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10x PowerBuilder Development with AI — Thinking About Open-Sourcing It
  1. How-to
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  1. Mark Rezmer
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. Wednesday, 28 October 2026 11:38 AM UTC

Hi everyone,

As some of you might remember, I'm still working with legacy PowerBuilder versions (PB9 and others).

Over the past few months, I've been working on personal projects using more modern technologies and experimenting a lot with AI-assisted development. Along the way, I've learned a ton about harness engineering, agentic loops, context engineering, and automated validation.

I've realized that the real power of AI isn't just generating code, but building a proper system around it to reduce hallucinations, enforce coding standards, catch mistakes, and produce much more reliable code.

So I thought: Why not bring all of this into PowerBuilder?

I started experimenting, and the results have been pretty crazy. I'm now getting up to 10x more work done, and I've even managed to automate entire PowerBuilder version migrations.

I've built a workflow combining AI agents, skills, commands, automations, hooks, prompts, scripts, templates, tests, and validation loops. It genuinely feels like having cheat codes in real life, especially with legacy code.

I'm curious: What tools and workflows are you guys using for day-to-day PowerBuilder development?

I'm also considering open-sourcing my repository if there's enough community interest. The goal would be to build a reusable AI development workflow for PowerBuilder, not just a collection of prompts.

Would any of you be interested in contributing PRs to improve the workflow or support other PowerBuilder versions?

Before publishing anything, I'd love to chat privately with some of you to understand how you currently handle:

  • Version control (Git, SVN, etc.)
  • PBL extraction and decompilation
  • PowerBuilder version migrations
  • AI-assisted development workflows

I think there's a real opportunity to bring modern AI development practices into the PowerBuilder ecosystem, especially for those of us maintaining legacy applications.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Mark.

Programming with PowerBuilder can avoid the impact brought b... True multi-threading support in PowerBuilder (beyond Shared ...
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