IBM Bob

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• Hacker News
• > 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?

  by cube00
• Nope, not predictable at all.

  Because they auto route still your requests, you never know if something costs one coin or a tenth of a coin

  by Bombthecat
• They took a page from AWS on whatever the hell a Kiro token is supposed to represent.
  by alchemism
• 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.
  by Ciantic
• Sure! IBM and Spotify, two companies united in being famous for not being software consulting businesses and definitely not ever developing software development tools.
  by lowbloodsugar
• 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.
  by xemdetia
• > 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.

  by abtinf
• 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.

  by qsort
• I feel second hand embarrassment for IBM. Terrible name, subpar landing page, no mention of coding ability or which LLM "Bob" uses.

  If you're launching something 2 years late, you've got to do better than this.

  by bluerooibos
• Well, at least the AI market is validated now.
  by kakapo5672
• They should have called it "WebSphere AI" and ship it on 5 DVDs, maybe with a serial port dongle.
  by rwoerz
• 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".
  by Stevvo
• IBM hasn't made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.
  by getatme32
• how long before some hero puts them on github?
  by SSLy
• What do you mean by renting out an agent skill? How can one even rent a Skill? It’s just a markdown file
  by sajithdilshan
• This is the most IBM thing IBM ever IBM'd.
  by redhale
• markdown as a service is crazy
  by qsort
• 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

  Good on them for at least trying.

  by epsteingpt
• 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

  by mhaberl
• Agreed. Note, that is at ~50% gross margin and ~15% profit margin which I guess is pretty typical of computer hardware vendors.
  by tedd4u
• 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".
  by exakoustos
• It’s actually hard to sell anything to developers, it’s however much easier to do with executives and managers
  by looksjjhg
• Theres even one that says "Bib [sic] is a highly reliable partner."
  by humodz
• One carousel quote literally ends with "Bib is a highly reliable partner."
  by emddudley
• It's IBM. They leveraged synergies with the thought leaders they could reach out and touch base with.
  by PaulRobinson
• 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

  by Skwid
• 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."

  by throwyawayyyy
• 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.

  [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bobbins

  by PaulRobinson
• 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!
  by Towaway69
• 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.
  by Intermernet