April 6, 2026
The launch of the Bob AI coding tool in late March has been met with considerable amount of hoopla by IBM, as well as anticipation by the IBM i community. The early reception to Bob has been mixed, due in part to the lack of one particular feature.
Bob is a new AI tool from IBM that’s designed to help developers understand, document, and generate code in a variety of languages and platforms. On the IBM i server, Bob supports RPG, as well as CL, SQL, DDS, and COBOL, while it supports other languages on other platforms. IBM introduced Bob last fall and launched its first release of Bob on March 24.
With the current release of Bob, users must download all of their code to the PC in order for Bob to work. That has been met with some disappointment by some users.
“I tried the pre-release version of Bob for a while but since it [didn’t] utilize IBM i connections, including the ability to work with source files and libraries, I stopped using it,” one IBM i professional from the Chicago area told us. “I was looking forward to the official release of Bob, hoping these limitations were taken care of. They were not.”
Tim Rowe, the IBM i business architect responsible for system management and application development in Rochester, Minnesota, acknowledged this limitation during an IBM i Guided Tour webinar last week.
IBM has a Premium Package for i and a Premium Package Expansion coming up.
“Today, all of this source is on my PC. Today, with the base version of Bob that came out, it’s on the PC,” Rowe said. “That’s one of the big items that is, in fact, part of the premium pack: The ability to connect, read, and write your source, not from your local workspace, but from your IBM i itself. That’s the future.”
IBM is expected to announce the Premium Package for i at the COMMON POWERUp conference that’s coming up later this month in New Orleans, with availability expected by the end of the second quarter, according to Rowe. There will also be a Premium Package Expansion, which will provide end-to-end SDLC (software development lifecycle) support, but the timing of that offering was not provided.
Rowe said there’s a workaround to the lack of a native IBM i connection for Bob. Customers can use the MCP Server to provide that IBM i connection, he said. “But it’s not going to be quite as seamless,” Rowe said. “It’s not going to have the same quality of tools that are going to be available when you get the premium package support available.”
In the meantime, the Chicago IBM i professional is moving forward with Anthropic’s Claud, which he finds has good support for IBM i and RPG. “It can read IBM i source files and does a pretty good job of working with RPG,” he said.
Bob works as a plug-in to VS Code, the Web-based IDE from Microsoft that has become popular in the IBM i community thanks to the Code for i plug-in from Liam Allan. But according to Rowe, Bob actually is a full replacement for VS Code as well as RDi, the fat client integrated development environment (IDE) from IBM.
Pricing for the various Bob packages is in line with what we wrote in our Bob 1.0 story in early March. (Click on image for link.)
“I don’t need to use VS Code anymore,” Rowe said during the IBM i Guided Tour. “I don’t need to go get VS Code and install it on my PC. It’s a replacement. I’m getting Bob, which includes VS Code. Maybe it’s semantics, but nonetheless we are going to leverage all the code for is support. . . So none of that is going away. It’s just that what I install on my PC is Bob. I don’t need to install VS Code.”
Rowe also addressed some questions about how Bob stores user data. When a user asks Bob to perform a function, such as analyzing RPG code or generating SQL, Bob calls a large language model (LLM) and passes the relevant user data to the LLM running in the IBM Cloud. That user data is only used for one thing, Rowe said: to execute the command given by the user.
All of the network connections – between the IBM i server and Bob running on a PC, and PC Bob and the IBM Cloud – are encrypted, Rowe said. When the Bob session is over, the data is removed from the IBM Cloud.
“It’s not stored there,” Rowe said. “So if I sign out and come back the next day, all the data that’s been up in the cloud is gone. It doesn’t remember anymore. And your data is never used to train a model. So that’s one of the big differentiator for sure for Bob compared to other options.”
According to Rowe, IBM takes security seriously with Bob, and delivers all of the enterprise features that customers demand.
“Bob is intended to be an enterprise solution,” he said. “Our enterprise customers have the ability to have a tool to go and develop code, leveraging AI, that provides the security , the regulation, the guardrails, the IP protection that you as an enterprise customer not expect, but demand.”
RELATED STORIES
Early Bob Excels In Medhost IBM i Tryout
IBM Gets Bob 1.0 Off The Ground
Bob More Than Just A Code Assistant, IBM i Chief Architect Will Says
IBM Pulls The Curtain Back A Smidge On Project Bob
Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”