It kind of is - when I looked at it 6 months ago it was just a fork of vscode with old ass versions of Claude and the only unique things were java and ibm I mcp clients or servers or something built in. For those works I'd rather just have the skill or mcp for my harness of choice. I think they weren't allowed to use external AI so they run the models in house and remade cursor. Not bad to have competition but the name is awful - as others have said it's been used before by Microsoft in the 90s to make a friendly desktop giving us the winxp search dog and clippy.
After the company rebranded itself to Lenovo, it merged with IBM's PC business which produced its ThinkPad line in 2005, after which it rapidly expanded abroad. In 2013, Lenovo became the world's largest personal computer vendor by unit sales for the first time, a position it still holds as of 2024.
When I was in the final year of college in 04-05 my dream would be to work at IBM. It still had the kind of prestige of R&D in the world. Fast forward a couple of years to 08-09, I don’t recall the event but IBM perception went down and a stone. Was that when they sold the hardware business and became fully consultant?
The "What developers say" carousel has a single Java dev and dev advocate. They got lots of quotes from managers, directors, CEOs, and an "AI strategist".
Lots of "performance review boilerplate, I don't want to say anything _bad_ about this person but there's nothing particularly good I can say" energy there.
Someone decided that this feedback was worth highlighting:
"Bob demonstrated a level of intelligence and contextual understanding that goes beyond anything I've seen in other tools. Bob goes beyond anything I've seen in other tools."
Interesting they are renting out agent skills. You can pick up "Java Modernization" at $20 a month for "Specialist workflows to help with modernizing Java applications", or "IBM i" for "Specialist modes, workflows, and skills to work with IBM i applications".
No, you are wrong. IBMer here. I was at first agains it, my background is for 2 decades startup(s) before I joined IBM, and I started slowly using IBM Bob and I must say it is really good and helping. With many integrations that works :)
What is good about it then? What model do you use? Which integration are we talking about? Is it open source? How much the "transparent pricing" "bobcoin" is worth?
You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn't perfect, it'll just get called "Bobbins" [0], especially where I'm from.
I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money. They've just slunk off into a corner hugging their old architectures they have a moat around, and thrown out some audacious nonsense like Watson now and again, but nothing has stuck. When is somebody in that organisation going to try and innovate properly again?
I'm not sure this is the answer I'd be rooting for.
OS/2 was the only thing I remembering being great. If they practically gave it away I think we'd be living in a different world. Pre-emptive multitasking long before OSX/Windows. I mean Microsoft essentially had to force windows (eg. 3.1) down our throats until it become tolerable.
We did a deal with IBM back in the day to adapt our tech as the code generation for enterprise java beans.
The commercial guy I dealt with made it very clear that a primary concern was IBM not being humiliated and shafted like their MS dealings. It colored our commercial arrangements, which had to include "break glass" arrangements for them to gain full access to our source code.
Speaking of UK, I was immediately reminded of the Blackadder episode where the men-servant calls herself “Bob”. Rowan Atkinsons pronunciation is how I imagine this Bob to pronounced, with the same look of course!
You should also never name your faulty/flaky Dell server Bob when Bob is also the name of your company president (though the president came after the server).
Calling Bob (the server) a piece of shit ("Bob is a piece of shit") because it crashed again was a very risky move that we often didn't fully think through.
As with most things on the UK, probably. I definitely used Bobbins.
I used to think everyone called (cobs|bread cakes|rolls|barns) muffins, and it turns out it was just my small town that did it. As in, just my small town, not region, county, etc.
If you call it a teacake, and I say no those have raisins in, and you protest that's a fruit teacake, I know you're probably from Burnley: https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/
>> I used to think everyone called (cobs|bread cakes|rolls|barns) muffins
UK regional dialects are summed up really well here because despite listing five different names for a specific thing you still neglected the word I use (baps).
It’s barm, with an m, from barm cakes. Barm is the frothy scummy stuff you get on top of fermented beer, and it contains yeast. Back in the day bakers would take the barm from local brewers to make weakly fermented bread rolls… barm cakes.
(So obviously those calling them cobs or rolls or whatever else are just wrong!)
honestly that would still probably mean more than story points. maybe all this AI insanity has an upside that the new cargo cult washes out the old one.
There is so much business software out there and ecosystems that have evolved around it. Systems still running cobol on IBM mainframes; or, more "modern" stacks like Java apps running in IBM websphere. There are relatively small numbers of HN reading folk that went to some of the best CS programs and/or work(ed) at FANG caliber companies (whatever you call them now). The rest of the software engineer types are a diverse crowd and turning to IBM Bob might be more natural than some creepy looking orange starfish offering. That's my hypothesis anyway.
I'm sure tons of companies have retainer spends with IBM for software, hardware, consulting, etc., and this is another way for their corporate clients to spend down / increase their retainers faster
This sounds a lot like Spotify's XIRP. They managed to vibe something useful for their own engineers, were super hyped, and decided to release it in public. However what are the odds this harness will stand the test of time against actual harness makers like OpenAI or Anthropic? Neither Spotify or IBM are focused on making models or harnesses, these are just side-products.
To be fair Codex and Claude Code don't have a lot of secret sauce either. This is not to say that the harness doesn't matter at all or that you can't do any better, but whenever they benchmark it always turns out that you don't lose that much with even a very minimal agent. If a different harness makes better sense for your workflow I don't see why you wouldn't switch (or make your own if you have the resources to do so).
I'm also sticking to first-party agents, but that's more because I feel no compelling reason to switch and CLI agents fit well with my spartan technology choices. YMMV.
IBM is training their own models (for instance IBM granite) as well as watsonx as a platform. They are trying to build a products for enterprise as well as their specific AI modernization models.
It's puzzling, considering they made some strides towards improving their design language and systems in past years, which produced IBM Plex etc. under Mike Abbink.
They have a decent component system with Carbon[0] and a whole design principles website[1] which they could have easily pointed their LLM of choice to.
Even the ibm.com landing page isn't close to the design system spec, rounded corners and whatnot...
Working with any AI tool means you trust the vendor, sometimes you don't have a choice because the best models/tools are from specific providers. IBM isn't a company I would ever trust.
I believe it sends to various models in the background, So largely a harness / framework. Ibm does have its own model which is one of the options for Bob to use.
(Note, I'm an IBMer but nowhere near this so my comment is strictly from my public knowledge/awareness:).
Feels like a manager with no branding skills had an initial “vision” and everyone working there probably hoped marketing/branding would get pulled in later.
Is anyone out there paying for this? I know you are there. Come out explain yourself. And also explain the value of a Bobcoin, and if can be scalped and resold on eBay.
Is this just a harness or using a proprietary model in the background? Anthropic and OpenAI are already very well trained in IBM system i and z knowledge. Unless Bob is somehow improving the integration to these midrange and mainframe systems I literally dont see any benefit to using Bob. IBM will just kill this proprietary tech in 5 years as they are currently doing with RDi or forget about updating it like SEU.
I think it's just a harness that uses proprietary (or maybe IBM is hosting open weight?) models. They say on the site (in the FAQs) that you can't even choose which model!
So it seems to be a harness that auto-routes your queries with no way to change this.
IBM has models trained for older mainframe usage (RPG II, RPG/400, COBOL, etc) so I imagine it would be very good for that. Bob looks like a branded fork of vs code or vscodium.
The copy is "clearly" written with AI… too bad. Some organizations "can't go wrong with Big Blue," so this will probably be a success. Perhaps it's even good, but that's not the case with this sloppy copywriting.
First paragraph: focused, what matters, clean. Shame they didn't throw in a "load-bearing" example and a few pelicans to boot.
Bob has been out for a while. It just never got a lot of press. IBM has also been developing more "enterprise" flavored LLMs through their Granite series. In fact they were trying to make small, mission-specific LMs a thing for the last two years or so.
Why so negative? I for one cannot wait for IBM Bob to become the most successful AI solution - nay, product - ever, and eagerly await petrobobcoin eclipsing the petrodollar to become the only truly global currency. They have a CLI with giant ASCII art text for heavens sake! When has anything with giant ASCII art text ever been of poor quality? They made a fork of Visual Studio Code and everything!
That’s partly why they are giants. Let the startups take the arrows necessary to figure out or create the market. Then they can buy or build the gen 2 system that meets the needs of the market.
Microsoft got this right once, and it cost them big to turn up late - that was the Internet and Windows 95 and the massive u-turn. Otherwise, they've been defining stuff early a lot I think. It's hard to explain how big a turnaround they had to do back then, but then it says a lot that until they made that u-turn the leadership was so confident in their own hubris they thought they could take on the entire internet with their own crap version of AOL.
IBM invented the PC and then lost control of that identity. Figuring out how that happened is something they are going to have a meeting about, but they're still working through the meetings to plan that meeting, and the Gantt chart for those meetings takes meetings to adjust, and everybody is in meetings so doesn't have time for those meetings. They'll get to them though.
Apple consistently turn up late, but redefine and improve the status quo. They sometimes prototype early in public (for example, the Newton), but normally they show up with the version 3 that everyone else wished they'd thought of that then goes on to define a sector quite cleanly (Mac, iMac, Mac OS System X, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Mac Mini). They Newton'ed Siri, but I'm pretty sure they're going to come back strong in the next 18 months, unless the enshitification we've all witnessed over the last few years really has taken hold and Siri is just going to automate that at scale. Maybe we will all be killed by AI, but not through malevolent evil, but widely distributed incompetence.
Meta are constantly taking swings at the latest thing the founder is excited by - the Metaverse (now with legs!), pervert glasses, and so on - but they mostly prop up a bunch of expensive failures on the back of a hugely successful advertising business. I don't think they come late to the party per se, they're just not very good at anything that isn't killing & harming children, or undermining democracy. They should stay in their lane and keep doing that, I guess.
As somebody already mentioned, they already had a big product named after their CEO. IBM Watson was the next big thing after Deep Blue, and it went pretty viral after defeating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy back in ~2011.
It was a bit of a market play and of course has since been completely upstaged by the invention of LLMs, but it still definitely got them the attention they wanted at the time.
The companies who are hoarding RAM to produce pointless products should be called out. Deprive working class from computing resources to sell some corporate crap. Get fucked.
So it's just a vscode wrapper around a mystery open weights LLM I'm guessing?
> Can I choose which model Bob uses?
> No. Bob automatically selects the most appropriate language model for each task based on complexity, required capabilities, and cost-efficiency. This intelligent routing ensures you receive high-quality responses while optimizing resource usage.
“Bobcoins are the consumption-based billing metric used for Bob subscriptions. They provide a transparent, predictable way to measure and bill for your Bob usage.”
I’m getting sick of these mobile game currency style credits/coins that obfuscate costs or usage. It’s honestly pretty gross.
Just telling us exactly what we get for our money.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
Only beaten by Lenovo.
It's as if I bought an old telephone exchange building and called it Bell Labs.
indeed, child, indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
Someone decided that this feedback was worth highlighting:
"Bob demonstrated a level of intelligence and contextual understanding that goes beyond anything I've seen in other tools. Bob goes beyond anything I've seen in other tools."
I realise LinkedIn is a surrealist caricature of corporate reality, but just imagine proudly displaying your #1 shill award for all to see
I don't think it's a caricature of reality at all, it very much is like the large US corps I've worked at.
When you stop paying but keep using the skill, that’s called pirating.
signed: a proud IBMer
I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money. They've just slunk off into a corner hugging their old architectures they have a moat around, and thrown out some audacious nonsense like Watson now and again, but nothing has stuck. When is somebody in that organisation going to try and innovate properly again?
I'm not sure this is the answer I'd be rooting for.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bobbins
The commercial guy I dealt with made it very clear that a primary concern was IBM not being humiliated and shafted like their MS dealings. It colored our commercial arrangements, which had to include "break glass" arrangements for them to gain full access to our source code.
Calling Bob (the server) a piece of shit ("Bob is a piece of shit") because it crashed again was a very risky move that we often didn't fully think through.
[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Builder_(character) ]
I used to think everyone called (cobs|bread cakes|rolls|barns) muffins, and it turns out it was just my small town that did it. As in, just my small town, not region, county, etc.
UK regional dialects are summed up really well here because despite listing five different names for a specific thing you still neglected the word I use (baps).
I ask because i'm only familiar with a thread/yarn bobbin, I wonder if it derived from that.
(So obviously those calling them cobs or rolls or whatever else are just wrong!)
I wonder what their target customer is. They must have analyzed and projected this. I'm genuinely interested.
I agree IBM Bob is not the revolution, but…
We are still in the punch card era of LLMs. Maybe even the Altair era.
None of this stuff has really been figured out yet.
I'm also sticking to first-party agents, but that's more because I feel no compelling reason to switch and CLI agents fit well with my spartan technology choices. YMMV.
Looks awful from a design perspective. Had to double check that this was the actual IBM domain
They have a decent component system with Carbon[0] and a whole design principles website[1] which they could have easily pointed their LLM of choice to.
Even the ibm.com landing page isn't close to the design system spec, rounded corners and whatnot...
[0] https://preview.carbondesignsystem.com/ [1] https://www.ibm.com/design/language/
Probably by design considering the songs subject matter.
https://imgur.com/a/3PQXIsQ
(Note, I'm an IBMer but nowhere near this so my comment is strictly from my public knowledge/awareness:).
(I'm also an IBMer.)
Never happened.
I promise you Bob isn't going to fix the long-term stupidity.
So it seems to be a harness that auto-routes your queries with no way to change this.
The only positive versus others is that at an enterprise level you have more control of the costs with the coins.
The copy is "clearly" written with AI… too bad. Some organizations "can't go wrong with Big Blue," so this will probably be a success. Perhaps it's even good, but that's not the case with this sloppy copywriting.
First paragraph: focused, what matters, clean. Shame they didn't throw in a "load-bearing" example and a few pelicans to boot.
https://bob.ibm.com/pricing
IBM invented the PC and then lost control of that identity. Figuring out how that happened is something they are going to have a meeting about, but they're still working through the meetings to plan that meeting, and the Gantt chart for those meetings takes meetings to adjust, and everybody is in meetings so doesn't have time for those meetings. They'll get to them though.
Apple consistently turn up late, but redefine and improve the status quo. They sometimes prototype early in public (for example, the Newton), but normally they show up with the version 3 that everyone else wished they'd thought of that then goes on to define a sector quite cleanly (Mac, iMac, Mac OS System X, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Mac Mini). They Newton'ed Siri, but I'm pretty sure they're going to come back strong in the next 18 months, unless the enshitification we've all witnessed over the last few years really has taken hold and Siri is just going to automate that at scale. Maybe we will all be killed by AI, but not through malevolent evil, but widely distributed incompetence.
Meta are constantly taking swings at the latest thing the founder is excited by - the Metaverse (now with legs!), pervert glasses, and so on - but they mostly prop up a bunch of expensive failures on the back of a hugely successful advertising business. I don't think they come late to the party per se, they're just not very good at anything that isn't killing & harming children, or undermining democracy. They should stay in their lane and keep doing that, I guess.
No thanks, that's what I like about AI so I'll just stay with the raw tokens.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
It was a bit of a market play and of course has since been completely upstaged by the invention of LLMs, but it still definitely got them the attention they wanted at the time.
https://www.ibm.com/history/watson-jeopardy
Maybe this time it'll work.
> Can I choose which model Bob uses?
> No. Bob automatically selects the most appropriate language model for each task based on complexity, required capabilities, and cost-efficiency. This intelligent routing ensures you receive high-quality responses while optimizing resource usage.
But it is IBM after all.
Then how did you not see that coming?
I’m getting sick of these mobile game currency style credits/coins that obfuscate costs or usage. It’s honestly pretty gross.
Just telling us exactly what we get for our money.