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.
As a fun addition, I think the atomic clock/time standards division went HP → Agilent → Symmetricom → Microsemi → Microchip. You could have bought a HP 5071A Cesium Frequency Standard under all of these badges!
"Just" feeding paper is extreme engineering. And a disposable vape has more compute in it than a toner cartridge. (Though there is insane non recurring engineering in an inkjet cartridge. But I bet just the warehousing of a printer is a significant part of the total cost of a printer.
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?
I think they started on a long slide starting in the late 90s when they tried to couple research more and more tightly to product deliverables, and then as they pivoted to being a services company, including selling off non-mainframe hardware to Lenovo, to coupling r&d to, uh, I guess services revenue, whatever that means. They had some research layoffs in 2008, at the same time that MSR and Google were really blossoming in research spend and perception, and I think they kind of got left behind.
I had a former student go there around 2008 and it seemed like the vibes were starting to sour around then. They maintained some awesome researchers in, e.g., databases, but I think the "make sure you are showing closely how your research directly contributes to services revenue" thing was strong by then and somewhat ruinous for how pleasant a work experience it was for many.
Same. My first real job out of college was at IBM 2004 to 2005. I was so proud to be an IBMer. Hated it. Lots of good people, but the bureaucracy, the pace, the whole thing, not fun.
Hey now, sure, Microsoft Bob didn't get us ordinary users a "partner that helps you by making it easier", but it DID help MS Bob product owner Melinda French get a "partner that helps you by getting 10+ billion dollars" in the end, amiright?
<joking>
Maybe IBM is signalling it is likewise hoping for 10 billion dollars while also realizing the (AI) partner might not end up being that helpful either??
MS Bob was for adults… although there were kid dedicated areas, like the den, and I seem to remember packard bell navigator being a kid-friendly reskin.
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."
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.
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.
How to not learn from your mistakes and actually make them worse. I wonder how many valuable alliances they lost just because of that fear. Whoever was willing to sign was already probably not going to be a threat.
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.
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.
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!
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!)
Might also mark you out as a certain age if not from the right region - I’m familiar with it as a word for “a bit rubbish” because of listening to Mark & Lard’s late night show on Radio 1 in the 90s
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".
depending on what the skill does, it can be a whole collection of python/other code files, resource files (i.e., js libs, css/html templates) and markdown files with orchestration instructions
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?
It's not good, they hide the model (their whole thing is hidden model routing to keep costs low, but predictably yields bad results), there are no novel integrations not available in any other harness, it's closed source, and bobcoin is worthless because it's only usable with Bob.
Not an IBMer, but IBM MQ and Sterling Connect:Direct are both solid, I use them daily and they work wonderfully, although they can be a real bitch to set up and use in certain scenarios.
A bit of hyperbole by me since db2 was made in 1983. But MQ was created in 1993. Sterling was an acquisition. The majority of products that actually work were acquired. Very little if anything of value since 2005+ that was actually IBM created. (Bob appears fully IBM created)
What makes you proud about IBM currently? IBM’s “RA” culture fostering Machiavellian politics, singleminded view of next quarter’s success, and asinine yet draconian bureaucracy are three out of MANY reasons why I’m embarrassed to have had IBM forced into my career and got the hell out as fast as possible each time.
I don't work at IBM but there are many things to admire. e.g. You can take software written 40 years and run on a new IBM system today without even recompiling it thanks to the Machine Interface.
Have fun trying to run a 40 year old C++ program.
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.
Sure! IBM and Spotify, two companies united in being famous for not being software consulting businesses and definitely not ever developing software development tools.
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.
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...
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
> 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. Each action you take in Bob—such as generating code, reading files, or running commands—consumes a certain number of Bobcoins based on the computational resources required.
transparent, predictable ... "a certain number of Bobcoins" ... so not that transparent then?
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:).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Yes, I know, I got a job offer to work in the Watson research lab around that time, at the T.J. Watson facility. I declined because they weren’t remote-friendly, among other things.
But IBM Tom would at least have a rationale. WTF is IBM Bob and why does it have the same name as an old Microsoft product?
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.
Totally reminds me of "HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About'"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
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.
How you doing fellow kids?
1000
yet hp exist after decades, just a terrible printer corp going long term is insane really
They're the 2nd biggest PC manufacturer in the world. Sell more computers than Dell, Apple, etc.
Only beaten by Lenovo.
and Lenovo is itself an IBM spinoff.
Not a spinoff. It was founded 20 years before and was the largest PC manufacturer in China 10 years before buying IBM's PC business.
Interesting. Did not know that. I thought someone bought the IBM laptop business and renamed it.
They did, but they also were a large existing manufacturer.
I don't know what they had before but their identity seemed to be IBM's overnight (thinkpads and all).
They used the Think(Pad|Centre) brand and expanded it to other things (like IdeaPad).
They basically bought IBM's good reputation name and style and used it for both IBM-alikes and budget machines.
Some of it was good machines, some of it was crap.
They actually bought entire ThinkPad R&D as well, and have been subcontracted manufacturer for some time before that.
So Thinkpads are still designed in ex-IBM Lenovo Japan
yet they gather PC parts right ? like did they create any board or ram or any great hardware, no ?
goal post shift.
HP was never just a printer corp. ;-)
The fun parts of HP split off years ago into Agilent, Keysight, and HPE. Current HP is just a printer and office PC corp.
As a fun addition, I think the atomic clock/time standards division went HP → Agilent → Symmetricom → Microsemi → Microchip. You could have bought a HP 5071A Cesium Frequency Standard under all of these badges!
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...
The most valuable offspring of HP is Broadcom, just as ASML is the most valuable offspring of Philips.
dont forget Autonomy !
HP is long gone. What's left is just a printer and PC company that didn't bother to change the sign on the building.
It's as if I bought an old telephone exchange building and called it Bell Labs.
You couldn't, mostly because Bell Labs is owned by Nokia now.
Interesting, TIL! I wonder what Nokia's market cap is... geez, still over $50B. Another surprise.
That's basically all Nokia(-Siemens) Networks.
I suspect their enterprise computer business creates more revenue than printers.
Printers are just a loss leader for toner.
If you put 90% of the electronics into the cartridge and the printer box is just a paper feeder - that's not exactly surprising.
HP retail ink cartridge prices are not a cost issue.
"Just" feeding paper is extreme engineering. And a disposable vape has more compute in it than a toner cartridge. (Though there is insane non recurring engineering in an inkjet cartridge. But I bet just the warehousing of a printer is a significant part of the total cost of a printer.
So good
Nobody ever got fired for IBM Bob setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster
Nobody has yet been fired for IBM Bob setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster
That we know of.
I laughed when I saw this; my 14yo looked over to see why I was laughing and asked "what's IBM?"
indeed, child, indeed.
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?
I think they started on a long slide starting in the late 90s when they tried to couple research more and more tightly to product deliverables, and then as they pivoted to being a services company, including selling off non-mainframe hardware to Lenovo, to coupling r&d to, uh, I guess services revenue, whatever that means. They had some research layoffs in 2008, at the same time that MSR and Google were really blossoming in research spend and perception, and I think they kind of got left behind.
I had a former student go there around 2008 and it seemed like the vibes were starting to sour around then. They maintained some awesome researchers in, e.g., databases, but I think the "make sure you are showing closely how your research directly contributes to services revenue" thing was strong by then and somewhat ruinous for how pleasant a work experience it was for many.
They only sold the consumer and low-end server hardware line. You can still get IBM servers (Power) and mainframes.
Same. My first real job out of college was at IBM 2004 to 2005. I was so proud to be an IBMer. Hated it. Lots of good people, but the bureaucracy, the pace, the whole thing, not fun.
I thought they were resurrecting Microsoft Bob, the operating system for kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
Naming a new product which is a "partner that helps you by making it easier" "Bob" seems like a... lack of historical awareness?
Hey now, sure, Microsoft Bob didn't get us ordinary users a "partner that helps you by making it easier", but it DID help MS Bob product owner Melinda French get a "partner that helps you by getting 10+ billion dollars" in the end, amiright?
<joking>
Maybe IBM is signalling it is likewise hoping for 10 billion dollars while also realizing the (AI) partner might not end up being that helpful either??
<further joking>
After what we've learned about Billy gates in the last year im not certain that's such a good deal.
MS Bob was for adults… although there were kid dedicated areas, like the den, and I seem to remember packard bell navigator being a kid-friendly reskin.
It was for adults, but the design was quite childish.
for… kids? :/
Children were, and are, permitted to use the computer.
My first thought as well!!
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."
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
> I realise LinkedIn is a surrealist caricature of corporate reality
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.
Exactly, it really is that absurd. If anything, you could say the corporate world is its own self-caricature.
It's IBM. They leveraged synergies with the thought leaders they could reach out and touch base with.
One carousel quote literally ends with "Bib is a highly reliable partner."
Can we look forward to a localized version named 'Bub'?
Theres even one that says "Bib [sic] is a highly reliable partner."
It’s actually hard to sell anything to developers, it’s however much easier to do with executives and managers
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
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.
How to not learn from your mistakes and actually make them worse. I wonder how many valuable alliances they lost just because of that fear. Whoever was willing to sign was already probably not going to be a threat.
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.
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.
They left the consumer market decades ago, as you mentioned, but they've been thriving in the enterprise and government sectors.
They have been expanding their portfolio through acquisitions: Red Hat, HashiCorp, Confluent...
tbh - my first thought, especially with that figure and marketing, is "Bob the Builder"...
[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Builder_(character) ]
My first thought was it was going to be "Microsoft Bob for the AI Age" or something. I didn't look too closely -- maybe it is!
"IBM Bob? Certainly they have a license deal with Microsoft to release Bob for OS/2"
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!
I had thought that in the UK, Bob was everyone's uncle.
Everyone else's uncle, and only on a good day
Also in the UK and never heard of this in my life. Guessing this is very regional?
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.
It's definitely chip muffin. I have no patience for those heretics up the road with their chip barms.
Hahaha. Chip butty
Extra vinegar please, I want my muffin drenched.
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).
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.
Yes. The North West and the midlands was where it all started. Cotton, mills, Industrial Revolution etc
It does indeed, probably the heart of it.
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!)
I think that was just autocorrect to be fair. Barm isn't in the standard dictionary
I suspected that might be the case, but I wasn’t about to turn down an opportunity to share one of my fun facts!
Might also mark you out as a certain age if not from the right region - I’m familiar with it as a word for “a bit rubbish” because of listening to Mark & Lard’s late night show on Radio 1 in the 90s
It's pretty common around Manchester. Bit like being nesh. But as you know... this is a thing: https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/
Never enough Frank Sidebottom on here
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".
markdown as a service is crazy
Is it that diff from code as a service? It’s human intent transcribed into something useful.
Code is precise. Human intent is anything but.
I lol'd so hard at this comment that it hurt.
This is the most IBM thing IBM ever IBM'd.
What do you mean by renting out an agent skill? How can one even rent a Skill? It’s just a markdown file
You periodically pay a fee that gives you the right to use a licensed markdown file, in the same way you can rent movies or fonts.
When you stop paying but keep using the skill, that’s called pirating.
But if you point your LLM at it and say you want something like this, then it’s all ok. :) If you can’t legally copy it, just launder it through AI.
so it's just a prompt?
It could be added to context only on the inference server, with the model heavily instructed not to repeat its contents. Not foolproof, obviously.
depending on what the skill does, it can be a whole collection of python/other code files, resource files (i.e., js libs, css/html templates) and markdown files with orchestration instructions
how long before some hero puts them on github?
Does anyone actually care about what IBM's skill files say?
IBM hasn't made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.
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 :)
Is it true that employees have to earn Bobcoins before they can use Bob?
You get more bobcoins by using your old allowance and running out, then submitting GitHub issues that get ignored.
When people say they have been in startups for long periods, does this mean they worked at a chain of failed companies?
is bob helping with ur writing too? ;p
Are you allowed to use Cursor, Codex, Claude, or OpenCode or is Bob all they allow?
Official policy is to only use Bob. All of the best people I work with are using other tools because Bob is trash.
I have been told only Bob is allowed but not 100% on that.
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?
It's not good, they hide the model (their whole thing is hidden model routing to keep costs low, but predictably yields bad results), there are no novel integrations not available in any other harness, it's closed source, and bobcoin is worthless because it's only usable with Bob.
Lol
lol, I've used it and Bob is a dumpster fire.
Not an IBMer, but IBM MQ and Sterling Connect:Direct are both solid, I use them daily and they work wonderfully, although they can be a real bitch to set up and use in certain scenarios.
A bit of hyperbole by me since db2 was made in 1983. But MQ was created in 1993. Sterling was an acquisition. The majority of products that actually work were acquired. Very little if anything of value since 2005+ that was actually IBM created. (Bob appears fully IBM created)
I wish you study the Wikipedia page, please. it's a very old company and we have invented really cool stuff.
signed: a proud IBMer
What makes you proud about IBM currently? IBM’s “RA” culture fostering Machiavellian politics, singleminded view of next quarter’s success, and asinine yet draconian bureaucracy are three out of MANY reasons why I’m embarrassed to have had IBM forced into my career and got the hell out as fast as possible each time.
I don't work at IBM but there are many things to admire. e.g. You can take software written 40 years and run on a new IBM system today without even recompiling it thanks to the Machine Interface. Have fun trying to run a 40 year old C++ program.
easy.
"claude, get this c++ program working"
these types of moats are all but obliterated.
I feel second hand embarrassment for IBM. Terrible name, subpar landing page, no mention of coding ability or which LLM "Bob" uses.
If you're launching something 2 years late, you've got to do better than this.
Well, at least the AI market is validated now.
System Prompt: "Claude, call yourself Bob"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Sure! IBM and Spotify, two companies united in being famous for not being software consulting businesses and definitely not ever developing software development tools.
Definitely gonna change Jira config to start estimating work in Bobcoins.
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.
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
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...
[0] https://preview.carbondesignsystem.com/ [1] https://www.ibm.com/design/language/
As far as I can tell, IBM has mostly been putting out junk for twenty years.
Nobody got fired for using IBM Bob
Pretty sure a lot of people got fired over Microsoft Bob though
Well, you could say Melinda got a big promotion for a while.
Nope, but they'll probably get laid off at some point to boost share price.
Can we say it's Bob's fault, though? Bob did it, not me.
You can
Nobody who got fired uses IBM Bob
Someone must have thought about this. PMs, Directors, lots of people involved in putting this together.
I wonder what their target customer is. They must have analyzed and projected this. I'm genuinely interested.
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.
And the solution to those businesses is not more IBM software, but Claude Code converting it to Go/Rust/Typescript in a few weeks.
I have a feeling that if they already thought like that, they wouldn’t be using IBM legacy stacks in 2026.
A lot of IBM customers have moved to RH Openshift and running their java there.
That IBM Z skill locked behind an "enterprise only" pay point would be a good starting point.
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
See: Kiro by AWS
> 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. Each action you take in Bob—such as generating code, reading files, or running commands—consumes a certain number of Bobcoins based on the computational resources required.
transparent, predictable ... "a certain number of Bobcoins" ... so not that transparent then?
They took a page from AWS on whatever the hell a Kiro token is supposed to represent.
I was at an IBM Bob party, behind the scenes it's basically other frontier models with an IBM-specific context.
It's been a while since Sonnet 4.5 could be considered frontier :D
IBM knows their customers very well, the additional context unlocks a lot of value.
"frontier" is pretty load bearing there, I think it tops out at sonnet 4.5?
Ask the AI chat agent on the website what a BobCoin is. Because, I really want to know.
> I’m not able to find a definition for BobCoin in IBM’s content. If you have another term or topic you’d like to explore, let me know!
The memes write themselves
It takes a while to actually login while it provisions some cloud infrastructure in your name. Let's see if it can build something interesting!
Still provisioning...
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.
My first experience with a computer was with an actual IBM PC XT and a King's Quest floppy. Bob is funny but let's not dis the IBM.
The last product I know of named Bob didn’t fare so well.
"Bob" is also the most difficult to listen to Primus song.
Probably by design considering the songs subject matter.
Clippy came out of that....
And Rover!
Is Bib Bob's partner?
https://imgur.com/a/3PQXIsQ
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
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:).
Never heard of Granite? https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite
(I'm also an IBMer.)
so it routes to actual AI companies and IBM adds additional cost on top. what a business model.
and hides from you what models it's actually using
This can only mean that IBM Clippy is next.
Nothing coming out of IBM is worth any attention.
I generally agree except for these two things: IBM Carbon design system is quite neat. IBM Plex typefaces are lovely, as well. I'm a designer
What do you think is special about Carbon? It looks indistinguishable from any other design system to me.
Seems pretty minor. It seems there is hope for quantum computing at IBM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Ever since the Watson debacle I just run the other way anytime IBM turns up wanting to talk about AI
just AI? Have you seen the other rubbish they try to peddle?
I love how the pricing page has a "Most Popular" offering, totally.
No one at IBM remembers Microsoft Bob (one of the earliest, if not the earliest virtual assistants) from the 90s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
I'm convinced they do and they're trolling us.How many 100s of 1000s in consulting do you think it took to come up with Bob?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Builder very common to copy.
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.
You are correct. It routes to the model best suited for the ask.
The only positive versus others is that at an enterprise level you have more control of the costs with the coins.
except they tack on surcharges to all token calls to Claude and GPT
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.
31 years after Microsoft Bob, IBM releases it's own IBM Bob. :)
I thought MS killed that name forever.
It's like they're begging for failure
Call it PC Bob
Better than IBM Tay.
Microsoft Bob's non-compete finally expired.
This is especially funny when you realize how much money IBM dumped into Watson over all these years.
I like how the solitary review is word salad.
I can't tell if this is an excellent joke, or a sad not-joke.
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.
Never happened.
I thought the image was a joke, but you really pay with Bobcoins.. lmao
https://bob.ibm.com/pricing
Funny, because "bob" is slang for shillings in the old LSD pre-decimal British currency system (coins worth 5 pence in the modern system).
If only one could generate bobcoin using their GPU, only to use the bobcoin to use someone else's GPU.
NYSE: IBM -20% YTD.
I promise you Bob isn't going to fix the long-term stupidity.
Bob Shrugged
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.
Microsoft Bob wasn't wrong, it was just early.
Anyone else immediately think "Clippy for developers".
Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Meta, all the giants are always coming late to the party.
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.
This somehow has less personality than plain enterprise software. How IBM.
Looks like LEGO's lawyers will be knocking on their door soon.
IBM Watson 2.0
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.
Bob huh?
That name's a gamble. Go Bob it? I need to ask Bob. Let's Bob for answers. Bob's your uncle. I'll stop now.
That was fast.
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!
So much for the "THINK" motto.
/THINK
I hope its good, I wont test it though
I’m going to get a free trial and test it. If you do, leave your comments below on the experience
Bobcoins. Hehe.
They got it wrong - they're showing code in the ad.
Who're they subcontracting for the Von Neumann probes?
Does it write really clean code ala Uncle Bob?
I used Bob extensively at an IBM acquisition, it was absolutely dreadful. Bobcoins.
The next step is yandex/nebius "vasya"
https://alice.yandex.ru/
seems like they used claude for this
The logo, the name... Horrible marketing/branding.
Should have called it Bob The Builder
what happened to Watson?
one-off, LLMs killed it would be my take.
The review that "IBM Bob isn't just another autocomplete tool" tells you everything you need to know about this product. lol.
Bob the Builder? Right age bracket I guess.
Bobcoins. Intriguing.
At least it's not Clippy?
At least it's not Clippy(2)
Copy of At least it's not Clippy(2)
Copy of At least it's not Clippy (2)_final
Thought this was going to be about Microsoft Bob.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
This is embarrassing. It would have been better to release nothing than this.
Hi Bob! Bob!
Oh Clippy
What do you call an agent with no arms and no legs in the ocean?
Well played! <golf clap>
Clippy the Clip is it's uncle
Aww IBM wants to play too. I forgot they were still around.
Announcement post from April: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-04-28-introducing-ibm-bob-ai-d...
Not to be confused with Microsoft Bob:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
Too late ?
Should have been IBM Tom, after legendary IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson. But perhaps they didn't want to sully his name.
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.
https://www.ibm.com/history/watson-jeopardy
Yes, I know, I got a job offer to work in the Watson research lab around that time, at the T.J. Watson facility. I declined because they weren’t remote-friendly, among other things.
But IBM Tom would at least have a rationale. WTF is IBM Bob and why does it have the same name as an old Microsoft product?
IBM already have IBM Watson which is probably named after the CEO
IBM Wat?
Seconded
I bet this will be as successful as Microsoft Bob.
My guess is absolutely nobody on the team that made this is even old enough to remember Microsoft Bob.
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?
Bobalytics
Lol github copilot 5 years late
Not exactly like that, but something similar :)
their swag too tough
ibm desperately clinging to relevancy by hopping on the LLM bandwagon.
Lost opportunity to call it Hal
I'm surprised they didn't use Watson.
They already have an AI product line dubbed Watson: https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx
Has any product with an infantilized agent avatar like this ever turned out to be useful or succeed in gaining traction?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
ibm bob, will help you make slop
Oh, so we are yet again in the 'Bob' phase?
Maybe this time it'll work.
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.
If they produce pointless products then they will lose money.
That money will not "trickle down" in either way.
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.
I never thought the day that IBM would make complete slop.
But it is IBM after all.
> But it is IBM after all.
Then how did you not see that coming?
“I would expect something like this from IBM, but I never expected it from IBM!”
“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.