IBM Bob
90 points by artpar 3 hours ago | 87 comments

mrbluecoat 2 hours ago
Totally reminds me of "HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About'"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8

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dyzone 2 hours ago
How you doing fellow kids?
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joleyj 2 hours ago
1000
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PaulRobinson 53 minutes ago
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.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bobbins

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gertrunde 19 minutes ago
tbh - my first thought, especially with that figure and marketing, is "Bob the Builder"...

[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Builder_(character) ]

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basisword 49 minutes ago
Also in the UK and never heard of this in my life. Guessing this is very regional?
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PaulRobinson 37 minutes ago
It's pretty common around Manchester. Bit like being nesh. But as you know... this is a thing: https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/
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podgietaru 38 minutes ago
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.

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PaulRobinson 36 minutes ago
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/
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serf 32 minutes ago
does that area have a textile manufacturing history?

I ask because i'm only familiar with a thread/yarn bobbin, I wonder if it derived from that.

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podgietaru 16 minutes ago
It does indeed, probably the heart of it.
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basisword 26 minutes ago
>> 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).

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dainiusse 2 minutes ago
The next step is yandex/nebius "vasya"
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butterisgood 39 minutes ago
The last product I know of named Bob didn’t fare so well.
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jmward01 30 minutes ago
Clippy came out of that....
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Throudin 22 minutes ago
And Rover!
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Ciantic 2 hours ago
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.
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qsort 2 hours ago
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.

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abtinf 59 minutes ago
> actual harness makers

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.

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natsucks 57 minutes ago
Yes my first instinct is to roll my eyes at these efforts but we'll probably all get something better in the end from all the competition.
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Stevvo 2 hours ago
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".
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qsort 2 hours ago
markdown as a service is crazy
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closetheloopdev 2 hours ago
I lol'd so hard at this comment that it hurt.
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getatme32 2 hours ago
IBM hasn't made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.
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pytlicek 30 minutes ago
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 :)
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absoluteunit1 53 minutes ago
The landing/marketing page for this looks like something someone promoted/vibe coded including the Bob mascot.

Looks awful from a design perspective. Had to double check that this was the actual IBM domain

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a012 2 hours ago
Nobody got fired for using IBM Bob
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someguyiguess 2 hours ago
Pretty sure a lot of people got fired over Microsoft Bob though
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hn_throw2025 2 hours ago
Well, you could say Melinda got a big promotion for a while.
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glitchc 2 hours ago
Can we say it's Bob's fault, though? Bob did it, not me.
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a012 51 minutes ago
You can
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pestatije 2 hours ago
Nobody who got fired uses IBM Bob
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exakoustos 53 minutes ago
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".
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Skwid 7 minutes ago
If you search those names you'll find most have a LinkedIn page proudly displaying their many "IBM Influencer" achievements and qualifications.

I realise LinkedIn is a surrealist caricature of corporate reality, but just imagine proudly displaying your #1 shill award for all to see

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PaulRobinson 51 minutes ago
It's IBM. They leveraged synergies with the thought leaders they could reach out and touch base with.
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psygn89 2 hours ago
Is Bib Bob's partner?

https://imgur.com/a/3PQXIsQ

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brk 2 hours ago
This can only mean that IBM Clippy is next.
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cisrockandroll 2 hours ago
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.
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meerita 53 minutes ago
Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Meta, all the giants are always coming late to the party.
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mbreese 39 minutes ago
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.
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PaulRobinson 39 minutes ago
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.

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amelius 45 minutes ago
Companies trying to make AI less of a commodity that you can just swap out for another ...

No thanks, that's what I like about AI so I'll just stay with the raw tokens.

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nielsbot 18 minutes ago
Should have called it Bob The Builder
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throwfaraway135 60 minutes ago
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.
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herodoturtle 57 minutes ago
[dead]
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sajithdilshan 2 hours ago
I'm really confused what this is, is it a harness or a new model by IBM? Some reviews on that page suggests that it's a new model
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NikolaNovak 47 minutes ago
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:).

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getatme32 23 minutes ago
so it routes to actual AI companies and IBM adds additional cost on top. what a business model.
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garciasn 2 hours ago
[flagged]
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bob1029 2 hours ago
I like how the solitary review is word salad.
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mvk666 53 minutes ago
I was at an IBM Bob party, behind the scenes it's basically other frontier models with an IBM-specific context.
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unleashhale 41 minutes ago
This somehow has less personality than plain enterprise software. How IBM.
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villish 17 minutes ago
“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.

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DeathArrow 2 hours ago
31 years after Microsoft Bob, IBM releases it's own IBM Bob. :)
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Nelson69 48 minutes ago
I thought MS killed that name forever.
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someguyiguess 2 hours ago
It's like they're begging for failure
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ginko 2 hours ago
Call it PC Bob
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amelius 46 minutes ago
Looks like LEGO's lawyers will be knocking on their door soon.
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pram 2 hours ago
I thought the image was a joke, but you really pay with Bobcoins.. lmao

https://bob.ibm.com/pricing

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basisword 48 minutes ago
Thought this was going to be about Microsoft Bob.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

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selfawareMammal 2 hours ago
The logo, the name... Horrible marketing/branding.
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woggy 2 hours ago
Bobcoins. Hehe.
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m_w_ 2 hours ago
The review that "IBM Bob isn't just another autocomplete tool" tells you everything you need to know about this product. lol.
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swiftcoder 2 hours ago
At least it's not Clippy?
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r2ob 2 hours ago
At least it's not Clippy(2)
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skhameneh 2 hours ago
I’m quite certain it’s a fork of Roo Code which is a fork of Cline.

When I saw earlier reviews and videos of it, I couldn’t shake the ick of IBM shamelessly forking a startup’s code. There was even some UI slop where they had some big green pulsing button.

That combined with knowing full well how inefficient the default Roo Code base prompts were, I would not be surprised if there’s some massive token churn.

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jgbuddy 31 minutes ago
Lol github copilot 5 years late
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pytlicek 29 minutes ago
Not exactly like that, but something similar :)
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Hypergraphe 50 minutes ago
Too late ?
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quietsegfault 3 hours ago
I used Bob extensively at an IBM acquisition, it was absolutely dreadful. Bobcoins.
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taspeotis 2 hours ago
Not to shit on their effort or anything, but it looks like a VS Code fork + an agent panel which is very ... late 2024 energy?
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saberience 2 hours ago
This is embarrassing. It would have been better to release nothing than this.
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antonvs 2 hours ago
Should have been IBM Tom, after legendary IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson. But perhaps they didn't want to sully his name.
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vablings 53 minutes ago
IBM already have IBM Watson which is probably named after the CEO
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xyst 2 hours ago
ibm desperately clinging to relevancy by hopping on the LLM bandwagon.
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h_mirin 2 hours ago
Bobalytics
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walrus01 2 hours ago
Not to be confused with Microsoft Bob:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

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znpy 2 hours ago
Lost opportunity to call it Hal
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criddell 2 hours ago
I'm surprised they didn't use Watson.
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andsoitis 2 hours ago
They already have an AI product line dubbed Watson: https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx
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bob_builder99 22 minutes ago
[dead]
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self_awareness 2 hours ago
Oh, so we are yet again in the 'Bob' phase?

Maybe this time it'll work.

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Geonode 3 hours ago
I bet this will be as successful as Microsoft Bob.
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dmd 3 hours ago
My guess is absolutely nobody on the team that made this is even old enough to remember Microsoft Bob.
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varispeed 2 hours ago
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.
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yapyap 2 hours ago
ibm bob, will help you make slop
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rdtsc 26 minutes ago
[flagged]
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jrflo 2 hours ago
[flagged]
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gilliethefoil 2 hours ago
[dead]
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colesantiago 3 hours ago
I never thought the day that IBM would make complete slop.

But it is IBM after all.

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lirolero 3 hours ago
> But it is IBM after all.

Then how did you not see that coming?

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zenethian 2 hours ago
“I would expect something like this from IBM, but I never expected it from IBM!”
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