July 13, 2026

IBM’s push into the world of agentic coding continues, as Big Blue officially started selling and supporting major updates to its Bob agentic AI software. There are two separate but related pieces of news to cover, including the release of IBM Bob Premium Package for i and the release of Bob 2.0.

As it is wont to do, IBM generated some confusion with its Bob launches, as both Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages became available on the same day, June 24. However, Bob 2.0 and the Bob premium packages are not the same thing, and their announcements were made largely separately.

IBM announced the release of Bob 2.0 on its Bob website (www.bob.ibm.com) while the various premium package announcements were made through IBM’s standard announcement letter process, which has no mention of the Bob 2.0 announcement. AI is changing many things in this world, but apparently some things at IBM will never change.

First, let’s cover Bob 2.0.

Bob 2.0 brings significant changes to the product, both in terms of its architectural underpinnings as well as the features that IBM exposes to users.

On the architectural front, Bob 2.0 delivers a unified foundation for both of the core executables within the AI product, including the IDE extension for VS Code and the shell environment. By the way, the shell environment for Bob 2.0 has not shipped yet.

This unified foundation is a big change from Bob 1.0, which used separate foundations for the two environments. That allowed the company to deliver the product more quickly, but it required more work from IBM, which had to deliver every improvement twice.

According to a June 24 blog post on Bob 2.0 by the IBM Bob team, the new foundation in Bob 2.0 is based on a three-tier architecture that’s composed of the agent, the harness, and the clients. The agent provides reasoning and code generation capabilities, while the harness handles ancillary capabilities like authentication, logging, and telemetry. The client component provides the interface for the users. Currently there are two – the IDE and the planned upcoming shell – but IBM says there are more to come.

This new unified architecture impacts how Bob 2.0 works. For starters, the Bob AI agent should behave identically across every client. It also runs more quickly and delivers better overall performance. Users report that the answers are more accurate, and its capability to self-correct has improved.

Bob 2.0 also introduces the concept of subagents. For certain tasks, such as figuring out how authentication works in a codebase, Bob will automatically spin up subagents. The subagents will work on the task in parallel with a clean context window, and summarize the findings back to the main agent.

Bob 2.0 also brings parallel tool calling, which is a big enhancement over Bob 1.0. Previously, tools ran sequentially, so if a task required conducting multiple file reads and searches, the user was left waiting for Bob to finish. IBM says tasks that previously took 30 seconds can now be completed in less than 10 seconds thanks to the parallel processing.

Instead of wrapping every tool call in XML, as Bob 1.0, Bob 2.0 calls tools natively, which means fewer tokens are burned. Bob 2.0 reads .docx, .xlsx, and .pdf files natively, eliminating copying and pasting. The context window for Bob 2.0 is 270,000 tokens, up from 200,000 tokens in Bob 1.0.

Bob 2.0 introduces three modes for the AI product, including agent, plan, and ask. The agent mode takes action and delivers full agentic capabilities, while the plan mode is an “opinionated planning process” that focuses on gathering requirements, discovering context, and checking understand. The ask mode is a read-only mode for exploring the architecture.

IBM replaced the old checkpoint feature with a new feature called rollbacks. Checkpoints worked, but were based on Git, so if a user wasn’t using Git (which was probably the majority of IBM i users), the entire history was stored, which slowed things down. The new rollbacks feature provides a more streamlined mechanism for tracking (and providing rollbacks for) all changes at the task, conversation, and individual tool call level.

Finally, Bob 2.0 introduces the concept of workflows, which gives a “backbone” to repeatable processes.

“Not every step wants AI, and not every step should be fully automated,” the IBM Bob team writes. “A workflow defines where each step belongs. The engine runs the steps in order, holds state, handles errors, and makes the whole process repeatable.”

IBM is delivering the workflows via the premium packages. There are three premium packages, one each for IBM i, System Z, and Java. That brings us to Bob Premium Package for i announcement, which we have known about for some time and which we wrote about back in early June following IBM’s official announcement on May 21 in software announcement A26-0539.

Bob Premium Package for i

Bob Premium Package for i, which as we previously mentioned became generally available on June 24, brings several important features for IBM i customers, namely support for direct connections to the IBM i and new modes, including an IBM i Developer Mode and a Database Mode.

In the first release, Bob needed the source code it was working on to be either loaded on the PC that the developer was using or accessible via a Git repository on the Web (Bob is a Web-based tool, after all, Bob-self being essentially a version of VS Code). With the Premium Pack, Bob can now work directly with source members residing in the QSYS or with files sitting on the IFS.

This functionality is a big deal, as most IBM i developers are used to working directly with source code sitting directly on the IBM i. While the future of software development may be to hold source in a Git type repository, that is not how the bulk of IBM i developers currently use it. Meeting IBM i devs where they currently sit is smart for IBM, and this capability likely will lead to a significant increase in the number of IBM i’ers using Bob, which is good.

“If I’m going to do development, I should be able to work with source code where it typically lives,” Tim Rowe, a senior technical staff member for IBM i at IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota lab and its software architect for development tools and systems management, said on a recent episode of Charlie Guarino’s iChime podcast.

“For most of our customers, it’s typical that it’s on QSYS. Maybe they’ve moved forward a little bit and it’s on IFS,” Rowe continued. “The bottom line is, source code is on the IBM i so why can’t I work with my source code where it lives?”

The new Developer Mode that ships in the Premium Pack gives Bob much better knowledge of IBM i. Developer Mode essentially turns Bob into the persona of a programmer skilled in IBM i-centric languages, like RPG, COBOL, DDS, SQL, and CL. As Rowe said during his POWERUp 2026 keynote, Developer Mode lets Bob know about “the intricacies, the uniqueness of our platform.”

“If you develop, you have to run stuff on the IBM i,” Rowe said during the iChime appearance with Guarino. “You have to run a CL command, you have to run SQL, you have to run a PASE script – whatever the case may be. That was our problem: We need to be able to have Bob be able to perform those same features and functions.”

The new Database Mode elevates Bob into a database nerd. “This is truly one of those things where Bob has been elevated,” Rowe said. “Some of the stuff you can do in Database Mode is mind blowing. . . . It’s phenomenal.

Not only can Bob write SQL with Database Mode, but it can check it for errors, explain what it’s doing, all using best practices for Db2 for i. “This is where we’ve tried to take Scott and Ryan’s head and packaged it into a tool,” Rowe said, referring reference to STSM and Database Architect Scott Forstie and Software Engineer Ryan Moeller, who has been instrumental in developing the SQE query engine and query optimizer.

The Premium Package includes about 40 new skills and workflows, which enable Bob to perform specific tasks on IBM i, such as extracting business rules from code, compiling code, generating display files, and converting RPG from fixed-format to free-format. Bob now understands all major languages on IBM i, including archaic features like the RPG cycle.

As Rowe said, Bob now understands IBM i context and gives clarity on tasks. “I want to perform a task. How do you do it? What’s the best way? What are the gotchas that Bob needs to be aware of?’” Rowe said. “Those are the things that we are building into these different use cases.”

The Premium Package also brings support for about 30 specialized tools for IBM i, such as reading and writing to QSYS or IFS, running CL commands and SQL statements, launching 5250 sessions, and managing library lists. The Premium Package also adds support for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) workflows on IBM i.

IBM intends its IBM i customers to use Bob to help modernize older applications. In its press release, IBM touted progress that IBM i banking software provider Jack Henry (which apparently changed its name from Jack Henry & Associates back in 2022) made with its “large RPG codebase.”

“Using IBM Bob, our developers are able to accelerate RPG development workflows, improve code quality, and gain deeper insights into decades of accumulated system knowledge while gaining efficiency in enhancement efforts,” stated Kevin Sligar, chief technical architect at Jack Henry.

The Premium Packages are add-ons to existing Bob subscriptions. They work with all three versions of Bob – Pro, Pro+, and Ultra. The Premium Package for i will add about $20 to $40 per month to the cost of Bob on top of the cost of the base Bob version. Including the Premium Package for i, Bob Pro costs $60 to $80 per month, Pro+ costs $100 per month, while Ultra costs $240 per month. For more information, see bob.ibm.com/.

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