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.
dyzone 19 hours ago [-]
How you doing fellow kids?
9 hours ago [-]
joleyj 20 hours ago [-]
1000
kingleopold 16 hours ago [-]
yet hp exist after decades, just a terrible printer corp going long term is insane really
kylecazar 16 hours ago [-]
They're the 2nd biggest PC manufacturer in the world. Sell more computers than Dell, Apple, etc.
Only beaten by Lenovo.
philipov 16 hours ago [-]
and Lenovo is itself an IBM spinoff.
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.
SahAssar 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jonwinstanley 15 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Did not know that. I thought someone bought the IBM laptop business and renamed it.
exiguus 4 hours ago [-]
It was bought, but after the renaming. Today IBM only build Servers. Mainframes. All other PC, Laptop and Server Production/Branding is sold.
IBM rebranded mainly to IBM iX. A full service agency.
Hardware is now Mainframes. And other deviations are mostly Cloud, OpenShift, Ansible, and RHEL.
phyalow 14 hours ago [-]
They did, but they also were a large existing manufacturer.
jolt42 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know what they had before but their identity seemed to be IBM's overnight (thinkpads and all).
SahAssar 10 hours ago [-]
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.
p_l 7 hours ago [-]
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
kingleopold 14 hours ago [-]
yet they gather PC parts right ? like did they create any board or ram or any great hardware, no ?
jatora 7 hours ago [-]
goal post shift.
flo123456 15 hours ago [-]
HP was never just a printer corp. ;-)
InvisibleUp 12 hours ago [-]
The fun parts of HP split off years ago into Agilent, Keysight, and HPE. Current HP is just a printer and office PC corp.
nxobject 11 hours ago [-]
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!
The most valuable offspring of HP is Broadcom, just as ASML is the most valuable offspring of Philips.
etc-hosts 10 hours ago [-]
dont forget Autonomy !
CamperBob2 15 hours ago [-]
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.
JAlexoid 14 hours ago [-]
You couldn't, mostly because Bell Labs is owned by Nokia now.
CamperBob2 14 hours ago [-]
Interesting, TIL! I wonder what Nokia's market cap is... geez, still over $50B. Another surprise.
formerly_proven 12 hours ago [-]
That's basically all Nokia(-Siemens) Networks.
nateglims 16 hours ago [-]
I suspect their enterprise computer business creates more revenue than printers.
zimbu668 16 hours ago [-]
Printers are just a loss leader for toner.
JAlexoid 14 hours ago [-]
If you put 90% of the electronics into the cartridge and the printer box is just a paper feeder - that's not exactly surprising.
dd8601fn 5 hours ago [-]
HP retail ink cartridge prices are not a cost issue.
actionfromafar 10 hours ago [-]
"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.
azinman2 17 hours ago [-]
So good
woah 15 hours ago [-]
Nobody ever got fired for IBM Bob setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster
brzz 15 hours ago [-]
Nobody has yet been fired for IBM Bob setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster
I laughed when I saw this; my 14yo looked over to see why I was laughing and asked "what's IBM?"
indeed, child, indeed.
Alien1Being 29 minutes ago [-]
Same thing is happening to Microsoft and Google.
A slow, long slide through mediocrity into irrelevance...
mrbonner 13 hours ago [-]
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?
dgacmu 12 hours ago [-]
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.
ofrzeta 12 hours ago [-]
They only sold the consumer and low-end server hardware line. You can still get IBM servers (Power) and mainframes.
powvans 8 hours ago [-]
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.
tims33 15 hours ago [-]
I thought they were resurrecting Microsoft Bob, the operating system for kids.
Naming a new product which is a "partner that helps you by making it easier" "Bob" seems like a... lack of historical awareness?
gregw2 13 hours ago [-]
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>
snickerbockers 8 hours ago [-]
After what we've learned about Billy gates in the last year im not certain that's such a good deal.
madaxe_again 13 hours ago [-]
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.
archonis 11 hours ago [-]
It was for adults, but the design was quite childish.
guy4261 15 hours ago [-]
for… kids? :/
5G_activated 14 hours ago [-]
Children were, and are, permitted to use the computer.
zabriel_goss 12 hours ago [-]
My first thought as well!!
exakoustos 19 hours 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".
throwyawayyyy 17 hours ago [-]
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."
Skwid 18 hours 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
esseph 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
schiffern 16 hours ago [-]
Exactly, it really is that absurd. If anything, you could say the corporate world is its own self-caricature.
PaulRobinson 19 hours ago [-]
It's IBM. They leveraged synergies with the thought leaders they could reach out and touch base with.
emddudley 13 hours ago [-]
One carousel quote literally ends with "Bib is a highly reliable partner."
TheOtherHobbes 6 hours ago [-]
Can we look forward to a localized version named 'Bub'?
humodz 13 hours ago [-]
Theres even one that says "Bib [sic] is a highly reliable partner."
looksjjhg 14 hours ago [-]
It’s actually hard to sell anything to developers, it’s however much easier to do with executives and managers
PaulRobinson 19 hours 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.
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.
cgio 6 hours ago [-]
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.
roryirvine 27 minutes ago [-]
To be fair, source code escrow was for a long time a standard feature of contracts between small/medium software companies and large enterprises.
It's actually one of the reasons that open source took off in the early 2000s - if the source was already available all you needed to do was come up with a legal agreement that says something to the effect of "EnterpriseCo has a limited license to use SmallCo's software which reverts to full rights in the event that SmallCo is unable to carry out its obligations", with no need to bother arranging (and paying for) escrow.
That made it easier and cheaper to deal with open source companies, and made escrow seem weird and expensive by comparison. But in the 90s it was almost universal in those sort of contracts.
jolt42 13 hours ago [-]
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.
LgWoodenBadger 17 hours ago [-]
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.
shellwizard 12 hours ago [-]
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...
gertrunde 18 hours ago [-]
tbh - my first thought, especially with that figure and marketing, is "Bob the Builder"...
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!
zorked 14 hours ago [-]
"IBM Bob? Certainly they have a license deal with Microsoft to release Bob for OS/2"
Towaway69 13 hours ago [-]
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!
throwaway81523 12 hours ago [-]
I had thought that in the UK, Bob was everyone's uncle.
queenkjuul 9 hours ago [-]
Everyone else's uncle, and only on a good day
basisword 19 hours ago [-]
Also in the UK and never heard of this in my life. Guessing this is very regional?
podgietaru 19 hours 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.
makerofthings 17 hours ago [-]
It's definitely chip muffin. I have no patience for those heretics up the road with their chip barms.
jonwinstanley 15 hours ago [-]
Hahaha. Chip butty
podgietaru 14 hours ago [-]
Extra vinegar please, I want my muffin drenched.
PaulRobinson 19 hours 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/
basisword 19 hours 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).
jamiek88 2 hours ago [-]
And mine! (batch)
serf 19 hours 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.
jonwinstanley 15 hours ago [-]
Yes. The North West and the midlands was where it all started. Cotton, mills, Industrial Revolution etc
podgietaru 18 hours ago [-]
It does indeed, probably the heart of it.
wrboyce 14 hours ago [-]
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!)
podgietaru 14 hours ago [-]
I think that was just autocorrect to be fair. Barm isn't in the standard dictionary
wrboyce 13 hours ago [-]
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
Angostura 17 hours ago [-]
Never enough Frank Sidebottom on here
Stevvo 20 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".
qsort 19 hours ago [-]
markdown as a service is crazy
azinman2 17 hours ago [-]
Is it that diff from code as a service? It’s human intent transcribed into something useful.
gspr 11 hours ago [-]
Code is precise. Human intent is anything but.
closetheloopdev 19 hours ago [-]
I lol'd so hard at this comment that it hurt.
redhale 13 hours ago [-]
This is the most IBM thing IBM ever IBM'd.
sajithdilshan 16 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by renting out an agent skill? How can one even rent a Skill? It’s just a markdown file
Someone 15 hours ago [-]
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.
aranelsurion 14 hours ago [-]
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.
fnord77 14 hours ago [-]
so it's just a prompt?
valleyer 15 hours ago [-]
It could be added to context only on the inference server, with the model heavily instructed not to repeat its contents. Not foolproof, obviously.
insane_dreamer 13 hours ago [-]
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
SSLy 16 hours ago [-]
how long before some hero puts them on github?
9cb14c1ec0 14 hours ago [-]
Does anyone actually care about what IBM's skill files say?
getatme32 19 hours ago [-]
IBM hasn't made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.
pytlicek 19 hours 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 :)
EgregiousCube 16 hours ago [-]
Is it true that employees have to earn Bobcoins before they can use Bob?
quietsegfault 13 hours ago [-]
You get more bobcoins by using your old allowance and running out, then submitting GitHub issues that get ignored.
jatora 7 hours ago [-]
When people say they have been in startups for long periods, does this mean they worked at a chain of failed companies?
insane_dreamer 13 hours ago [-]
is bob helping with ur writing too? ;p
quietsegfault 13 hours ago [-]
Are you allowed to use Cursor, Codex, Claude, or OpenCode or is Bob all they allow?
nosefurhairdo 5 hours ago [-]
Official policy is to only use Bob. All of the best people I work with are using other tools because Bob is trash.
getatme32 11 hours ago [-]
I have been told only Bob is allowed but not 100% on that.
Saline9515 16 hours ago [-]
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?
nosefurhairdo 5 hours ago [-]
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.
sroerick 18 hours ago [-]
Lol
aslkajdfklnlkwn 16 hours ago [-]
lol, I've used it and Bob is a dumpster fire.
shellwizard 12 hours ago [-]
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.
getatme32 11 hours ago [-]
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)
_zoltan_ 14 hours ago [-]
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
quietsegfault 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Stevvo 12 hours ago [-]
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.
jatora 7 hours ago [-]
easy.
"claude, get this c++ program working"
these types of moats are all but obliterated.
bluerooibos 12 hours ago [-]
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.
kakapo5672 10 hours ago [-]
Well, at least the AI market is validated now.
Ciantic 20 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.
qsort 19 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.
abtinf 19 hours 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.
natsucks 19 hours 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.
xemdetia 18 hours ago [-]
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.
lowbloodsugar 11 hours ago [-]
Sure! IBM and Spotify, two companies united in being famous for not being software consulting businesses and definitely not ever developing software development tools.
TYPE_FASTER 16 hours ago [-]
Definitely gonna change Jira config to start estimating work in Bobcoins.
hermitShell 15 hours ago [-]
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.
absoluteunit1 19 hours 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
petepete 3 hours ago [-]
> M.R. Williams is advancing its IBM i modernization strategy with new mobile solutions and accounting system improvements, while leveraging IBM Bob to quickly interpret older RPG code, automate documentation, and streamline development workflows.
This is exactly the kind of endorsement I’d expect to see from an IBM customer.
nadnad 18 hours ago [-]
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...
As far as I can tell, IBM has mostly been putting out junk for twenty years.
a012 20 hours ago [-]
Nobody got fired for using IBM Bob
someguyiguess 20 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure a lot of people got fired over Microsoft Bob though
hn_throw2025 19 hours ago [-]
Well, you could say Melinda got a big promotion for a while.
archonis 11 hours ago [-]
Nope, but they'll probably get laid off at some point to boost share price.
pestatije 19 hours ago [-]
Nobody who got fired uses IBM Bob
glitchc 19 hours ago [-]
Can we say it's Bob's fault, though? Bob did it, not me.
a012 19 hours ago [-]
You can
crash-universe 15 hours ago [-]
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.
steve-atx-7600 15 hours ago [-]
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.
throwitaway222 15 hours ago [-]
And the solution to those businesses is not more IBM software, but Claude Code converting it to Go/Rust/Typescript in a few weeks.
steve-atx-7600 15 hours ago [-]
I have a feeling that if they already thought like that, they wouldn’t be using IBM legacy stacks in 2026.
kitd 14 hours ago [-]
A lot of IBM customers have moved to RH Openshift and running their java there.
kfarr 15 hours ago [-]
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
cube00 10 hours ago [-]
That IBM Z skill locked behind an "enterprise only" pay point would be a good starting point.
alchemism 9 hours ago [-]
See: Kiro by AWS
mansilladev 12 hours ago [-]
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!
dudeWithAMood 8 hours ago [-]
The memes write themselves
mvk666 19 hours ago [-]
I was at an IBM Bob party, behind the scenes it's basically other frontier models with an IBM-specific context.
robteix 14 hours ago [-]
It's been a while since Sonnet 4.5 could be considered frontier :D
infamouscow 12 hours ago [-]
IBM knows their customers very well, the additional context unlocks a lot of value.
aslkajdfklnlkwn 16 hours ago [-]
"frontier" is pretty load bearing there, I think it tops out at sonnet 4.5?
wejick 2 hours ago [-]
VScode is so much similar with Eclipse IDE back around 2010s. 7 out of 10 IDE was based on it, and their look and feel awere kinda similar.
cube00 10 hours 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. 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?
alchemism 9 hours ago [-]
They took a page from AWS on whatever the hell a Kiro token is supposed to represent.
Bombthecat 3 hours ago [-]
Nope, not predictable at all.
Because they auto route still your requests, you never know if something costs one coin or a tenth of a coin
purpleidea 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody wants a proprietary TUI. We still use claude because the model pricing is way better, but that will eventually change. Bob has a hard lesson ahead of it.
throwfaraway135 19 hours 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.
herodoturtle 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
butterisgood 19 hours ago [-]
The last product I know of named Bob didn’t fare so well.
acomjean 16 hours ago [-]
"Bob" is also the most difficult to listen to Primus song.
Probably by design considering the songs subject matter.
jmward01 19 hours ago [-]
Clippy came out of that....
Throudin 18 hours ago [-]
And Rover!
sajithdilshan 20 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
NikolaNovak 19 hours 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:).
I love how the pricing page has a "Most Popular" offering, totally.
NickHirras 7 hours ago [-]
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!
NickHirras 6 hours ago [-]
Still provisioning...
cmiles8 11 hours ago [-]
Ever since the Watson debacle I just run the other way anytime IBM turns up wanting to talk about AI
rf15 5 hours ago [-]
just AI? Have you seen the other rubbish they try to peddle?
cisrockandroll 19 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.
kbwal7 18 hours ago [-]
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.
EagnaIonat 17 hours ago [-]
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.
getatme32 17 hours ago [-]
except they tack on surcharges to all token calls to Claude and GPT
jenkstom 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Funny, because "bob" is slang for shillings in the old LSD pre-decimal British currency system (coins worth 5 pence in the modern system).
annoyingnoob 14 hours ago [-]
If only one could generate bobcoin using their GPU, only to use the bobcoin to use someone else's GPU.
stefangordon 15 hours ago [-]
I can't tell if this is an excellent joke, or a sad not-joke.
jonwinstanley 14 hours ago [-]
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.
1970-01-01 16 hours ago [-]
NYSE: IBM -20% YTD.
I promise you Bob isn't going to fix the long-term stupidity.
16 hours ago [-]
altmanaltman 16 hours ago [-]
Bob Shrugged
karim79 15 hours ago [-]
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.
meerita 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Meta, all the giants are always coming late to the party.
mbreese 19 hours 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.
PaulRobinson 19 hours 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.
kyle-rb 14 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Bob wasn't wrong, it was just early.
unleashhale 19 hours ago [-]
This somehow has less personality than plain enterprise software. How IBM.
amelius 19 hours ago [-]
Looks like LEGO's lawyers will be knocking on their door soon.
amelius 19 hours 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.
kazinator 9 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Bob's non-compete finally expired.
cbsmith 11 hours ago [-]
Anyone else immediately think "Clippy for developers".
globalise83 15 hours ago [-]
IBM Watson 2.0
Stitch4223 16 hours ago [-]
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.
nunez 15 hours ago [-]
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.
GaryBluto 15 hours ago [-]
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!
0xWTF 18 hours ago [-]
So much for the "THINK" motto.
thunderson 16 hours ago [-]
/THINK
woggy 19 hours ago [-]
Bobcoins. Hehe.
perarneng 11 hours ago [-]
I hope its good, I wont test it though
ctoth 15 hours ago [-]
Who're they subcontracting for the Von Neumann probes?
throwitaway222 15 hours ago [-]
They got it wrong - they're showing code in the ad.
getatme32 11 hours ago [-]
I’m going to get a free trial and test it. If you do, leave your comments below on the experience
delfugal 8 hours ago [-]
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.
quietsegfault 20 hours ago [-]
I used Bob extensively at an IBM acquisition, it was absolutely dreadful. Bobcoins.
Should have been IBM Tom, after legendary IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson. But perhaps they didn't want to sully his name.
vunderba 16 hours ago [-]
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?
vablings 19 hours ago [-]
IBM already have IBM Watson which is probably named after the CEO
DonHopkins 15 hours ago [-]
IBM Wat?
antonvs 5 hours ago [-]
Seconded
Geonode 20 hours ago [-]
I bet this will be as successful as Microsoft Bob.
dmd 20 hours ago [-]
My guess is absolutely nobody on the team that made this is even old enough to remember Microsoft Bob.
19 hours ago [-]
taspeotis 20 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?
10 hours ago [-]
jgbuddy 19 hours ago [-]
Lol github copilot 5 years late
pytlicek 19 hours ago [-]
Not exactly like that, but something similar :)
19 hours ago [-]
mattmcbrien 14 hours ago [-]
their swag too tough
xyst 19 hours ago [-]
ibm desperately clinging to relevancy by hopping on the LLM bandwagon.
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.
argentinian 18 hours ago [-]
If they produce pointless products then they will lose money.
varispeed 17 hours ago [-]
That money will not "trickle down" in either way.
20 hours ago [-]
gregce10 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rdtsc 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jrflo 19 hours ago [-]
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.
19 hours ago [-]
gilliethefoil 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
skrebbel 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
colesantiago 20 hours ago [-]
I never thought the day that IBM would make complete slop.
But it is IBM after all.
lirolero 20 hours ago [-]
> But it is IBM after all.
Then how did you not see that coming?
zenethian 20 hours ago [-]
“I would expect something like this from IBM, but I never expected it from IBM!”
villish 18 hours 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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
Only beaten by Lenovo.
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.
So Thinkpads are still designed in ex-IBM Lenovo Japan
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...
It's as if I bought an old telephone exchange building and called it Bell Labs.
[1] https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/many-employees-ibm-2026-la...
indeed, child, indeed.
A slow, long slide through mediocrity into irrelevance...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
<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>
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.
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.
It's actually one of the reasons that open source took off in the early 2000s - if the source was already available all you needed to do was come up with a legal agreement that says something to the effect of "EnterpriseCo has a limited license to use SmallCo's software which reverts to full rights in the event that SmallCo is unable to carry out its obligations", with no need to bother arranging (and paying for) escrow.
That made it easier and cheaper to deal with open source companies, and made escrow seem weird and expensive by comparison. But in the 90s it was almost universal in those sort of contracts.
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 have been expanding their portfolio through acquisitions: Red Hat, HashiCorp, Confluent...
[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!)
When you stop paying but keep using the skill, that’s called pirating.
signed: a proud IBMer
"claude, get this c++ program working"
these types of moats are all but obliterated.
If you're launching something 2 years late, you've got to do better than this.
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.
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.
Looks awful from a design perspective. Had to double check that this was the actual IBM domain
This is exactly the kind of endorsement I’d expect to see from an IBM customer.
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/
I wonder what their target customer is. They must have analyzed and projected this. I'm genuinely interested.
> 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!
transparent, predictable ... "a certain number of Bobcoins" ... so not that transparent then?
Because they auto route still your requests, you never know if something costs one coin or a tenth of a coin
Probably by design considering the songs subject matter.
(Note, I'm an IBMer but nowhere near this so my comment is strictly from my public knowledge/awareness:).
(I'm also an IBMer.)
https://imgur.com/a/3PQXIsQ
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.
I seriously think I’m going to use it just for the lolz
Bobcoins! Are they blue? hahaha
https://bob.ibm.com/pricing
Never happened.
I promise you Bob isn't going to fix the long-term stupidity.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
[0] 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
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?
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.