Eradani Touts Native Git Connection As AI Tools Spread - ...

May 4, 2026 Alex Woodie

Thanks to AI tools like Bob and Claude, IBM i shops are changing how they develop code. AI tools can crank out RPG much faster, but the quality is inherently suspect, which makes having a solid change management life cycle very important. It’s the perfect setup for the folks at Eradani, who say their IBM i change management tool’s native integration with Git provides the right capabilities at the right time.

What makes Eradani’s approach to supporting Git with its Eradani DevOps offering is the lack of compromise. Instead of splicing Git support into an existing change management product, as other change management vendors have done, Eradani decided to build a new product from scratch that natively supports Git and does everything “the Git way.”

As Eradani chief executive officer Dan Magid tells us, that means source code is stored in Git, as opposed to residing on the IBM i server itself. “Typically in the traditional IBM world, you would work in the tool the way you’ve always worked in it because it’s proven, it’s been working forever the IBM way,” Magid told IT Jungle in an interview at POWERUp last week.

The user goes into PDM, RDi, or VS Code, and check RPG code out of the libraries, source files, or source members residing on the IBM i server. The developer makes changes to the code, and then promote those changes to test, to QA, and ultimately into production. This is the traditional IBM i way of doing change management.

“The way we’re doing it now is you work in Git. So the source of truth is not the IBM libraries. The source of truth is the Git repository,” Magid said. “When you go to do builds, instead of having a proprietary IBM i build system, we use Azure Pipelines, or we use Jenkins, and everything that we do is just scripts that run to do the builds.”

Storing source in Git (i.e., “the Git way”) as opposed to storing source on IBM i (i.e. “the IBM i way”) required Eradani to do quite a bit of extra work, and that development work was not easy. For instance, when a developer changes RPG code that is stored in Git, Eradani must know how to rebuild everything that the changed code touches. From modules and service programs to physical files and logical files, Eradani needs to know all the relationships and what create commands are being used and what authorities are being assigned.

“That’s the kind of IBM i-specific knowledge that we had to have, but we had to have it in a way that you could kick it off from a Jenkins script or you could kick it off from a from an Azure pipeline, not this sort of whole monolithic system for managing the whole thing,” Magid said.

When Eradani first rolled out its Eradani DevOps product back in 2023, early adopters had trouble adapting to the new Git paradigm. They struggled to get their minds around the idea that they don’t have to check code out of the IBM i server, that they can clone an entire library and have it stored in their own Git repo, and that multiple users can be working on the same piece of code at the same time, and that Git has built-in mechanisms for approval processes and sorting through merge conflicts.

Eradani DevOps provides native IBM i support for Git.

“If you get straight into Git, that can be pretty jarring for IBM i users, largely because it’s not the same paradigm,” said Eradani chief architect Aaron Magid, who is the CEO’s son. “There’s no checkout. There is no ‘reserve this source member to go work on it.’ Everything’s in your Git repository.”

Eradani added a checkout function to its DevOps product just to try and make it seem more like what customers were used to. The software makes it appear that customers are checking out source from the IBM i or the IFS, but any changes are being saved to Git (the source of truth) and then synchronized with the IBM i.

“We have a toolkit that basically says ‘This is going to work the way that an IBM developer wants to work,’” the younger Magid said. “But under the hood, it’s all just Git commands. So the checkout–is it really checking out a file? No, it’s just copying a source member into your library. It’s not really reserving it because there is no such concept. But it’s smoothing out the daily actions so that you don’t have to worry about all the intricacies of Git.”

The good news for IBM i shops is that, even though Eradani is making its DevOps tools seem to work like the old IBM i way, it doesn’t take away from any of the rich goodness that Git and the world of open source application lifecycle development (ALDC) tools have to offer.

“You are not limited,” the elder Magid said. “You can do any Git function. Git has thousands of options and commands that you can use, and you can use them all. There is no limitation on what you do because you are working from Git. You’re not working from a tool that we’re using to then put things into a git repository.”

This difference is important in the world of AI, for several reasons. First of all, nearly all of the new AI tools expect the source code to live in Git. That is the modern method. Young developers are also fully versed in the world of Git and also expect their new employers to be working in the modern world, not the old IBM i way. Lastly, the volume of code emanating from Bob, Claude, Cline, or any other AI tool will demand that you have a fully functioning DevOps pipeline to test all lines of AI generated code before it’s pushed into production.

Magid made his point explicit. “Vendors have been pushing copies of RPG source to repositories for years and calling it Git support,” he stated in an announcement made at COMMON’s conference last week. “You can’t take advantage of the powerful parallel development support of Git; you can’t easily branch your code, stash it, trigger a pipeline from it, or run a code review against it. You can’t view changes at the branch or developer commit level, or easily roll back changes to a specific tag. You can’t make your source changes locally on your PC and then use Git to sync them to your IBM i for compiles and execution. It’s a backup dressed up as DevOps.”

IBM’s first version of Bob expected RPG code to be living either on your PC or in a cloud repository, such as Git. This caused some concern among old-school IBM i users, who wanted to be able to use Bob directly against RPG source code stored in IBM i. That functionality will come soon, via the Bob premium support package, which will also support RPG stored on the IFS.

But considering all the automation that comes from using Git the way Git was supposed to be used, IBM i shops may want to think twice about using Bob like that. The folks at Eradani obviously have an opinion on the matter. But being pragmatic businessmen, they will also give IBM i customers what they want: The capability to use Git with IBM i the old IBM i way, even if it’s really just an illusion.

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