Don't miss the AI train!

Businesses have experienced a great many fundamental and jarring shifts in the way data processing propels their business over many decades. From:

• Paper and pencil to computer processing
• Punched cards to sophisticated IDEs
• From assembler to C#
• From procedural code to object-oriented and function code
• From twinax-tethered applications to smartphones

We’ve seen many changes. However, it’s quite likely that the impact of generative AI will have a far greater impact than all of the previous changes put together. Is there hype around AI? You bet. But even today, in the infancy of commodity AI, AI brings about real productivity gains, substantial workflow improvements, and opens the door to many new possibilities.

AI and modernizing enterprise applications

At ASNA, we’re very excited about the promise of AI. Our R&D team has spent the last several months exploring AI to how it can improve our abilities to migrate an IBM i RPG application to .NET. We’re pretty proud of the fact that without AI’s help we’ve already got a migration suite that is able to migrate 99% of an RPG application without any manual remediation. However, we’re always looking to improve our toolsets and we think AI will ultimately be substantial help. We’ve done enough work with AI and RPG to be quite excited by the promise, but the deliverable just isn’t there yet. AI and RPG still need a little more time in the oven.

While AI generally is in its infancy, using generative AI for work with RPG is a virtual newborn. AI’s ability to generate reliable and complete RPG is still very much ahead of us. Before we get there, LLMs need to acquire enough “knowledge” of RPG, its well-known patterns and idiomatic uses, to be truly helpful. See Joe Pluta’s recent MC Press article about his experiences with AI and RPG.

For a similar, but deeper, perspective on using AI to modernize legacy enterprise applications, listen to this interesting interview from the Microsoft Ignite fall 2024 conference. In it, two technologists from ThoughtWorks, a global consultancy, discuss ThoughtWorks’ efforts to establish what AI can do for legacy applications. They discuss the promise of AI and explain some of what they think needs to evolve for AI to produce effective deliverables. (There is also a transcript of the ThougthWorks interview here.)

What can AI do for you now?

All that said, our migration engineers are not only excited about the promise but also about the deliverable using AI with C#. We’re using it for a variety of tasks for honing and improving ASNA migrated RPG applications to C# for .NET Core.

Read more about ASNA Monarch and how it can help you avoid a business disruption when your RPG programmers retire or contact us now about what ASNA Monarch can do for your business.

As you ponder the future of your RPG application, consider what you can do with that application once it’s been migrated to C#.

For example, for C# today generative AI today can help with :

Code Understanding and Navigation

• Generate summaries or inline comments for methods, classes, and logic
• Identify undocumented code or outdated comments
• Answer questions about specific code snippets

Development and Enhancement

• Create boilerplate code for new features (e.g., CRUD operations)
• Propose improvements for readability, maintainability, and performance
• Check code quality and adherence to best practices
• Write unit and integration tests

Database Management

• Suggest improvements to your database schema for better performance and scalability
• Suggest indexing strategies or schema changes
• Generate migration scripts to modify your database schema without data loss

Security

• Scan your code for common security vulnerabilities and exposures
• Enforce best practices for input validation, authentication

Team Collaboration

• Analyze source control pull requests for potential bugs, coding standards, or inefficiencies
• Suggest structured commit messages
• Assist with merging conflicts or understanding complex diffs

UI/UX Improvements

• Propose, and help implement, improvements to Razor view templates for better accessibility or responsiveness
• Recommend layout adjustments or styling updates

DevOps and Automation

• Create or troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines for deploying the MVC app
• Help set up application performance monitoring tools
• Configure alerts for potential issues like high database usage or long page load times

The programming landscape is bright with the promise of AI. Don’t miss for the AI train. Migrate your application today to C# with ASNA Monarch and get onboard!