iris-agentic-dev -- Give Your AI a Live Connection to IRIS, Part 1: The Problem, the Tool, and Getting Started

Part 1 of a series. Part 2 covers the full tool catalog. Part 3 covers ObjectScript skills. Part 4 covers benchmarking and measuring what actually improves. The Problem Hiding in the Comments Thomas Mazur's post "Frogs, Chickens, AI, and VS Code" on VS Code productivity — Peacock, scoped workspace files, Copilot Agent mode — drew a sharper problem in the comments. Pietro Di Leo and Mike.W pointed out that when you work server-side in VS Code, the isfs:// workspace most production IRIS shops use, Copilot can only see the files open in your editor . It cannot index the virtual filesystem. On a mature IRIS application with thousands of classes, the AI works through a keyhole. John Murray pointed people at a project I've been building — iris-agentic-dev — and noted no Developer Community article existed for it yet. So here it is: why the problem exists, how the tool addresses it, and how to get it running in about five minutes. Why the AI Can't See Your Namespace When you open an isfs:// workspace, your IRIS classes live on the server, not on disk. The VS Code ObjectScript extension streams them to you on demand via the Atelier API — open a class, it fetches it; save it, it writes back. This works beautifully for editing. AI assistants such as Copilot work differently. They need a picture of the code around the file you're editing. Who calls this method? What inherits from this class? What other code touches this global? On a local project, the assistant can scan the files to answer those questions. An isfs:// workspace materializes files only when you open them, so there is nothing complete to scan. For a new project with a handful of classes, that may be tolerable. For a production IRIS system — ten thousand classes, Ensemble productions, custom %Library subclasses, business logic accumulated across years of development — the AI becomes nearly useless for the hard questions. It can help you write a new method if you paste in the surrounding context yourself. It cannot