Every IBM i development team running a futurization effort eventually hits the same friction point. The business logic is solid. The RPG programs are running exactly as they should. But the screen itself, the interface your users actually touch, is limited by what your development tooling can express.
With traditional display files, that limitation is manageable. With rich display files and a visual widget palette, it gets better. But in an agentic development context, where AI agents are doing the heavy lifting on screen creation, there has always been a ceiling: the agent can only produce what the widget library allows.
That ceiling just came down. With the May release of Profound UI, a core component of Profound AppDev, we’re excited to introduce Agentic Display Files — a new kind of display file built specifically for how AI agents work best. The result is a meaningful step forward in what’s possible when futurizing IBM i applications.
Why the Old Approach Had Limits in an Agentic World
Profound UI’s rich display files are genuinely powerful. A visual designer, over 125 pre-built widgets, responsive layout support, and clean integration with IBM’s Open Access architecture — it’s a strong foundation. For development teams building screens manually or working through a guided conversion process, the widget palette is an asset.
But large language models don’t think in widgets. They think in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are the languages that make up the majority of public training data for every major AI model, and they’re what LLMs can generate fluently, reason about precisely, and iterate on confidently. When you ask an AI agent to produce a screen using a proprietary component library, you’re asking it to work in a language it knows less well, and the output reflects that.
This isn’t a limitation of CoderFlow.
It’s a fundamental characteristic of how language models are trained. The practical effect was that agentic screen generation using rich display files required heavy prompting, careful constraint management, and frequent human correction. The productivity gain from agentic development was real, but it left something on the table.
What Agentic Display Files Actually Are
Agentic Display Files are a streamlined display file format designed to let AI agents produce screens directly in raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Technically, they use EJS (Embedded JavaScript Templates), a lightweight format that strips away proprietary framework overhead and gives agents a clean, standards-based canvas to work with.
The file structure is straightforward. For each screen, the agent generates an EJS file containing the HTML structure with template variables, a JavaScript file to handle the data binding, and a CSS file for styling. These files are what modern web developers work with every day, which means the agent is operating in deeply familiar territory.
What doesn’t change is equally important. The RPG program and its Open Access handler remain exactly as they were. The IBM i business logic layer is untouched. Agentic Display Files integrate with Profound UI like any other display file — the futurization of the screen doesn’t require rewriting the application underneath it.
What This Unlocks
Agentic Display Files don’t just change how screens get built, they expand what’s possible to build in the first place. Because agents are now working in the language of the modern web, the conversation shifts from “what can our tooling support?” to “what does the business actually need?”
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
No More Widget Ceiling
When an agent writes a screen in HTML and CSS, the only limit is what the web can express, which is effectively no limit at all. Charts, custom layouts, conditionally rendered sections, interactive data tables, design patterns that don’t map to any standard widget: all of it is achievable. The agent isn’t constrained to what’s in the palette. It produces exactly what the screen should be.
Responsive Interfaces by Default
Screens produced with Agentic Display Files are responsive web interfaces. Because they’re written as real CSS, adapting layout to different screen sizes is a natural part of the output. IBM i applications that have always lived on desktop terminals can now produce interfaces that work fluently on tablets and mobile devices, without additional development effort.
Multiple Design Directions
Traditional Rich Display Files produce similar-looking output constrained by the Profound UI widget set and CSS. Agentic Display Files open up genuine design range. Different agents or models can propose different UI treatments for the same screen, and your team picks the direction that best fits the application and the users. That kind of exploration wasn’t practical before.
Existing Profound UI customers doing new development alongside their established screens will find this particularly useful. For screens already built in rich display format, those stay as they are. For anything net-new, Agentic Display Files offer a faster path to a better result.
Theme Continuity
For net-new development, the productivity gain is substantial. A developer can describe what a screen should do — in plain language, with business context and CoderFlow can generate a complete, polished interface. That generation loop, from task description to working screen, is significantly faster than building in a visual designer, and the output quality now matches what a skilled web developer would produce manually.
Existing Profound UI customers doing new development alongside their established screens will find this particularly useful. For screens already built in rich display format, those stay as they are. For anything net-new, Agentic Display Files offer a faster path to a better result.
Faster Screen Development for New and Existing Applications
For net-new development, the productivity gain is substantial. A developer can describe what a screen should do — in plain language, with business context — and CoderFlow can generate a complete, polished interface. That generation loop, from task description to working screen, is significantly faster than building in a visual designer, and the output quality now matches what a skilled web developer would produce manually.
For teams with existing screens, the story is equally compelling. CoderFlow agents can use existing DDS display files and Rich Display Files as source material, reading the field structure, subfile definitions, and screen logic, then rebuilding the interface as a modern Agentic Display File. Every field is preserved. The RPG doesn’t change. What changes is the experience the user sees.
AI-Assisted Iteration
Because the underlying files are standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, agents can read and revise them fluently. If the first pass at a screen needs refinement — a layout adjustment, a new field, a different visual treatment — you describe the change and the agent revises the code directly. There’s no round-trip to a visual designer. The iteration loop is fast, and the agent understands its own output.
A Practical Example
Consider a manufacturing company with an IBM i order management application. Their existing order entry screens run in Profound UI with rich display files — functional, browser-accessible, and doing the job. But they want to build a new order summary dashboard that shows real-time production status, filterable by line and shift, with visual progress indicators and a mobile-friendly layout for supervisors on the floor.
With traditional screen development, that requirement involves significant designer work, widget configuration, and likely custom JavaScript to handle the dynamic elements. With CoderFlow and Agentic Display Files, a developer writes a task that describes the screen’s purpose, the data it should display, the filtering behavior, and the mobile layout requirement. The agent generates the HTML structure, writes the CSS for responsive layout and visual indicators, and produces the JavaScript for data binding — all in a format that connects cleanly to the existing RPG business logic.
How to Enable Agentic Display Files
Agentic Display Files are available with CoderFlow as of the May Profound UI release. In the CoderFlow Connections panel, there is an IBM i feature toggle for EJS Display Files. Enabling it and pointing to your EJS Display File settings activates the EJS Screen Designer skill, which loads the instructions the LLM needs to generate these files correctly for your environment.
For teams that want to continue maintaining existing Rich Display Files alongside new Agentic Display File development, the Rich Display File designer skill is available separately in the CoderFlow skills catalog.
Organizations already running Profound UI with an established theme will find the transition seamless. The agent picks up your existing visual standards automatically. For teams starting fresh, the same skill provides the scaffolding for a consistent design approach from the first screen.
The Bigger Picture for IBM i Futurization
Agentic Display Files matter because they change the answer to a question every IBM i development team eventually faces: how much of the futurization effort is spent on the interface, and how much on the underlying logic?
The underlying logic in most IBM i environments is genuinely valuable. The RPG programs, the DB2 data, the business rules accumulated over decades — that’s institutional knowledge you don’t rebuild. The futurization opportunity has always been about surfacing that logic through interfaces that match what users and the business now expect.
Until now, producing those interfaces in an agentic context required working around the limitations of widget-based screen generation. Agentic Display Files remove that workaround. The agent writes directly in the language of the modern web, the RPG stays where it belongs, and the output is a complete, production-ready interface that didn’t exist the hour before.
That’s a meaningful change in what IBM i futurization can look like in practice and it’s available now.
Ready to see Agentic Display Files in action? Reach out to our team at Futurization@ProfoundLogic.com to schedule a conversation.
Note: A CoderFlow subscription is required to use Agentic Display Files. Existing Profound UI customers on maintenance who are not yet using CoderFlow will need to add a CoderFlow subscription to access this capability.