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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
https://imgur.com/a/3PQXIsQ
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.
https://bob.ibm.com/pricing
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
Maybe this time it'll work.
But it is IBM after all.
Then how did you not see that coming?