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.

How you doing fellow kids?

1000

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.

So good

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?

Naming a new product which is a "partner that helps you by making it easier" "Bob" seems like a... lack of historical awareness?

My first thought as well!!

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.

for… kids? :/

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.

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.

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...

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!

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

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

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

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

Never enough Frank Sidebottom on here

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."

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

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

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

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

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

markdown as a service is crazy

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

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

how long before some hero puts them on github?

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

Well, at least the AI market is validated now.

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

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.

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.

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

See: Kiro by AWS

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

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

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

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

Nobody who got fired uses IBM Bob

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.

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.

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

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

Probably by design considering the songs subject matter.

Clippy came out of that....

[dead]

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:).

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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

I'm convinced they do and they're trolling us.How many 100s of 1000s in consulting do you think it took to come up with Bob?

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.

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.

I thought MS killed that name forever.

It's like they're begging for failure

Call it PC Bob

Better than IBM Tay.

Funny, because "bob" is slang for shillings in the old LSD pre-decimal British currency system (coins worth 5 pence in the modern system).

If only one could generate bobcoin using their GPU, only to use the bobcoin to use someone else's GPU.

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.

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!

/THINK

one-off, LLMs killed it would be my take.

At least it's not Clippy(2)

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.

https://www.ibm.com/history/watson-jeopardy

IBM already have IBM Watson which is probably named after the CEO

IBM Wat?

My guess is absolutely nobody on the team that made this is even old enough to remember Microsoft Bob.

Not exactly like that, but something similar :)

I'm surprised they didn't use Watson.

[dead]

If they produce pointless products then they will lose money.

> But it is IBM after all.

Then how did you not see that coming?