Not My Father’s Middleware: How To Be Productive With Agentic AI

My father, Nick Humble, worked for IBM for most of his career. In the early 1990s, he worked on the launch team for a brand new piece of messaging-oriented middleware called IBM MQ Series (now called IBM MQ). Released in 1993, it was an instant hit.

In the early 2000s, I worked with a team that used MQ Series as the foundation for implementing an internet banking system for a major UK High Street bank. Its guaranteed-once (and once only) message delivery worked flawlessly across everything, from the two mainframes that ran the core banking…