June 1, 2026
The arrival of AI tools to the IBM i community is helping to drive Git adoption, according to Michael Morgan, the chief executive officer of Midrange Dynamics, a provider of application management software for IBM i. But even without the AI push, the IBM i community is moving solidly toward modern development techniques and tools, Morgan said in an interview.
“We’re seeing the management expectations that shops use Git as the bigger driver for our customers versus AI,” Morgan told IT Jungle. “AI is a smaller driver of those wanting to get to Git. Even without AI, the movement to Git is happening on IBM i.”
Midrange Dynamics develops MDChange, the Swiss company’s suite of application lifecycle management tools for IBM i. The software, which is distributed in the United States and Canada through its Peterborough, New Hampshire-based affiliate, Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA), meets customers wherever they are at on their Git journey, Morgan said.
That means the change management software will allow old-school RPG programmers to continue to store source code directly on the IBM i server, like they always have, while simultaneously allowing developers to use modern code management techniques by storing source on a Git repository. Morgan emphasized that MDChange supports both types of users with a single deployment, or what he calls a hybrid setup.
“When you’ve got developers that are nearing retirement and they’re not particularly motivated to learn new tricks, they can continue to use MDChange like they always have, where they’re just checking out source members and then MDChange is automatically doing all of the things behind the scenes – not just replicating to Git, but handling pull requests and doing everything else that’s Git related,” he said.
“So those developers that are accustomed to working in Git and understand the power of Git and understand how to use it, they can continue to work from their local workspace or wherever they want to use Git, but they’re not going to lose out on that concurrent development happening by developers that are working directly on the i,” Morgan continued.
In these hybrid setups, MDChange will automatically clone the Git repository onto the IBM i server. The software uses REST APIs and Git command language to ensure everything stays in sync between the IBM i and the Git host servers, Morgan said.
Morgan, who founded Midrange Dynamics back in 1998, has been in the change management trenches for a very long time, and he understands how important it is for IBM i shops to have functional and streamlined software. He points out that the MDChange suite includes a component called MDWorkflow that provides code pipeline capabilities, thereby eliminating the need to acquire and integrate a third-party CI/CD tool, such as Jenkins, into the mix.
This becomes critical when things break – and it’s not an “if,” because things always break – and company revenue is dependent on identifying and fixing broken stuff as soon as possible.
“Because it’s all on the IBM i, you don’t have all this bloatware in between that you have to manage,” Morgan said. “Merlin was sort of that thing. They had an IDE front-end, and you had to have OpenShift. But more importantly, you had to have Jenkins in the middle. Things would break somewhere and you could spend two days trying to figure out where did it break, whereas with our approach, there’s a single spot. It shows all the logs from start to finish, with retry capabilities. You see instantly where things are at.”
As AI-enabled IDEs like IBM Bob have arrived on the IBM i scene, Midrange Dynamics’ support for Git and internal pipelining tooling has paid dividends. Developers who want to vibe code and give Bob plain English commands to generate RPG or other code don’t have to worry about ensuing all the connections are in place, Morgan said.
“So you’re avoiding all the orchestration headaches,” he said. “You’ve got all the logging in one spot and it’s just much faster. They don’t have to spend the time to learn and onboard these other sorts of open source tools, like Jenkins, in order to move forward. They can just continue using the product as they have and just add Git to it.”
Midrange Dynamics has made a few changes to its software to accommodate Bob and other VS Code-based AI IDEs, and how they work with Git. For starters, Midrange Dynamics has started publishing its VS Code extensions to the Open VSX Registry in addition to Microsoft’s official Visual Studio Marketplace. Cursor and Windsurf, two VS Code-based AI IDEs that are popular alternatives to IBM Bob among IBM i shops, are published on Open VSX.
More importantly, Midrange Dynamics is making changes to MDChange itself. For instance, it has added tasks that allow Bob to automatically pull up the results of cross-referencing analysis performed by MD X-Ref to help ensure better quality software. Instead of requiring a user to go to an MDXREF screen and type in a command, Midrange Dynamics now allows Bob to pull that data programmatically via REST API calls.
“We’re seeing a lot of pickup with our hooks for our quality gates for automated testing,” Morgan said. “It’s making sure that there’s fewer mistakes occurring by AI, because it can hallucinate when you get into these large data sets if it doesn’t have enough structured data to work with.”
The majority of the MDChange customer base, which spans 1,400 organizations, are now using VS Code or one of the VS Code-based IDEs, Morgan said, leaving only about one-quarter still using Rational Developer for i (RDi). MDChange users are moving solidly into the world of AI with tools like Bob, which is a fork of VS Code.
“We’re seeing a huge uptick in adoption of AI,” Morgan said. “We know that several of them are using it daily and others are using Cursor, Windsurf, or VS Code. We’re seeing a lot of interest from our customers and being able to leverage AI tools to help their developers be more efficient.”
Midrange Dynamics has some bigger changes coming later in the year. We’ll let you know about them when we hear more.
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