IBM Bob (bob.ibm.com)

1000

How you doing fellow kids?

So good

yet hp exist after decades, just a terrible printer corp going long term is insane really

   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 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.

Nobody has yet been fired for IBM Bob setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster

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?

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?

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.

My first thought as well!!

It's IBM. They leveraged synergies with the thought leaders they could reach out and touch base with.

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

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."

It’s actually hard to sell anything to developers, it’s however much easier to do with executives and managers

Theres even one that says "Bib [sic] is a highly reliable partner."

One carousel quote literally ends with "Bib is a highly reliable partner."

Also in the UK and never heard of this in my life. Guessing this is very regional?

tbh - my first thought, especially with that figure and marketing, is "Bob the Builder"...

[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Builder_(character) ]

Never enough Frank Sidebottom on here

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.

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.

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!

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.

I had thought that in the UK, Bob was everyone's uncle.

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...

markdown as a service is crazy

IBM hasn't made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.

how long before some hero puts them on github?

What do you mean by renting out an agent skill? How can one even rent a Skill? It’s just a markdown file

This is the most IBM thing IBM ever IBM'd.

Well, at least the AI market is validated now.

To be fair Codex and Claude Code don't have a lot of secret sauce either. This is not to say that the harness doesn't matter at all or that you can't do any better, but whenever they benchmark it always turns out that you don't lose that much with even a very minimal agent. If a different harness makes better sense for your workflow I don't see why you wouldn't switch (or make your own if you have the resources to do so).

I'm also sticking to first-party agents, but that's more because I feel no compelling reason to switch and CLI agents fit well with my spartan technology choices. YMMV.

> actual harness makers

I agree IBM Bob is not the revolution, but…

We are still in the punch card era of LLMs. Maybe even the Altair era.

None of this stuff has really been figured out yet.

IBM is training their own models (for instance IBM granite) as well as watsonx as a platform. They are trying to build a products for enterprise as well as their specific AI modernization models.

Sure! IBM and Spotify, two companies united in being famous for not being software consulting businesses and definitely not ever developing software development tools.

honestly that would still probably mean more than story points. maybe all this AI insanity has an upside that the new cargo cult washes out the old one.

It's puzzling, considering they made some strides towards improving their design language and systems in past years, which produced IBM Plex etc. under Mike Abbink.

They have a decent component system with Carbon[0] and a whole design principles website[1] which they could have easily pointed their LLM of choice to.

Even the ibm.com landing page isn't close to the design system spec, rounded corners and whatnot...

[0] https://preview.carbondesignsystem.com/ [1] https://www.ibm.com/design/language/

As far as I can tell, IBM has mostly been putting out junk for twenty years.

Pretty sure a lot of people got fired over Microsoft Bob though

Nobody who got fired uses IBM Bob

Can we say it's Bob's fault, though? Bob did it, not me.

Nope, but they'll probably get laid off at some point to boost share price.

There is so much business software out there and ecosystems that have evolved around it. Systems still running cobol on IBM mainframes; or, more "modern" stacks like Java apps running in IBM websphere. There are relatively small numbers of HN reading folk that went to some of the best CS programs and/or work(ed) at FANG caliber companies (whatever you call them now). The rest of the software engineer types are a diverse crowd and turning to IBM Bob might be more natural than some creepy looking orange starfish offering. That's my hypothesis anyway.

I'm sure tons of companies have retainer spends with IBM for software, hardware, consulting, etc., and this is another way for their corporate clients to spend down / increase their retainers faster

That IBM Z skill locked behind an "enterprise only" pay point would be a good starting point.

See: Kiro by AWS

They took a page from AWS on whatever the hell a Kiro token is supposed to represent.

"frontier" is pretty load bearing there, I think it tops out at sonnet 4.5?

It's been a while since Sonnet 4.5 could be considered frontier :D

IBM knows their customers very well, the additional context unlocks a lot of value.

The memes write themselves

Still provisioning...

Clippy came out of that....

"Bob" is also the most difficult to listen to Primus song.

Probably by design considering the songs subject matter.

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 generally agree except for these two things: IBM Carbon design system is quite neat. IBM Plex typefaces are lovely, as well. I'm a designer