conference a couple of weeks ago, we previewed the resulting product, and this week, again at COMMON POWERUp, we are unveiling it, talking about it and giving demos of the tool we’ve been calling the “RPG Code Assistant” until now.
My co-author this week is Michael Kwok, Vice President, IBM watsonx Code Assistant. He and Bargav Balakrishnan, VP of Product Management for Infrastructure, have previewed the tool, and as you might guess from Michael’s title, and from the title of this blog post, the product is called IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i (WCA for i).
Product Overview
IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i is a GenAI coding assistant that is purpose-built for IBM i and RPG code. It is built on the flagship IBM Granite model that is fine-tuned for RPG code through training on public code repositories, IBM RPG material such as Redbooks and test cases and—very importantly—code which was contributed by many, many members of the IBM i community! It seamlessly integrates with Visual Studio Code-based IDEs to allow developers to understand the code they’re developing, enhancing or maintaining with much greater efficiency and accuracy than if they had to scan through the code on their own.
Most clients will use the power of the RPG-trained Granite LLM through the IBM Cloud, which hosts the LLM. Some clients will prefer to install the LLM and its associated WCA Core technology in their own data centers. Either way, the unique value brought by the pairing of the WCA for i VS Code extension and the specially trained LLM brings decades of RPG knowledge to bear helping today’s developers with their jobs, and allowing their employers to hire talent from today’s developer pool.
Business Benefits
Of course, the driving factor in creating this product is the IBM i customer base. A very large percentage of IBM i clients have business-critical applications that were written in RPG a long time ago. Perhaps those the programmers who originally wrote these applications are nearing retirement, have since retired, or are no longer with the company. Yet that critical RPG code needs to be maintained and enhanced by someone!
We all know that the developers who are among the talent pool available to join those companies may or may not have RPG skills—most likely they do not! A tool which helps them understand what the code is doing will be very useful in helping them get up to speed and make the next enhancement required by the business. WCA for i addresses these pain points by reducing the learning curve for new RPG programmers and making veteran RPG developers even more productive. WCA for i allows these developers to understand code they’ve never seen, and they can do it faster and more completely than if they spent much more time getting that knowledge on their own. It’s as if they have an experienced programmer helping them—assisting them—in the task.
We have had a set of RPG experts evaluating the tool and the model over the past couple of months. They have provided valuable feedback during this Private Preview. We are making changes based on their input, at the same time as we continue our LLM training of RPG. In a couple of months, we will be able to get feedback from even more people.
Public Preview
The first version of the product will provide the ability for developers to quickly and efficiently understand and document applications running on IBM i that are written in RPG. In the future, the product will enable developers to generate, test and transform RPG code to produce high-quality code for new applications and modernization of current ones to meet business requirements and accelerate innovation projects rather than spending time learning or rewriting older RPG code.
As I said above, the product was unveiled on May 7 at IBM Think and it will become generally available later this year. On May 7, the link to join the “waitlist” became available here and is on the new product page. This is where clients can sign up to receive more information and be notified when the product is generally available. We will pull from the list of clients who registered for the “waitlist” to do a larger public preview next quarter.
The Journey Is Just Beginning
Since the day I first talked about training a large language model, and creating a tool, to help RPG programmers, we’ve received suggestions for how AI can help the IBM i programmer. We’ve very excited about the capabilities we’ll deliver with the first GA of WCA for i, but it is just the beginning. We’ve already made enhancements to our initial design based on early feedback from our advisory councils and early users, and we’ll keep listening.
I am speaking this week at POWERUp about the journey we’ve been on, and the road we see ahead of us. I am so excited about this application of AI to help the IBM i community, I am finding it difficult to talk about anything else!
Keep an eye on the product page, pay attention to articles and blogs and follow us on social media to hear about further developments. There’s plenty more coming!