80,000 internal guinea pigs, Bobcoins, mainframe dreams and a name that really should have raised more flags
IBM has announced global availability of Bob, the AI coding assistant - sorry partner - which it claims has delivered a productivity boost to the 80,000 big bluers pressed into guinea pig status last year.
The GA status coincides with the launch of an IBM Bob Premium Package for Z, "which integrates and enhances the capabilities of IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z to deliver advanced features for enterprise-scale mainframe applications."
IBM said in a statement it's teams that used Bob saw an "average of 45 percent productivity gains across complex, multi-step workflows."
This makes IBM just the latest company to lean on its own staff to "prove" the efficacy of it AI platforms. PwC and Accenture have both told staff progression depends on buying into their AI visions.
As for IBM, the firm says Bob uses a mix of frontier LLMs, open-source models, small language models (SLMs) and IBM’s Granite SLM family to automate and augment the full software development lifecycle, from discovery and planning to design, coding, and testing.
It claims to embed security directly in to workflows and catches "new categories of risk that traditional controls were not designed to catch, from prompt injection to unintended data exposure."
Bob was put to work on Big Blue's own RevTech platform, delivering - we're told - "measurable gains" including "10x project-based ROI", 300k payloads automated in testing scenarios, and "monitoring built in hours versus months."
Customers are expected to use the platform for analyzing systems groaning with technical debt and a lack of documentation. Which probably sums up many mainframe installations, where knowledge and expertise is literally dying off or has been long exported offshore, despite their status as systems of record in key organizations including financial services firms.
The Z package offers Architect mode, to help "teams understand application structure, dependencies, business intent and change impact before updates are made." Code mode "generates, refactors and transforms standards aligned code using Zaware context."
While this is being touted as a "premium package", right now IBM customers are getting it as a "no-cost, private technical preview." Otherwise current prices range from a $20 per month for the Pro tier with 40 Bobcoins, to Ultra at $200, with 500 Bobcoins.
What’s a Bobcoin? About 50 cents, apparently.
GitHub recently reworked its Copilot pricing after concluding that more complex prompts were losing it money. Given that Bob’s raison d’etre is more complex requests from the get go, it will be interesting to see how Bob fixes that particular conundrum.
Kate Holterhoff, senior industry analyst at RedMonk, said one differentiator for Bob was its multi-modal approach, with the platform choosing the best model.
“This is a double edged sword, as developers can be suspicious of black box tools, but it also eliminates the paralysis of choice that comes from switching models between tasks.”
She added, “This may be a path forward as vendors like GitHub are forced to change billing structures to absorb the high cost of running these models.”
Bob’s path to GA has not been entirely smooth. In January it emerged that researchers had found it could be manipulated into executing malware via the CLI, while the IDE is vulnerable to common AI-specific data exfiltration vectors.
The brand may prove a challenge of its own. For those with long enough memories, Bob will inevitably conjure Microsoft's mid-90s consumer shell for Windows, widely regarded as one of the worst products in tech history.
Some legacies really don't bear revisiting. ®