IBM Bob

How you doing fellow kids?

1000

tbh - my first thought, especially with that figure and marketing, is "Bob the Builder"...

[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Builder_(character) ]

Also in the UK and never heard of this in my life. Guessing this is very regional?

Clippy came out of that....

IBM is training their own models (for instance IBM granite) as well as watsonx as a platform. They are trying to build a products for enterprise as well as their specific AI modernization models.

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.

> actual harness makers

I agree IBM Bob is not the revolution, but…

We are still in the punch card era of LLMs. Maybe even the Altair era.

None of this stuff has really been figured out yet.

markdown as a service is crazy

IBM hasn't made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.

It's puzzling, considering they made some strides towards improving their design language and systems in past years, which produced IBM Plex etc. under Mike Abbink.

They have a decent component system with Carbon[0] and a whole design principles website[1] which they could have easily pointed their LLM of choice to.

Even the ibm.com landing page isn't close to the design system spec, rounded corners and whatnot...

[0] https://preview.carbondesignsystem.com/ [1] https://www.ibm.com/design/language/

It's IBM. They leveraged synergies with the thought leaders they could reach out and touch base with.

If you search those names you'll find most have a LinkedIn page proudly displaying their many "IBM Influencer" achievements and qualifications.

I realise LinkedIn is a surrealist caricature of corporate reality, but just imagine proudly displaying your #1 shill award for all to see

Pretty sure a lot of people got fired over Microsoft Bob though

Can we say it's Bob's fault, though? Bob did it, not me.

Nobody who got fired uses IBM Bob

That’s partly why they are giants. Let the startups take the arrows necessary to figure out or create the market. Then they can buy or build the gen 2 system that meets the needs of the market.

Microsoft got this right once, and it cost them big to turn up late - that was the Internet and Windows 95 and the massive u-turn. Otherwise, they've been defining stuff early a lot I think. It's hard to explain how big a turnaround they had to do back then, but then it says a lot that until they made that u-turn the leadership was so confident in their own hubris they thought they could take on the entire internet with their own crap version of AOL.

IBM invented the PC and then lost control of that identity. Figuring out how that happened is something they are going to have a meeting about, but they're still working through the meetings to plan that meeting, and the Gantt chart for those meetings takes meetings to adjust, and everybody is in meetings so doesn't have time for those meetings. They'll get to them though.

Apple consistently turn up late, but redefine and improve the status quo. They sometimes prototype early in public (for example, the Newton), but normally they show up with the version 3 that everyone else wished they'd thought of that then goes on to define a sector quite cleanly (Mac, iMac, Mac OS System X, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Mac Mini). They Newton'ed Siri, but I'm pretty sure they're going to come back strong in the next 18 months, unless the enshitification we've all witnessed over the last few years really has taken hold and Siri is just going to automate that at scale. Maybe we will all be killed by AI, but not through malevolent evil, but widely distributed incompetence.

Meta are constantly taking swings at the latest thing the founder is excited by - the Metaverse (now with legs!), pervert glasses, and so on - but they mostly prop up a bunch of expensive failures on the back of a hugely successful advertising business. I don't think they come late to the party per se, they're just not very good at anything that isn't killing & harming children, or undermining democracy. They should stay in their lane and keep doing that, I guess.

I believe it sends to various models in the background, So largely a harness / framework. Ibm does have its own model which is one of the options for Bob to use.

(Note, I'm an IBMer but nowhere near this so my comment is strictly from my public knowledge/awareness:).

I thought MS killed that name forever.

It's like they're begging for failure

Call it PC Bob

At least it's not Clippy(2)

Not exactly like that, but something similar :)

IBM already have IBM Watson which is probably named after the CEO

I'm surprised they didn't use Watson.

My guess is absolutely nobody on the team that made this is even old enough to remember Microsoft Bob.

> But it is IBM after all.

Then how did you not see that coming?