Most IBM i futurization initiatives start strong and die in the middle.
The first few programs go smoothly. The team finds a rhythm. Results start coming in. Then someone runs the numbers.
There are not 10 programs to convert. There are 500.
Not 5 pieces of undocumented legacy code. Thousands.
The project slows to a crawl, or the team expands to a size the budget cannot support. Either way, the productivity gains that justified the initiative start to evaporate. Not because the vision was wrong. Because the tooling was never built for this.
CoderFlow’s templates and batch processing are built for exactly this.
What a Template Actually Does
A template in CoderFlow is a reusable task definition. Define the instructions once. Specify the parameters that change from program to program (the source file, the target format, the acceptance criteria). CoderFlow handles the rest.
Write the recipe once. Run it against every program in your library. The logic is consistent. The inputs change. Every result meets the same standard.
Common templates IBM i teams build and use:
- Converting fixed-format RPG to modern free-format RPG, including data definitions and documentation
- Migrating RPG programs to Node.js or Java, with Profound Automated Testing to verify functional equivalence
- Generating technical documentation from COBOL or RPG source, mapping business logic, dependencies, and integration points
- Refactoring database access patterns to SQL, applying consistent standards across a library
- Creating unit tests for existing programs, covering key code paths and edge cases
Each template includes not just the instructions for what to do, but the validation criteria for whether it was done correctly. Agents compile, run tests, and confirm the output meets the acceptance standard before anything lands in your review queue.
What Batch Processing Actually Changes
Templates are useful on their own. At scale, they are transformative.
Select the programs you want to process. Five, fifty, or five hundred. Queue up the task, and CoderFlow spins up parallel agent tasks for each one. Every program compiled. Every program tested. Every program validated before you see it. And because the work runs in parallel, completion time does not scale linearly with program count.
A futurization project that would take a development team months of sequential work becomes a supervised review process. Agents execute. Developers review outcomes and approve what meets the standard.
That is a different kind of initiative entirely.
Governance Is Built In
The obvious question: if agents are running hundreds of tasks in parallel, who is actually in control?
You are.
CoderFlow’s approval gate means every task, whether it was submitted individually or as part of a batch of 500, goes through the same developer review before anything is committed. Agents compile and validate. Developers approve. Nothing reaches the codebase without human sign-off.
The batch workflow is built for incremental review. You do not wait for all 500 tasks to finish before you start. Tasks surface in your queue as they complete. Failed tasks that need attention are easy to spot and handle separately, without blocking everything else.
Visibility and control do not decrease at scale. They hold.
The Business Case
Here is where the numbers shift. The first time you build a template for a specific conversion type, you invest time upfront: defining the instructions, the parameters, the validation criteria.
After that, every program of that type runs against the same template. Setup time is fixed. Execution speed is exponential
You are not paying developer time to repeat the same conversion task hundreds of times. You are paying developer time to review completed, validated outcomes and make the final call. That is a fundamentally different use of your most valuable resource.
And it is a fundamentally different pace for a futurization initiative that has been waiting years to get off the ground.
Ready to see what batch-scale futurization looks like in your environment? Reach out to our team at Futurization@ProfoundLogic.com or explore CoderFlow at profoundlogic.com/coderflow.