It kind of is - when I looked at it 6 months ago it was just a fork of vscode with old ass versions of Claude and the only unique things were java and ibm I mcp clients or servers or something built in. For those works I'd rather just have the skill or mcp for my harness of choice. I think they weren't allowed to use external AI so they run the models in house and remade cursor. Not bad to have competition but the name is awful - as others have said it's been used before by Microsoft in the 90s to make a friendly desktop giving us the winxp search dog and clippy.
After the company rebranded itself to Lenovo, it merged with IBM's PC business which produced its ThinkPad line in 2005, after which it rapidly expanded abroad. In 2013, Lenovo became the world's largest personal computer vendor by unit sales for the first time, a position it still holds as of 2024.
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.
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!
AT&T used to exist. Because it was a monopoly, it was broken up into the baby bells in 1982. One of which was Southwestern Bell, which eventually bought up all the other baby bells and what was left of AT&T. And then in 2005 it renamed itself...AT&T.
"Just" feeding paper is extreme engineering. And a disposable vape has more compute in it than a toner cartridge. (Though there is insane non recurring engineering in an inkjet cartridge. But I bet just the warehousing of a printer is a significant part of the total cost of a printer.
When I was in the final year of college in 04-05 my dream would be to work at IBM. It still had the kind of prestige of R&D in the world. Fast forward a couple of years to 08-09, I don’t recall the event but IBM perception went down and a stone. Was that when they sold the hardware business and became fully consultant?
I think they started on a long slide starting in the late 90s when they tried to couple research more and more tightly to product deliverables, and then as they pivoted to being a services company, including selling off non-mainframe hardware to Lenovo, to coupling r&d to, uh, I guess services revenue, whatever that means. They had some research layoffs in 2008, at the same time that MSR and Google were really blossoming in research spend and perception, and I think they kind of got left behind.
I had a former student go there around 2008 and it seemed like the vibes were starting to sour around then. They maintained some awesome researchers in, e.g., databases, but I think the "make sure you are showing closely how your research directly contributes to services revenue" thing was strong by then and somewhat ruinous for how pleasant a work experience it was for many.
Same. My first real job out of college was at IBM 2004 to 2005. I was so proud to be an IBMer. Hated it. Lots of good people, but the bureaucracy, the pace, the whole thing, not fun.
Alphabet is operating and expanding the only fleet of fully autonomous vehicles in the world, to rave reviews.
The first contact with AI most people have is Gemini. And their net income went from $74B to $100B to $132B in 3 years and profit margin from 24% to 32%.
Mediocrity and irrelevant are hardly how I would describe them.
You could interpret the comment as a prediction based on the same pattern of overwhelming internal bureaucracy impacting engineering innovation. Control swinging entirely over to finance and legal. Focused entirely on rent seeking and protecting monopolies.
Hey now, sure, Microsoft Bob didn't get us ordinary users a "partner that helps you by making it easier", but it DID help MS Bob product owner Melinda French get a "partner that helps you by getting 10+ billion dollars" in the end, amiright?
<joking>
Maybe IBM is signalling it is likewise hoping for 10 billion dollars while also realizing the (AI) partner might not end up being that helpful either??
MS Bob was for adults… although there were kid dedicated areas, like the den, and I seem to remember packard bell navigator being a kid-friendly reskin.
If you remember the launch of IBM Watson in about 2011 it was meant to be this super smart AI entity and they demoed it by taking it on "Jeapordy!" and having it answer the quiz questions. To be fair, for the time that was kindof impressive but (if i remember correctly) attempts to turn Watson into something industries could actually use and pay for didn't really work. Access to it was tightly controlled.
Its interesting to contrast that with OpenAI chatgpt 3.5 which was launched and then immediately available to pretty much anyone and everyone. Would OpenAI have launched it that way if they werent (as they were at that time) trying to be open? (I get they arent really open but they were at least trying to be then). I guess I'm saying if the first chatgpt 3.5 level LLM had been built by someone less open like facebook or MS would the whole thing have gone in a different direction? Chatgpt being available to everyone seemed to set the pattern for everything since. Was this inevitable? Was it the only way these LLMs could have progressed?
I inherited a project two or three years ago which was consuming a Watson API. Obviously I didn't get a key, but I think they were only using it as a speech-to-text API. Really sad, actually.
You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn't perfect, it'll just get called "Bobbins" [0], especially where I'm from.
I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money. They've just slunk off into a corner hugging their old architectures they have a moat around, and thrown out some audacious nonsense like Watson now and again, but nothing has stuck. When is somebody in that organisation going to try and innovate properly again?
I'm not sure this is the answer I'd be rooting for.
We did a deal with IBM back in the day to adapt our tech as the code generation for enterprise java beans.
The commercial guy I dealt with made it very clear that a primary concern was IBM not being humiliated and shafted like their MS dealings. It colored our commercial arrangements, which had to include "break glass" arrangements for them to gain full access to our source code.
How to not learn from your mistakes and actually make them worse. I wonder how many valuable alliances they lost just because of that fear. Whoever was willing to sign was already probably not going to be a threat.
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.
OS/2 was the only thing I remembering being great. If they practically gave it away I think we'd be living in a different world. Pre-emptive multitasking long before OSX/Windows. I mean Microsoft essentially had to force windows (eg. 3.1) down our throats until it become tolerable.
You should also never name your faulty/flaky Dell server Bob when Bob is also the name of your company president (though the president came after the server).
Calling Bob (the server) a piece of shit ("Bob is a piece of shit") because it crashed again was a very risky move that we often didn't fully think through.
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.
>> 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).
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/
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!)
Can confirm. Per the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]: 'barm' is The froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors, which is used to leaven bread, and to cause fermentation in other liquors; yeast, leaven. OR The froth or foam on the surface of beer OR English regional (chiefly Lancashire). A soft round bread roll, a barm cake.
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
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!
IBM actually do a bunch of semiconductor research, which they license to other fabs. I'm not sure how much money they make (probably nothing compared to support contracts with banks etc), but they actually do innovate. At least, a small portion of one of their business sectors still innovates. The rest are probably engaged in aggressive IP lawsuits or taking CFOs out to strip clubs on golf courses or something.
I'm not sure where that "again" comes from. IBM has never been good a product and everybody is looking at OS/2 through glasses so rose tinted that they're essentially blind. The PC itself was a skunk-works project that was removed from their influence as soon as the rest of company got involved.
Not so much rose-colored glasses, but in comparison to MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows, 32-bit OS/2 was a dream.
Native application support was limited, and it was even less of a pure 32-bit OS than Windows 95, but for about a year it was the only game in town if you wanted to run 16-bit Windows applications with preemptive multitasking and memory protection, and still had some advantages over NT when it shipped.
I don't remember all the details, but I recall not switching to NT full-time until 3.5, and even then the UI wasn't as nice.
The "What developers say" carousel has a single Java dev and dev advocate. They got lots of quotes from managers, directors, CEOs, and an "AI strategist".
Lots of "performance review boilerplate, I don't want to say anything _bad_ about this person but there's nothing particularly good I can say" energy there.
Someone decided that this feedback was worth highlighting:
"Bob demonstrated a level of intelligence and contextual understanding that goes beyond anything I've seen in other tools. Bob goes beyond anything I've seen in other tools."
For all the smarm and jokes, IBM still makes ~$70B in annual revenue and enables billions more in systems integrators. Not many companies can say that.
This allows them to take the secondary revenue in-house and potentially fund a new mainframe business.
It's a [smart-ish because it's their only] strategy for the near term, because long term businesses will be moving off their mainframes and onto more powerful and intelligent systems that can 'think'.
Business Machines 1.0 were CRUD; if they pull this off they can at least get enough capital to maybe upgrade business machines to 2.0
Well for some company already running IBM Z, using Bobcoins might make sense (we will see what happens)
for a FE dev or some nodejs dev this sounds stupid, who cares but
for someone who deals with their stack it might mean something to get IBM-specific tooling/knowledge that works with tech like CICS, IMS, Db2, JCL and RPG etc.
also, they say they use a mix of Claude,Mistral and specialized models (some form of IBM Granite perhaps, idk) so its not that Bob will be retarded
Bobcoins and Bobalytics stuff is still hilarious though XD
Interesting they are renting out agent skills. You can pick up "Java Modernization" at $20 a month for "Specialist workflows to help with modernizing Java applications", or "IBM i" for "Specialist modes, workflows, and skills to work with IBM i applications".
depending on what the skill does, it can be a whole collection of python/other code files, resource files (i.e., js libs, css/html templates) and markdown files with orchestration instructions
No, you are wrong. IBMer here. I was at first agains it, my background is for 2 decades startup(s) before I joined IBM, and I started slowly using IBM Bob and I must say it is really good and helping. With many integrations that works :)
What is good about it then? What model do you use? Which integration are we talking about? Is it open source? How much the "transparent pricing" "bobcoin" is worth?
It's not good, they hide the model (their whole thing is hidden model routing to keep costs low, but predictably yields bad results), there are no novel integrations not available in any other harness, it's closed source, and bobcoin is worthless because it's only usable with Bob.
Not an IBMer, but IBM MQ and Sterling Connect:Direct are both solid, I use them daily and they work wonderfully, although they can be a real bitch to set up and use in certain scenarios.
A bit of hyperbole by me since db2 was made in 1983. But MQ was created in 1993. Sterling was an acquisition. The majority of products that actually work were acquired. Very little if anything of value since 2005+ that was actually IBM created. (Bob appears fully IBM created)
What makes you proud about IBM currently? IBM’s “RA” culture fostering Machiavellian politics, singleminded view of next quarter’s success, and asinine yet draconian bureaucracy are three out of MANY reasons why I’m embarrassed to have had IBM forced into my career and got the hell out as fast as possible each time.
I don't work at IBM but there are many things to admire. e.g. You can take software written 40 years and run on a new IBM system today without even recompiling it thanks to the Machine Interface.
Have fun trying to run a 40 year old C++ program.
This sounds a lot like Spotify's XIRP. They managed to vibe something useful for their own engineers, were super hyped, and decided to release it in public. However what are the odds this harness will stand the test of time against actual harness makers like OpenAI or Anthropic? Neither Spotify or IBM are focused on making models or harnesses, these are just side-products.
To be fair Codex and Claude Code don't have a lot of secret sauce either. This is not to say that the harness doesn't matter at all or that you can't do any better, but whenever they benchmark it always turns out that you don't lose that much with even a very minimal agent. If a different harness makes better sense for your workflow I don't see why you wouldn't switch (or make your own if you have the resources to do so).
I'm also sticking to first-party agents, but that's more because I feel no compelling reason to switch and CLI agents fit well with my spartan technology choices. YMMV.
IBM is training their own models (for instance IBM granite) as well as watsonx as a platform. They are trying to build a products for enterprise as well as their specific AI modernization models.
Sure! IBM and Spotify, two companies united in being famous for not being software consulting businesses and definitely not ever developing software development tools.
The throwback nostalgia of that package might actually sell well, even if purchased ironically. HTMX did a Gameboy release and everyone gushed over it for no serious technical merits.
> 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?
honestly that would still probably mean more than story points. maybe all this AI insanity has an upside that the new cargo cult washes out the old one.
It's puzzling, considering they made some strides towards improving their design language and systems in past years, which produced IBM Plex etc. under Mike Abbink.
They have a decent component system with Carbon[0] and a whole design principles website[1] which they could have easily pointed their LLM of choice to.
Even the ibm.com landing page isn't close to the design system spec, rounded corners and whatnot...
> 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.
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.
Good point. Maybe I'm still puzzled by the coins choice. But it makes sense that they may trust that ecosystem more and an IBM offering since they have a lot of business there. Thank you!
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
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:).
Working with any AI tool means you trust the vendor, sometimes you don't have a choice because the best models/tools are from specific providers. IBM isn't a company I would ever trust.
I was forced to work with IBM closely for years. That has led me to believe it's the single most institutionally incompetent company in the world. If they ever do anything well it's pure coincidence and most likely due to some single hero dev.
IBM should be searching their patents, obscure computer architecture research, and historical low level hardware development to try to figure out how to get low energy AI systems running.
They should pivot their cloud offerings toward research labs.
“Here’s 10 different clusters of analog compute you can rent for half the price of building it out yourselves. It doesn’t map to the math you’re using right now, but it looks much more like a human brain. Have fun!”
Is this just a harness or using a proprietary model in the background? Anthropic and OpenAI are already very well trained in IBM system i and z knowledge. Unless Bob is somehow improving the integration to these midrange and mainframe systems I literally dont see any benefit to using Bob. IBM will just kill this proprietary tech in 5 years as they are currently doing with RDi or forget about updating it like SEU.
I think it's just a harness that uses proprietary (or maybe IBM is hosting open weight?) models. They say on the site (in the FAQs) that you can't even choose which model!
So it seems to be a harness that auto-routes your queries with no way to change this.
IBM has models trained for older mainframe usage (RPG II, RPG/400, COBOL, etc) so I imagine it would be very good for that. Bob looks like a branded fork of vs code or vscodium.
That’s partly why they are giants. Let the startups take the arrows necessary to figure out or create the market. Then they can buy or build the gen 2 system that meets the needs of the market.
Microsoft got this right once, and it cost them big to turn up late - that was the Internet and Windows 95 and the massive u-turn. Otherwise, they've been defining stuff early a lot I think. It's hard to explain how big a turnaround they had to do back then, but then it says a lot that until they made that u-turn the leadership was so confident in their own hubris they thought they could take on the entire internet with their own crap version of AOL.
IBM invented the PC and then lost control of that identity. Figuring out how that happened is something they are going to have a meeting about, but they're still working through the meetings to plan that meeting, and the Gantt chart for those meetings takes meetings to adjust, and everybody is in meetings so doesn't have time for those meetings. They'll get to them though.
Apple consistently turn up late, but redefine and improve the status quo. They sometimes prototype early in public (for example, the Newton), but normally they show up with the version 3 that everyone else wished they'd thought of that then goes on to define a sector quite cleanly (Mac, iMac, Mac OS System X, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Mac Mini). They Newton'ed Siri, but I'm pretty sure they're going to come back strong in the next 18 months, unless the enshitification we've all witnessed over the last few years really has taken hold and Siri is just going to automate that at scale. Maybe we will all be killed by AI, but not through malevolent evil, but widely distributed incompetence.
Meta are constantly taking swings at the latest thing the founder is excited by - the Metaverse (now with legs!), pervert glasses, and so on - but they mostly prop up a bunch of expensive failures on the back of a hugely successful advertising business. I don't think they come late to the party per se, they're just not very good at anything that isn't killing & harming children, or undermining democracy. They should stay in their lane and keep doing that, I guess.
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.
Feels like a manager with no branding skills had an initial “vision” and everyone working there probably hoped marketing/branding would get pulled in later.
Is anyone out there paying for this? I know you are there. Come out explain yourself. And also explain the value of a Bobcoin, and if can be scalped and resold on eBay.
As somebody already mentioned, they already had a big product named after their CEO. IBM Watson was the next big thing after Deep Blue, and it went pretty viral after defeating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy back in ~2011.
It was a bit of a market play and of course has since been completely upstaged by the invention of LLMs, but it still definitely got them the attention they wanted at the time.
Yes, I know, I got a job offer to work in the Watson research lab around that time, at the T.J. Watson facility. I declined because they weren’t remote-friendly, among other things.
But IBM Tom would at least have a rationale. WTF is IBM Bob and why does it have the same name as an old Microsoft product?
The copy is "clearly" written with AI… too bad. Some organizations "can't go wrong with Big Blue," so this will probably be a success. Perhaps it's even good, but that's not the case with this sloppy copywriting.
First paragraph: focused, what matters, clean. Shame they didn't throw in a "load-bearing" example and a few pelicans to boot.
Bob has been out for a while. It just never got a lot of press. IBM has also been developing more "enterprise" flavored LLMs through their Granite series. In fact they were trying to make small, mission-specific LMs a thing for the last two years or so.
Why so negative? I for one cannot wait for IBM Bob to become the most successful AI solution - nay, product - ever, and eagerly await petrobobcoin eclipsing the petrodollar to become the only truly global currency. They have a CLI with giant ASCII art text for heavens sake! When has anything with giant ASCII art text ever been of poor quality? They made a fork of Visual Studio Code and everything!
The companies who are hoarding RAM to produce pointless products should be called out. Deprive working class from computing resources to sell some corporate crap. Get fucked.
So it's just a vscode wrapper around a mystery open weights LLM I'm guessing?
> Can I choose which model Bob uses?
> No. Bob automatically selects the most appropriate language model for each task based on complexity, required capabilities, and cost-efficiency. This intelligent routing ensures you receive high-quality responses while optimizing resource usage.
“Bobcoins are the consumption-based billing metric used for Bob subscriptions. They provide a transparent, predictable way to measure and bill for your Bob usage.”
I’m getting sick of these mobile game currency style credits/coins that obfuscate costs or usage. It’s honestly pretty gross.
Just telling us exactly what we get for our money.