Belgium IBM Champions and Application Developers Meetup

Belgium IBM Champions and Application Developers Meetup
30 September 2026
A hands-on workshop in AI-assisted modernization

Radisson Hotel, Berchem, Antwerp

Reaching the venue by train is a no brainer, hassle free, relaxed –
Arrive at Antwerp-Berchem station, go towards platform 1, come out, turn right, take the bridge on right, Radisson is at the end.
If at all coming by car, the parking is in basement.

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Agenda:
11:30-11:50 – IBM Champions Welcome Coffee
11:50-12:50 – IBM Champions open discussion – Moderator Koen Decorte & another Champion
12:50-13:30 – IBM Champions Lunch
13:30-14:20 – General Welcome coffee and laptop setup
14:20-16:00 – Education session 1 – Koen Decorte
16:00-16:20 – Coffee break
16:20-18:00 – Education session 2 – Koen Decorte
18:00-18:30 – Concluding remarks from IBM Champion’s panel
18:30- … – standing drinks for 30 minutes followed by dinner

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A hands-on workshop in AI-assisted modernization

 Abstract:
Come with a healthy skepticism. Come with a program. Leave with a workflow.
You won’t watch a demo. You’ll rewrite a program.

Methodology – Bring your laptop – We’ll work in small groups, share screens, compare rewrites, and be honest about what worked and what didn’t. You’ll build a reusable prompt template calibrated and a validation checklist that separates a rewrite you can ship from one that merely compiles.

On IBM i – Bring an RPG source member (up to ~500 lines)
Every attendee arrives with one RPG source member — the fixed-format monster no one wants to open, the one with fourteen indicators and a comment from 1998 that reads “DO NOT REMOVE.” Over the course of the session, we’ll turn those programs into modern, readable, testable code, working alongside AI (IBM Bob or other) as a pair programmer.

Not on IBM i? Bring what you have.

  • The techniques transfer. If you work on z/OS COBOL, come with a program full of 88-levels, PERFORM THRU chains, and copybooks nobody has touched since the last Y2K remediation.
  • If you’re modernizing Linux workloads — legacy Perl, Bash pipelines held together by cron and hope, or Fortran that outlived its author — you’ll get just as much out of the session. The prompt patterns, the validation discipline, and the “trust but verify” workflow are platform-agnostic. Only the syntax changes.

Already exploring IBM Bob?
Good — bring that too. IBM’s Premium Package for i ships pre-built workflows for exactly the transformations we’ll be doing by hand: fixed-form to free-form, RPG II/III to ILE, DDS to DDL, embedded SQL modernization, all with human approval gates. What it can’t ship is your shop. It doesn’t know that *IN50 means “customer is on credit hold” in half your programs and something else entirely in WSPINV, and it has never met the 2019 decision that explains why the totals are calculated twice. That gap is what this workshop is about, and closing it is the same work whichever assistant you point at the code. Everything you build here — the context file, the prompt template, the validation checklist that separates a shippable rewrite from one that merely compiles — carries straight over.

Along the way we’ll answer three questions you can’t answer from a slide deck:

For IBM i –

  1. How do you describe legacy RPG to an AI that has never seen your machine, so what comes back is worth keeping?
  2. What does “spec-driven modernization” look like when the spec is 350 lines of RPG II with embedded CL calls and an indicator that means five different things depending on the subroutine?
  3. Where does AI actually accelerate you — and where will it confidently produce nonsense that has to be caught before it ships?

For non-IBM i –

  1. How do you describe a codebase to an AI that has never seen your system, your conventions or your data, so that what comes back is worth keeping?
  2. What does “spec-driven modernization” look like when the spec is a 2,000-line stored procedure with three layers of dynamic SQL and a status column that means five different things depending on which job wrote the row?
  3. Where does AI actually accelerate you — and where will it confidently produce plausible, wrong code that has to be caught before it ships?

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Koen Decorte, Moderator:

Koen Decorte is the founder of CD-Invest, a Belgian IBM i consultancy with over 30 years of expertise in ERP/CRM and open source development, IBM i platform modernization, and PEPPOL e-invoicing services. CD-Invest is home to several IBM Champions and serves enterprise clients across Belgium and Europe, with an additional presence in Spain.

An IBM Champion since 2018, Koen specializes in modernizing IBM i applications bridging decades of mission-critical business logic with contemporary web architectures. He is an active contributor to the IBM i community as a CEAC member and treasurer of Common Belgium.

Koen has spent 30 years inside IBM i systems — long enough to know where the bodies are buried, and long enough to resurrect a few of them with Python, AI, and some decidedly unorthodox ideas.

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