I Connected Claude to My IBM i — And It Changed How I Think About Legacy Modernization

What happens when you give an AI direct access to a system most people have never heard of There's a weird disconnect in the AI conversation right now. Everyone's talking about coding assistants, AI-powered DevOps, intelligent dashboards — but almost all of it assumes you're running modern cloud infrastructure. Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, GitHub Actions. The usual stack. Nobody's talking about what happens when your critical business system runs on IBM i. I work with IBM i every day. Warehouses, supply chains, enterprise systems that process millions of transactions and have been running for decades. These systems aren't going anywhere. They're stable, they're fast, and they do exactly what they're supposed to do. But they've also been left out of the AI conversation entirely. And I kept wondering — does it have to be that way? The problem with IBM i and modern tooling If you've worked with IBM i, you know the feeling. You're reading about some new tool or platform, nodding along, and then