IBM Bob

Score9 out of 10

151 Reviews and Ratings

What is IBM Bob?

IBM Bob is an AI-assisted development tool designed to support developers across the software development lifecycle. It helps interpret developer intent and provides assistance when working with real-world codebases by using contextual awareness of the surrounding project.

Categories & Use Cases

#1 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

“We are accelerating the development of RPG software artifacts that run our business core applications and Bob is helping us to achieve this goal by reducing the time to market of our technical teams in the software development.”
— Cloud Coordinator, Banco Internacional (Enterprises)

#2 most frequent

Information

“Bob reduziert die Anzahl der Entwicklungsstunden.”
— Principal Consultant, PROFI AG (Mid-sized Companies)

#3 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

“IBM Bob Helps in automating the work in my company.”
— AI ML Engineer, GSU (Enterprises)

Pros

Comprehensive documentation generation for existing code
Analysis and rewriting of existing legacy code
Automation of development and testing workflows

Cons

Code generation accuracy issues, sometimes requiring manual correction
Complex and difficult-to-navigate user interface
Concerns regarding token usage and associated costs

Markus Glaser

Tech Lead Modernization in Information Technology at i and me - IT Training and Solutions GmbH (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am using IBM Bob to modernize old RPG programs running at our customers and to Document and Understand very old RPG code. The scope ranges from understanding and documentation to rewriting or generating new code. The heaviest workload is understanding and retrieving business critical process information from the existing RPG code reaching back to code from the 70s.

Pros

Understanding and Analyzing small chunks of code
Executing IBM i system commands

Cons

Understanding larger context of grown applications
Generating correct syntax of RPGLE code
Be more responsive to input from the developer regarding certain things to do or things especially NOT to do
Integration of the most up to date VSCode extensions
Not just understanding code, but also understanding the intention behind the code and the context built around the business process

Return on Investment

When trying to improve the system, it always suggests editing system settings, which, in my opinion, is not recommended for most customers - leading to additional effort to correct those mistakes
IBM Bob makes onboarding of new employees easier in ILE RPG which saves time
Complex syntax checking is not working, which results in additional code reviews for less experienced developers

Usability

Alternatives Considered

GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Grok Bot, OpenAI Codex and Ollama

Other Software Used

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Grok Bot, Notion, GitHub

Alex Walter

CTSO in Corporate at A3J Group (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We work with IBM Maximo on a daily basis. IBM Bob has helped us write automation scripts to address customer business requirements, develop integrations with third-party systems, and review and develop new features for our existing mobile application. It has given us an on-demand senior advisor to both review and create work.

Pros

Analyzes existing codebases for security risks.
Performs architectural reviews of existing codebases.
Develops new features and patterns.
Answers questions about how something works.
Generates documentation based on existing code.

Cons

Would like to see more personalization capabilities. Bob does a good job reading code and adapting to a given style, but there should be more specific personalization settings.
A more detailed understanding of how Bobcoins are spent would be welcome. This will help adapt to more efficient prompting.

Return on Investment

We've been able to grow our own development team from within as a result of using this technology. Team members who may not have been confident enough to meaningfully contribute to the existing codebase have now become high-output developers.
We've been able to grow an automated test suite to more thoroughly test our mobile application. What once took two weeks of manual regression testing can now be done in an afternoon.
Our documentation has improved considerably, giving the product a more polished feel. Product documentation had previously consistently lagged behind new feature development.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Claude Code

Other Software Used

IBM Maximo Application Suite, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft SQL Server

Richard Westerik View profile

Principal Specialist in Information Technology at Simac IT NL bv (501-1000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have been using IBM Bob for a variety of tasks and business problems, because it is quite versatile. My use ranges from simply rewriting programs (scripts) in another language, building custom scripts quickly to collect data and present it in human-readable form, or analyze data and draw conclusions from it. IBM Bob is quick to respond and easy to use.

Pros

Analyzing existing programs, explaining clearly what it does.
Rewriting programs in a more modern language and/or a much more modular design, adding lots of explanatory comments.
Analyzing large amounts of data, verifying assumptions are either true or false.
Improving my ability to write good prompts, by asking IBM Bob feedback about the prompt(s) I used.

Cons

In some cases, I asked IBM Bob to rewrite a Korn shell script in another language (Python), and it did so quickly. It's just the output looked different and didn't take some exceptions into account I had built in to the original script.
When I pointed out I wanted a "plug-in replacement", with some pointers for things to look for, it corrected those quickly. You do need to check its output (like with any AI).
Some colleagues had trouble signing up for IBM Bob (trials) if their e-mail address did not match their IBM ID etc. That process should be more clear, or foolproof.

Return on Investment

It lessened the dependency on me as 'the programmer' in the team. I usually had to write even the simplest of shell scripts for monitoring purposes. I just taught one of my colleagues to use IBM Bob to do it in a fraction of the time. He created it with two or three decent prompts. That saved him having to contact me and saved me time in creating it.
For the customer, this meant having the monitoring solution online within minutes, instead of days.
I asked IBM Bob to document a complex script that I wrote in ksh and rewrite it in Python. I can read Python but am not "fluent" in programming it. With the help of IBM Bob, I created a plug-in replacement of this tool within 1 day, which would normally have taken me weeks.
Also, the resulting tool runs 4 times faster than the original script.
A customer wanted to know if their suspicions were correct that, at certain times of the day, network traffic was slower. I had the systems (8 systems talking to each other) collect data every 30 seconds and fed the resulting .txt files into IBM Bob for analyzing, asking specific questions about time periods, inter- or intra datacenter traffic, etc. I first verified the details and examples it found in the data (to make sure it is correct) and asked it to generate a user-friendly report with a few tables.
That took less than 30 minutes to execute various queries until I was satisfied. It would have taken me days to analyze the data myself (and would probably missed some of the clues).

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft 365 Copilot and ChatGPT

Other Software Used

IBM AIX, IBM Storage Protect, IBM Power

Raj Ramaswamy

Senior Software Engineer in Finance and Accounting at US Bank (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use IBM Bob for my daily coding and analysis. I code on COBOL and Java as well.
IBM Bob has been phenomenal in analyzing and visualizing complex COBOL programs. The feature I use most is the z architect. I ask IBM Bob to analyze the impact if I change a table column size from 4 bytes to 9 bytes. IBM Bob analyzed my entire repository and suggested the changes needed in every program. It also gave the output in an HTML file which I used for presentation. The entire workflow just took 25 minutes. Manual effort would have taken days to complete. I would certainly recommend IBM Bob (with the premium package for Z).

Pros

Analyzing any COBOL program with produce well defined documentation with detailed flow diagrams in various formats.
The zcode and zarchitect modes provides detailed impact analysis and call graphs.
It wrote a set of classes for Prometheus for zDIH.

Cons

Sometimes IBM Bob provides an incorrect copybook layout. This is similar to 3.13 in File Manager. It miscalculates the bytes and positions.
At times, IBM Bob is very slow and takes more than 45 minutes to analyze complex programs.

Return on Investment

Productivity has significantly increased.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Other Software Used

IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm

Siddharth pakkam seshadry

Senior Manager in Information Technology at FIS (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We got a chance to use IBM Bob in our organization. We are exploring MCP servers to integrate with Instana. Configuring MCP servers in IBM Bob is very simple and easy. In other solutions, configuring MCP servers are not that easy.

Pros

MCP server configuration
Interacting with IBM in house products like Instana
Easy to integrate with GITHUB

Cons

If IBM Bob can integrate with COBOL code and convert them to JAVA/spring boot that will be of great help

Return on Investment

Root cause analysis from Instana can be done by using IBM bob with MCP servers
Integrating code base which is available in GITHUB
MCP server configuration is very simple

Usability

Alternatives Considered

IBM Instana

Other Software Used

IBM Instana

GitHub Copilot

Kiro

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IBM Bob

What is IBM Bob?

Categories & Use Cases

Most Frequent Users

Finance and Insurance

Information

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

IBM Bob Reviews

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Usability

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

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