IBM Bob

(bob.ibm.com)

206 points by artpar10 hours ago

94 comments

  • mrbluecoat9 hours ago
    Totally reminds me of &quot;HP Offers &#x27;That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About&#x27;&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8</a>
    • hypercube333 hours ago
      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&#x27;d rather just have the skill or mcp for my harness of choice. I think they weren&#x27;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&#x27;s been used before by Microsoft in the 90s to make a friendly desktop giving us the winxp search dog and clippy.
    • dyzone9 hours ago
      How you doing fellow kids?
    • kingleopold5 hours ago
      yet hp exist after decades, just a terrible printer corp going long term is insane really
      • kylecazar5 hours ago
        They&#x27;re the 2nd biggest PC manufacturer in the world. Sell more computers than Dell, Apple, etc.<p>Only beaten by Lenovo.
        • philipov5 hours ago
          and Lenovo is itself an IBM spinoff.<p><pre><code> After the company rebranded itself to Lenovo, it merged with IBM&#x27;s PC business which produced its ThinkPad line in 2005, after which it rapidly expanded abroad. In 2013, Lenovo became the world&#x27;s largest personal computer vendor by unit sales for the first time, a position it still holds as of 2024.</code></pre>
          • SahAssar4 hours ago
            Not a spinoff. It was founded 20 years before and was the largest PC manufacturer in China 10 years before buying IBM&#x27;s PC business.
            • jonwinstanley4 hours ago
              Interesting. Did not know that. I thought someone bought the IBM laptop business and renamed it.
              • phyalow4 hours ago
                They did, but they also were a large existing manufacturer.
                • jolt422 hours ago
                  I don&#x27;t know what they had before but their identity seemed to be IBM&#x27;s overnight (thinkpads and all).
        • kingleopold3 hours ago
          yet they gather PC parts right ? like did they create any board or ram or any great hardware, no ?
      • flo1234565 hours ago
        HP was never just a printer corp. ;-)
        • InvisibleUp2 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.
          • nxobject53 minutes ago
            As a fun addition, I think the atomic clock&#x2F;time standards division went HP → Agilent → Symmetricom → Microsemi → Microchip. You could have bought a HP 5071A Cesium Frequency Standard under all of these badges!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microchip.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;products&#x2F;clock-and-timing&#x2F;components&#x2F;atomic-clocks&#x2F;atomic-system-clocks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microchip.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;products&#x2F;clock-and-timing&#x2F;co...</a>
        • CamperBob24 hours ago
          HP is long gone. What&#x27;s left is just a printer and PC company that didn&#x27;t bother to change the sign on the building.<p>It&#x27;s as if I bought an old telephone exchange building and called it Bell Labs.
          • JAlexoid3 hours ago
            You couldn&#x27;t, mostly because Bell Labs is owned by Nokia now.
            • CamperBob23 hours ago
              Interesting, TIL! I wonder what Nokia&#x27;s market cap is... geez, still over $50B. Another surprise.
              • formerly_proven1 hour ago
                That&#x27;s basically all Nokia(-Siemens) Networks.
      • nateglims5 hours ago
        I suspect their enterprise computer business creates more revenue than printers.
        • zimbu6685 hours ago
          Printers are just a loss leader for toner.
          • JAlexoid3 hours ago
            If you put 90% of the electronics into the cartridge and the printer box is just a paper feeder - that&#x27;s not exactly surprising.
    • joleyj9 hours ago
      1000
    • azinman27 hours ago
      So good
  • woah4 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
    • brzz4 hours ago
      Nobody <i>has yet been</i> fired for IBM Bob setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster
  • dgacmu3 hours ago
    I laughed when I saw this; my 14yo looked over to see why I was laughing and asked &quot;what&#x27;s IBM?&quot;<p>indeed, child, indeed.
    • mrbonner2 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&amp;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?
      • dgacmu1 hour 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&amp;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.<p>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 &quot;make sure you are showing closely how your research directly contributes to services revenue&quot; thing was strong by then and somewhat ruinous for how pleasant a work experience it was for many.
      • ofrzeta2 hours ago
        They only sold the consumer and low-end server hardware line. You can still get IBM servers (Power) and mainframes.
  • tims335 hours ago
    I thought they were resurrecting Microsoft Bob, the operating system for kids.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Bob" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Bob</a>
    • mrandish2 hours ago
      Naming a new product which is a <i>&quot;partner that helps you by making it easier&quot;</i> &quot;Bob&quot; seems like a... lack of historical awareness?
      • gregw22 hours ago
        Hey now, sure, Microsoft Bob didn&#x27;t get us ordinary users a &quot;partner that helps you by making it easier&quot;, but it DID help MS Bob product owner Melinda French get a &quot;partner that helps you by getting 10+ billion dollars&quot; in the end, amiright?<p>&lt;joking&gt;<p>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??<p>&lt;further joking&gt;
    • zabriel_goss1 hour ago
      My first thought as well!!
    • madaxe_again2 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.
      • archonis11 minutes ago
        It was for adults, but the design was quite childish.
    • guy42614 hours ago
      for… kids? :&#x2F;
      • 5G_activated3 hours ago
        Children were, and are, permitted to use the computer.
  • exakoustos8 hours ago
    The &quot;What developers say&quot; carousel has a single Java dev and dev advocate. They got lots of quotes from managers, directors, CEOs, and an &quot;AI strategist&quot;.
    • throwyawayyyy7 hours ago
      Lots of &quot;performance review boilerplate, I don&#x27;t want to say anything _bad_ about this person but there&#x27;s nothing particularly good I can say&quot; energy there.<p>Someone decided that this feedback was worth highlighting:<p>&quot;Bob demonstrated a level of intelligence and contextual understanding that goes beyond anything I&#x27;ve seen in other tools. Bob goes beyond anything I&#x27;ve seen in other tools.&quot;
    • Skwid7 hours ago
      If you search those names you&#x27;ll find most have a LinkedIn page proudly displaying their many &quot;IBM Influencer&quot; achievements and qualifications.<p>I realise LinkedIn is a surrealist caricature of corporate reality, but just imagine proudly displaying your #1 shill award for all to see
      • esseph6 hours ago
        &gt; I realise LinkedIn is a surrealist caricature of corporate reality<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a caricature of reality at all, it very much is like the large US corps I&#x27;ve worked at.
        • schiffern5 hours ago
          Exactly, it <i>really is</i> that absurd. If anything, you could say the corporate world is its own self-caricature.
    • PaulRobinson8 hours ago
      It&#x27;s IBM. They leveraged synergies with the thought leaders they could reach out and touch base with.
    • emddudley2 hours ago
      One carousel quote literally ends with &quot;Bib is a highly reliable partner.&quot;
    • humodz2 hours ago
      Theres even one that says &quot;Bib [sic] is a highly reliable partner.&quot;
    • looksjjhg3 hours ago
      It’s actually hard to sell anything to developers, it’s however much easier to do with executives and managers
  • PaulRobinson8 hours ago
    You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn&#x27;t perfect, it&#x27;ll just get called &quot;Bobbins&quot; [0], especially where I&#x27;m from.<p>I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they&#x27;ve been on for ~35 years now since OS&#x2F;2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s&#x2F;1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money. They&#x27;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?<p>I&#x27;m not sure this is the answer I&#x27;d be rooting for.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;bobbins" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;bobbins</a>
    • beachy3 hours ago
      We did a deal with IBM back in the day to adapt our tech as the code generation for enterprise java beans.<p>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 &quot;break glass&quot; arrangements for them to gain full access to our source code.
    • jolt422 hours ago
      OS&#x2F;2 was the only thing I remembering being great. If they practically gave it away I think we&#x27;d be living in a different world. Pre-emptive multitasking long before OSX&#x2F;Windows. I mean Microsoft essentially had to force windows (eg. 3.1) down our throats until it become tolerable.
    • shellwizard1 hour ago
      They left the consumer market decades ago, as you mentioned, but they&#x27;ve been thriving in the enterprise and government sectors.<p>They have been expanding their portfolio through acquisitions: Red Hat, HashiCorp, Confluent...
    • LgWoodenBadger6 hours ago
      You should also never name your faulty&#x2F;flaky Dell server Bob when Bob is also the name of your company president (though the president came after the server).<p>Calling Bob (the server) a piece of shit (&quot;Bob is a piece of shit&quot;) because it crashed again was a very risky move that we often didn&#x27;t fully think through.
    • Towaway692 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!
    • gertrunde7 hours ago
      tbh - my first thought, especially with that figure and marketing, is &quot;Bob the Builder&quot;...<p>[Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bob_the_Builder_(character)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bob_the_Builder_(character)</a> ]
      • torgoguys6 hours ago
        My first thought was it was going to be &quot;Microsoft Bob for the AI Age&quot; or something. I didn&#x27;t look too closely -- maybe it is!
        • zorked4 hours ago
          &quot;IBM Bob? Certainly they have a license deal with Microsoft to release Bob for OS&#x2F;2&quot;
    • throwaway815232 hours ago
      I had thought that in the UK, Bob was everyone&#x27;s uncle.
    • basisword8 hours ago
      Also in the UK and never heard of this in my life. Guessing this is very regional?
      • podgietaru8 hours ago
        As with most things on the UK, probably. I definitely used Bobbins.<p>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.
        • PaulRobinson8 hours ago
          If you call it a teacake, and I say no those have raisins in, and you protest that&#x27;s a fruit teacake, I know you&#x27;re probably from Burnley: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ourdialects.uk&#x2F;maps&#x2F;bread&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ourdialects.uk&#x2F;maps&#x2F;bread&#x2F;</a>
        • makerofthings6 hours ago
          It&#x27;s definitely chip muffin. I have no patience for those heretics up the road with their chip barms.
        • basisword8 hours ago
          &gt;&gt; I used to think everyone called (cobs|bread cakes|rolls|barns) muffins<p>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).
        • serf8 hours ago
          does that area have a textile manufacturing history?<p>I ask because i&#x27;m only familiar with a thread&#x2F;yarn bobbin, I wonder if it derived from that.
          • jonwinstanley4 hours ago
            Yes. The North West and the midlands was where it all started. Cotton, mills, Industrial Revolution etc
          • podgietaru7 hours ago
            It does indeed, probably the heart of it.
        • wrboyce3 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.<p>(So obviously those calling them cobs or rolls or whatever else are just wrong!)
          • podgietaru3 hours ago
            I think that was just autocorrect to be fair. Barm isn&#x27;t in the standard dictionary
            • wrboyce2 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!
      • PaulRobinson8 hours ago
        It&#x27;s pretty common around Manchester. Bit like being nesh. But as you know... this is a thing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ourdialects.uk&#x2F;maps&#x2F;bread&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ourdialects.uk&#x2F;maps&#x2F;bread&#x2F;</a>
    • Angostura6 hours ago
      Never enough Frank Sidebottom on here
  • Stevvo9 hours ago
    Interesting they are renting out agent skills. You can pick up &quot;Java Modernization&quot; at $20 a month for &quot;Specialist workflows to help with modernizing Java applications&quot;, or &quot;IBM i&quot; for &quot;Specialist modes, workflows, and skills to work with IBM i applications&quot;.
    • qsort9 hours ago
      markdown as a service is crazy
      • azinman26 hours ago
        Is it that diff from code as a service? It’s human intent transcribed into something useful.
        • gspr26 minutes ago
          Code is precise. Human intent is anything but.
      • closetheloopdev8 hours ago
        I lol&#x27;d so hard at this comment that it hurt.
    • redhale2 hours ago
      This is the most IBM thing IBM ever IBM&#x27;d.
    • SSLy5 hours ago
      how long before some hero puts them on github?
      • 9cb14c1ec03 hours ago
        Does anyone actually care about what IBM&#x27;s skill files say?
    • sajithdilshan5 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
      • Someone4 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.<p>When you stop paying but keep using the skill, that’s called pirating.
        • aranelsurion3 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.
        • fnord773 hours ago
          so it&#x27;s just a prompt?
      • valleyer4 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_dreamer2 hours ago
        depending on what the skill does, it can be a whole collection of python&#x2F;other code files, resource files (i.e., js libs, css&#x2F;html templates) and markdown files with orchestration instructions
    • getatme328 hours ago
      IBM hasn&#x27;t made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.
      • pytlicek8 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 :)
        • EgregiousCube5 hours ago
          Is it true that employees have to earn Bobcoins before they can use Bob?
          • quietsegfault2 hours ago
            You get more bobcoins by using your old allowance and running out, then submitting GitHub issues that get ignored.
        • quietsegfault2 hours ago
          Are you allowed to use Cursor, Codex, Claude, or OpenCode or is Bob all they allow?
          • getatme321 hour ago
            I have been told only Bob is allowed but not 100% on that.
        • insane_dreamer2 hours ago
          is bob helping with ur writing too? ;p
        • Saline95155 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 &quot;transparent pricing&quot; &quot;bobcoin&quot; is worth?
        • sroerick7 hours ago
          Lol
        • aslkajdfklnlkwn5 hours ago
          lol, I&#x27;ve used it and Bob is a dumpster fire.
      • shellwizard1 hour 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.
        • getatme321 hour 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_4 hours ago
        I wish you study the Wikipedia page, please. it&#x27;s a very old company and we have invented really cool stuff.<p>signed: a proud IBMer
        • quietsegfault2 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.
          • Stevvo1 hour ago
            I don&#x27;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.
  • cbsmith7 minutes ago
    [delayed]
  • Ciantic9 hours ago
    This sounds a lot like Spotify&#x27;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.
    • qsort8 hours ago
      To be fair Codex and Claude Code don&#x27;t have a lot of secret sauce either. This is not to say that the harness doesn&#x27;t matter at all or that you can&#x27;t do any better, but whenever they benchmark it always turns out that you don&#x27;t lose <i>that</i> much with even a very minimal agent. If a different harness makes better sense for your workflow I don&#x27;t see why you wouldn&#x27;t switch (or make your own if you have the resources to do so).<p>I&#x27;m also sticking to first-party agents, but that&#x27;s more because I feel no compelling reason to switch and CLI agents fit well with my spartan technology choices. YMMV.
    • abtinf8 hours ago
      &gt; actual harness makers<p>I agree IBM Bob is not the revolution, but…<p>We are still in the punch card era of LLMs. Maybe even the Altair era.<p>None of this stuff has really been figured out yet.
      • natsucks8 hours ago
        Yes my first instinct is to roll my eyes at these efforts but we&#x27;ll probably all get something better in the end from all the competition.
    • xemdetia7 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.
    • lowbloodsugar34 minutes ago
      Sure! IBM and Spotify, two companies united in being famous for <i>not</i> being software consulting businesses and definitely not ever developing software development tools.
  • TYPE_FASTER5 hours ago
    Definitely gonna change Jira config to start estimating work in Bobcoins.
    • hermitShell4 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.
  • crash-universe4 hours ago
    Someone must have thought about this. PMs, Directors, lots of people involved in putting this together.<p>I wonder what their target customer is. They must have analyzed and projected this. I&#x27;m genuinely interested.
    • steve-atx-76004 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 &quot;modern&quot; 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&#x2F;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&#x27;s my hypothesis anyway.
      • throwitaway2224 hours ago
        And the solution to those businesses is not more IBM software, but Claude Code converting it to Go&#x2F;Rust&#x2F;Typescript in a few weeks.
        • steve-atx-76004 hours ago
          I have a feeling that if they already thought like that, they wouldn’t be using IBM legacy stacks in 2026.
      • kitd4 hours ago
        A lot of IBM customers have moved to RH Openshift and running their java there.
    • kfarr4 hours ago
      I&#x27;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 &#x2F; increase their retainers faster
  • cmiles829 minutes ago
    Ever since the Watson debacle I just run the other way anytime IBM turns up wanting to talk about AI
  • a0129 hours ago
    Nobody got fired for using IBM Bob
    • archonis5 minutes ago
      Nope, but they&#x27;ll probably get laid off at some point to boost share price.
    • someguyiguess9 hours ago
      Pretty sure a lot of people got fired over Microsoft Bob though
      • hn_throw20258 hours ago
        Well, you could say Melinda got a big promotion for a while.
    • glitchc8 hours ago
      Can we say it&#x27;s Bob&#x27;s fault, though? Bob did it, not me.
      • a0128 hours ago
        You can
    • pestatije8 hours ago
      Nobody who got fired uses IBM Bob
  • bluerooibos1 hour ago
    I feel second hand embarrassment for IBM. Terrible name, subpar landing page, no mention of coding ability or which LLM &quot;Bob&quot; uses.<p>If you&#x27;re launching something 2 years late, you&#x27;ve got to do better than this.
  • absoluteunit18 hours ago
    The landing&#x2F;marketing page for this looks like something someone promoted&#x2F;vibe coded including the Bob mascot.<p>Looks awful from a design perspective. Had to double check that this was the actual IBM domain
    • AlexCoventry14 minutes ago
      As far as I can tell, IBM has mostly been putting out junk for twenty years.
    • nadnad7 hours ago
      It&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Even the ibm.com landing page isn&#x27;t close to the design system spec, rounded corners and whatnot...<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;preview.carbondesignsystem.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;preview.carbondesignsystem.com&#x2F;</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibm.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;language&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibm.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;language&#x2F;</a>
  • butterisgood8 hours ago
    The last product I know of named Bob didn’t fare so well.
    • acomjean5 hours ago
      &quot;Bob&quot; is also the most difficult to listen to Primus song.<p>Probably by design considering the songs subject matter.
    • jmward018 hours ago
      Clippy came out of that....
  • mansilladev1 hour ago
    Ask the AI chat agent on the website what a BobCoin is. Because, I really want to know.<p>&gt; 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!
  • mvk6668 hours ago
    I was at an IBM Bob party, behind the scenes it&#x27;s basically other frontier models with an IBM-specific context.
    • infamouscow1 hour ago
      IBM knows their customers very well, the additional context unlocks a lot of value.
    • robteix3 hours ago
      It&#x27;s been a while since Sonnet 4.5 could be considered frontier :D
    • aslkajdfklnlkwn5 hours ago
      &quot;frontier&quot; is pretty load bearing there, I think it tops out at sonnet 4.5?
  • psygn898 hours ago
    Is Bib Bob&#x27;s partner?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;3PQXIsQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;3PQXIsQ</a>
  • throwfaraway1358 hours ago
    Working with any AI tool means you trust the vendor, sometimes you don&#x27;t have a choice because the best models&#x2F;tools are from specific providers. IBM isn&#x27;t a company I would ever trust.
  • perarneng45 minutes ago
    I hope its good, I wont test it though
  • hmokiguess5 hours ago
    I love how the pricing page has a &quot;Most Popular&quot; offering, totally.
  • brk9 hours ago
    This can only mean that IBM Clippy is next.
  • getatme3251 minutes ago
    I’m going to get a free trial and test it. If you do, leave your comments below on the experience
  • sajithdilshan9 hours ago
    I&#x27;m really confused what this is, is it a harness or a new model by IBM? Some reviews on that page suggests that it&#x27;s a new model
    • NikolaNovak8 hours ago
      I believe it sends to various models in the background, So largely a harness &#x2F; framework. Ibm does have its own model which is one of the options for Bob to use.<p>(Note, I&#x27;m an IBMer but nowhere near this so my comment is strictly from my public knowledge&#x2F;awareness:).
      • _zoltan_4 hours ago
        Never heard of Granite? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;ibm-granite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;ibm-granite</a><p>(I&#x27;m also an IBMer.)
      • getatme328 hours ago
        so it routes to actual AI companies and IBM adds additional cost on top. what a business model.
        • aslkajdfklnlkwn5 hours ago
          and hides from you what models it&#x27;s actually using
    • garciasn8 hours ago
      [flagged]
  • roncesvalles5 hours ago
    Nothing coming out of IBM is worth any attention.
    • rahulmax4 hours ago
      I generally agree except for these two things: IBM Carbon design system is quite neat. IBM Plex typefaces are lovely, as well. I&#x27;m a designer
      • eleventen2 hours ago
        What do you think is special about Carbon? It looks indistinguishable from any other design system to me.
      • jolt422 hours ago
        Seems pretty minor. It seems there is hope for quantum computing at IBM.
    • Henchman215 hours ago
      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_and_the_Holocaust" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_and_the_Holocaust</a>
  • maxbobby4 hours ago
    No one at IBM remembers Microsoft Bob (one of the earliest, if not the earliest virtual assistants) from the 90s? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Bob" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Bob</a>
    • bigmattystyles4 hours ago
      I&#x27;m convinced they do and they&#x27;re trolling us.How many 100s of 1000s in consulting do you think it took to come up with Bob?
      • gowld4 hours ago
        <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bob_the_Builder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bob_the_Builder</a> very common to copy.
  • kyle-rb3 hours ago
    Microsoft Bob wasn&#x27;t wrong, it was just early.
  • stefangordon4 hours ago
    I can&#x27;t tell if this is an excellent joke, or a sad not-joke.
    • jonwinstanley4 hours ago
      Feels like a manager with no branding skills had an initial “vision” and everyone working there probably hoped marketing&#x2F;branding would get pulled in later.<p>Never happened.
  • cisrockandroll8 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.
    • kbwal77 hours ago
      I think it&#x27;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&#x27;t even choose which model!<p>So it seems to be a harness that auto-routes your queries with no way to change this.
      • EagnaIonat7 hours ago
        You are correct. It routes to the model best suited for the ask.<p>The only positive versus others is that at an enterprise level you have more control of the costs with the coins.
        • getatme326 hours ago
          except they tack on surcharges to all token calls to Claude and GPT
      • jenkstom6 hours ago
        IBM has models trained for older mainframe usage (RPG II, RPG&#x2F;400, COBOL, etc) so I imagine it would be very good for that. Bob looks like a branded fork of vs code or vscodium.
  • karim794 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.
  • lowbloodsugar39 minutes ago
    Bob the Builder? Right age bracket I guess.
  • 1970-01-015 hours ago
    NYSE: IBM -20% YTD.<p>I promise you Bob isn&#x27;t going to fix the long-term stupidity.
  • legitster7 hours ago
    This is especially funny when you realize how much money IBM dumped into Watson over all these years.
  • DeathArrow9 hours ago
    31 years after Microsoft Bob, IBM releases it&#x27;s own IBM Bob. :)
    • Nelson698 hours ago
      I thought MS killed that name forever.
    • someguyiguess9 hours ago
      It&#x27;s like they&#x27;re begging for failure
    • ginko8 hours ago
      Call it PC Bob
    • Apocryphon5 hours ago
      Better than IBM Tay.
  • bob10299 hours ago
    I like how the solitary review is word salad.
  • pram8 hours ago
    I thought the image was a joke, but you really pay with Bobcoins.. lmao<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bob.ibm.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bob.ibm.com&#x2F;pricing</a>
    • UncleSlacky3 hours ago
      Funny, because &quot;bob&quot; is slang for shillings in the old LSD pre-decimal British currency system (coins worth 5 pence in the modern system).
    • annoyingnoob3 hours ago
      If only one could generate bobcoin using their GPU, only to use the bobcoin to use someone else&#x27;s GPU.
  • globalise834 hours ago
    IBM Watson 2.0
  • meerita8 hours ago
    Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Meta, all the giants are always coming late to the party.
    • mbreese8 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.
    • PaulRobinson8 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&#x27;ve been defining stuff early a lot I think. It&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t have time for those meetings. They&#x27;ll get to them though.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;ed Siri, but I&#x27;m pretty sure they&#x27;re going to come back strong in the next 18 months, unless the enshitification we&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t think they come late to the party per se, they&#x27;re just not very good at anything that isn&#x27;t killing &amp; harming children, or undermining democracy. They should stay in their lane and keep doing that, I guess.
  • unleashhale8 hours ago
    This somehow has less personality than plain enterprise software. How IBM.
  • Stitch42235 hours ago
    That was fast.<p>The copy is &quot;clearly&quot; written with AI… too bad. Some organizations &quot;can&#x27;t go wrong with Big Blue,&quot; so this will probably be a success. Perhaps it&#x27;s even good, but that&#x27;s not the case with this sloppy copywriting.<p>First paragraph: focused, what matters, clean. Shame they didn&#x27;t throw in a &quot;load-bearing&quot; example and a few pelicans to boot.
    • nunez5 hours ago
      Bob has been out for a while. It just never got a lot of press. IBM has also been developing more &quot;enterprise&quot; 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.
    • GaryBluto4 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!
  • amelius8 hours ago
    Looks like LEGO&#x27;s lawyers will be knocking on their door soon.
  • amelius8 hours ago
    Companies trying to make AI less of a commodity that you can just swap out for another ...<p>No thanks, that&#x27;s what I like about AI so I&#x27;ll just stay with the raw tokens.
  • 0xWTF7 hours ago
    So much for the &quot;THINK&quot; motto.
  • throwitaway2224 hours ago
    They got it wrong - they&#x27;re showing code in the ad.
  • ctoth5 hours ago
    Who&#x27;re they subcontracting for the Von Neumann probes?
  • woggy8 hours ago
    Bobcoins. Hehe.
  • arpanghoshal075 hours ago
    seems like they used claude for this
  • dainiusse7 hours ago
    The next step is yandex&#x2F;nebius &quot;vasya&quot;
    • SkyeCA4 hours ago
      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alice.yandex.ru&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alice.yandex.ru&#x2F;</a>
  • quietsegfault9 hours ago
    I used Bob extensively at an IBM acquisition, it was absolutely dreadful. Bobcoins.
  • mv44 hours ago
    what happened to Watson?
    • jolt422 hours ago
      one-off, LLMs killed it would be my take.
  • selfawareMammal8 hours ago
    The logo, the name... Horrible marketing&#x2F;branding.
  • madspindel3 hours ago
    Hi Bob! Bob!
  • karim795 hours ago
    Bobcoins. Intriguing.
  • nielsbot7 hours ago
    Should have called it Bob The Builder
  • m_w_9 hours ago
    The review that &quot;IBM Bob isn&#x27;t just another autocomplete tool&quot; tells you everything you need to know about this product. lol.
  • TheAtomic4 hours ago
    Oh Clippy
  • swiftcoder9 hours ago
    At least it&#x27;s not Clippy?
    • r2ob9 hours ago
      At least it&#x27;s not Clippy(2)
      • chuckadams5 hours ago
        Copy of At least it&#x27;s not Clippy(2)
        • globalise834 hours ago
          Copy of At least it&#x27;s not Clippy (2)_final
  • basisword8 hours ago
    Thought this was going to be about Microsoft Bob.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Bob" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Bob</a>
  • DonHopkins4 hours ago
    What do you call an agent with no arms and no legs in the ocean?
  • Surac4 hours ago
    Clippy the Clip is it&#x27;s uncle
  • saberience9 hours ago
    This is embarrassing. It would have been better to release nothing than this.
  • ltbarcly35 hours ago
    Aww IBM wants to play too. I forgot they were still around.
  • ChrisArchitect8 hours ago
    Announcement post from April: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.ibm.com&#x2F;2026-04-28-introducing-ibm-bob-ai-development-partner-that-takes-enterprises-from-ai-assisted-coding-to-production-ready-software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.ibm.com&#x2F;2026-04-28-introducing-ibm-bob-ai-d...</a>
  • Hypergraphe8 hours ago
    Too late ?
  • walrus019 hours ago
    Not to be confused with Microsoft Bob:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Bob" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Bob</a>
  • mattmcbrien3 hours ago
    their swag too tough
  • antonvs9 hours ago
    Should have been IBM Tom, after legendary IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson. But perhaps they didn&#x27;t want to sully his name.
    • vunderba5 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.<p>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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibm.com&#x2F;history&#x2F;watson-jeopardy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibm.com&#x2F;history&#x2F;watson-jeopardy</a>
    • vablings8 hours ago
      IBM already have IBM Watson which is probably named after the CEO
    • DonHopkins4 hours ago
      IBM Wat?
  • Geonode9 hours ago
    I bet this will be as successful as Microsoft Bob.
    • dmd9 hours ago
      My guess is absolutely nobody on the team that made this is even old enough to remember Microsoft Bob.
  • taspeotis9 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?
  • h_mirin9 hours ago
    <i>Bobalytics</i>
  • jgbuddy8 hours ago
    Lol github copilot 5 years late
    • pytlicek8 hours ago
      Not exactly like that, but something similar :)
  • colordrops2 hours ago
    Has any product with an infantilized agent avatar like this ever turned out to be useful or succeed in gaining traction?
  • xyst8 hours ago
    ibm desperately clinging to relevancy by hopping on the LLM bandwagon.
  • znpy9 hours ago
    Lost opportunity to call it Hal
    • criddell9 hours ago
      I&#x27;m surprised they didn&#x27;t use Watson.
      • andsoitis9 hours ago
        They already have an AI product line dubbed Watson: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibm.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;watsonx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibm.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;watsonx</a>
    • bob_builder997 hours ago
      [dead]
  • Henchman215 hours ago
    <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_and_the_Holocaust" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_and_the_Holocaust</a>
  • yapyap8 hours ago
    ibm bob, will help you make slop
  • self_awareness9 hours ago
    Oh, so we are yet again in the &#x27;Bob&#x27; phase?<p>Maybe this time it&#x27;ll work.
  • varispeed9 hours ago
    The companies who are hoarding RAM to produce pointless products should be called out. Deprive working class from computing resources to sell some corporate crap. Get fucked.
    • argentinian7 hours ago
      If they produce pointless products then they will lose money.
      • varispeed6 hours ago
        That money will not &quot;trickle down&quot; in either way.
  • gregce104 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • rdtsc8 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • jrflo8 hours ago
    So it&#x27;s just a vscode wrapper around a mystery open weights LLM I&#x27;m guessing?<p>&gt; Can I choose which model Bob uses?<p>&gt; 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.
  • gilliethefoil8 hours ago
    [dead]
  • skrebbel5 hours ago
    [dead]
  • colesantiago9 hours ago
    I never thought the day that IBM would make complete slop.<p>But it is IBM after all.
    • lirolero9 hours ago
      &gt; But it is IBM after all.<p>Then how did you not see that coming?
      • zenethian9 hours ago
        “I would expect something like this from IBM, but I never expected it from IBM!”
  • villish7 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.”<p>I’m getting sick of these mobile game currency style credits&#x2F;coins that obfuscate costs or usage. It’s honestly pretty gross.<p>Just telling us exactly what we get for our money.