IBM Bob
Shares rank 39 of 41 coding agents by recommenders
Recommended for enterprise cost control and IBM-specific tooling. Critics say it is a VS Code fork with weak security defaults and is not production-ready.
Recommended for enterprise cost control and IBM-specific tooling. Critics say it is a VS Code fork with weak security defaults and is not production-ready.
57 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 52
- approval share
- 9%
Recommended in 2 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 2 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Security and trust concerns
“Users have been trained to do this, as shifting the burden to the user with no way to enforce bounds or even sensible defaults.”
Comment from 8 Jan 2026 in “IBM AI ('Bob') Downloads and Executes Malware” “IBM got banned from Queensland gov contracts for 12 years, after the humans decided to secretly scan all legal docs”
Comment from 5 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob” “setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob” - Comment from 8 Jan 2026 in “IBM AI ('Bob') Downloads and Executes Malware”
Generic VS Code fork, no edge
“Very little if anything of value since 2005+ that was actually IBM created. (Bob appears fully IBM created)”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob” “when I looked at it 6 months ago it was just a fork of vscode with old ass versions of Claude”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob” “it looks like an IBM-mediocre version of every other LLM coding tool that currently exists”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “IBM Bob” - Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob”
Widely called poor quality
“I couldn't think of a better signal to flee a job interview than seeing an IBM LLM cli on someone's screen.”
Comment from 8 Jan 2026 in “IBM AI ('Bob') Downloads and Executes Malware” “IBM hasn't made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob” “All of the best people I work with are using other tools because Bob is trash.”
Comment from 5 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob” Opaque token and cost pricing
“If only one could generate bobcoin using their GPU, only to use the bobcoin to use someone else's GPU.”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob” “transparent, predictable ... "a certain number of Bobcoins" ... so not that transparent then?”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob” “They took a page from AWS on whatever the hell a Kiro token is supposed to represent.”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “IBM Bob”
Other coding agents people recommend
The four most recommended other coding agents, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | 571 | 993 | 37% | 12 | 1 yr46 owners | — |
| oh-my-pi | 104 | 28 | 79% | 9 | 2 mo5 owners | Approved |
| Grok Build CLI | 66 | 114 | 37% | 6 | — | — |
| DeepSeek Harness | 63 | 28 | 69% | 4 | 1 mo5 owners | Approved |
| IBM BobThis page | 5 | 52 | 9% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 68 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the harness gives you no choice in the model so you have to hope it doesn't decide your task isn't complex enough”
“the bob team aggressively blocks you from calling the bob api”
“for someone who deals with their stack it might mean something to get IBM-specific tooling/knowledge”
“IBM got banned from Queensland gov contracts for 12 years, after the humans decided to secretly scan all legal docs”
“This is so ridiculous that I love it”
“you never know if something costs one coin or a tenth of a coin”
“hidden model routing to keep costs low, but predictably yields bad results”
“All of the best people I work with are using other tools because Bob is trash.”
“They took a page from AWS on whatever the hell a Kiro token is supposed to represent.”
“transparent, predictable ... "a certain number of Bobcoins" ... so not that transparent then?”
“Very little if anything of value since 2005+ that was actually IBM created. (Bob appears fully IBM created)”
“the additional context unlocks a lot of value”
“Terrible name, subpar landing page, no mention of coding ability”
“The "What developers say" carousel has a single Java dev and dev advocate.”
“when I looked at it 6 months ago it was just a fork of vscode with old ass versions of Claude”
“If only one could generate bobcoin using their GPU, only to use the bobcoin to use someone else's GPU.”
“setting up a secret message board and establishing a persistent foothold in an internal inference cluster”
“Definitely gonna change Jira config to start estimating work in Bobcoins.”
“I love how the pricing page has a "Most Popular" offering”
“they tack on surcharges to all token calls to Claude and GPT”
“The only positive versus others is that at an enterprise level you have more control of the costs with the coins.”
“They say on the site (in the FAQs) that you can't even choose which model!”
“these mobile game currency style credits/coins that obfuscate costs or usage”
“it is really good and helping”
“This somehow has less personality than plain enterprise software.”
“ibm desperately clinging to relevancy by hopping on the LLM bandwagon”
“Unless Bob is somehow improving the integration to these midrange and mainframe systems I literally dont see any benefit to using Bob.”
“Bob automatically selects the most appropriate language model for each task”
“IBM hasn't made a product that works since Db2 so I am fairly confident this is a flaming pile of garbage.”
“it looks like a VS Code fork + an agent panel which is very ... late 2024 energy?”
“Neither Spotify or IBM are focused on making models or harnesses, these are just side-products.”
“This is embarrassing. It would have been better to release nothing than this.”
“I never thought the day that IBM would make complete slop.”
“it looks like an IBM-mediocre version of every other LLM coding tool that currently exists”
“IBM just created an AI assistant that's basically been trained to run malware if you tell it nicely”
“Users have been trained to do this, as shifting the burden to the user with no way to enforce bounds or even sensible defaults.”
“I couldn't think of a better signal to flee a job interview than seeing an IBM LLM cli on someone's screen.”
“Thought the product looks good for a prototype, but crazy as a published product.”
“I can’t believe the Bob CLI is just another fork of the Gemini CLI”
“the command can be displayed as just `echo`, but allows execution of anything”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.