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?
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.
As a fun addition, I think the atomic clock/time standards division when HP → Agilent → Symmetricom → Microsemi → Microchip. You could have bought a HP 5071A Cesium Frequency Standard under all of these badges!
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.
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.
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".
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 :)
so it tops out at sonnet 4.5 as the largest model it will use. the harness gives you no choice in the model so you have to hope it doesn't decide your task isn't complex enough and auto-route you to a smaller/weaker model which you then go round and round in circles with where a larger model would've 1 shotted it
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.
And what? IDK about BOB that is available for IBM customers, but closed source? As someone wrote in different thread is based on VScode, calling BOB's API.
Also do you know how chatgpt works? same for claude? Agents? Governance?
You know nothing and now just hating here :)
Also copilot and MS365 copilot, many local models etc...
Many haters (companies, etc...) can only dream about availability of models we usually have here.
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.
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)
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
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:).
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.
I’m quite certain it’s a fork of Roo Code which is a fork of Cline.
When I saw earlier reviews and videos of it, I couldn’t shake the ick of IBM shamelessly forking a startup’s code. There was even some UI slop where they had some big green pulsing button.
That combined with knowing full well how inefficient the default Roo Code base prompts were, I would not be surprised if there’s some massive token churn.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 3589 ms ] threadBut it is IBM after all.
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?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
Only beaten by Lenovo.
It's as if I bought an old telephone exchange building and called it Bell Labs.
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
signed: a proud IBMer
"claude, get this c++ program working"
these types of moats are all but obliterated.
When you stop paying but keep using the skill, that’s called pirating.
(Note, I'm an IBMer but nowhere near this so my comment is strictly from my public knowledge/awareness:).
(I'm also an IBMer.)
When I saw earlier reviews and videos of it, I couldn’t shake the ick of IBM shamelessly forking a startup’s code. There was even some UI slop where they had some big green pulsing button.
That combined with knowing full well how inefficient the default Roo Code base prompts were, I would not be surprised if there’s some massive token churn.
Maybe this time it'll work.