Today’s coffee: the last pot of Dunkin' Caramel Me Crazy . Sweet, familiar, and oddly reflective. It’s the kind of coffee you don’t think much about—until it’s gone. That feeling mirrors what’s happening in many IBM i shops today. We didn’t lose critical skills overnight. We let them fade. And now we’re paying for them—in outages, delays, stress, and risk. The Quiet Skill Fade No One Planned No team ever said, “Let’s stop teaching fundamentals.” Instead: Teams shrank. Systems grew. Deadlines tightened. Senior developers became permanent escalation points. Junior developers learned just enough to ship the next ticket. Over time, teaching became optional. Delivery became mandatory. The result is a generation of developers who can: Modify code safely inside known paths . Deliver features when patterns already exist. But struggle when: The system behaves unexpectedly. The database pushes back. A job runs diff...