Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”

October 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.

Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified code assistant code-named “Project Bob” that will not only converge these two previously developed and as yet largely uncommercialized code assistants and also provide a lot more functionality through an AI-infused integrated development environment. Presumably all of the work that IBM has done in training the Rochester models to take old fixed format RPG II, RPG III, and ILE RPG code into modern free form RPG and to take COBOL and transform it into Java code has been retained. But maybe not, considering that the Claude AI models from OpenAI spinoff Anthropic are behind the Project Bob IDE.

Our guess is that, considering that the Claude Sonnet 4.5 model from Anthropic is widely regarded as the best LLM for code analysis and code generation among its peers, this model has been heavily used in creating Project Bob. Sources at IBM tell us that Project Bob also makes use of IBM’s own Granite models as well as the Llama models from Meta Platforms and other models from Mistral. But we reckon that Claude Sonnet is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

Neel Sundaresan, general manager of automation and AI at IBM, holding up a doll version of Project Bob.

The IBM page describing Project Bob says that it can do automatic upgrades from Java 8 to Java 17 and can do Java framework migrations from Struts or JSF to React or Angular or other modern frameworks, and can help inject security into the DevOps process using Ansible, Terraform, and other tools. It doesn’t say anything about either RPG or COBOL, but we have been assured that Project Bob is indeed going to replace those Watsonx Code Assistants we have been writing about for nearly two years now.

It also looks to us that Big Blue has been separately working on Project Bob for quite some time, and perhaps the partnership that IBM and Anthropic announced last week at the developer conference has been in the works for a long time, and was actually inked many months ago. The reason we believe this is because Neel Sundaresan, general manager of automation and AI at IBM, says that the 6,000 software developers at Big Blue have been using the Project Bob IDE for the past four months, which would mean it was created even longer ago.

Sundaresan did a demo of Project Bob during the opening keynote of TechX25, as the conference is called in shorthand, which you can watch at this link. There is a QR code at the end of the demo that allows you to sign up to be part of the early release program. You can also join the waitlist for access to Project Bob here.

Project Bob looks a lot more useful, in a general sense, than something that only can convert from old RPG to new RPG or from COBOL to Java. It can do all kinds of programming tasks, and is really being pitched as a junior programmer than can do things at the behest of a seasoned programmer that has too many things to do.

As it turns out, the IBM developers have taken a shining to Project Bob, according to Sundaresan. About 3,000 programmers at IBM use it every, and another 1,500 use it once every two days. Over a ten day period, all developers used it at least once. Perhaps more significantly, across those 6,000 IBM software developers, productivity has increased by 45 percent since Project Bob was introduced. These are some pretty big numbers, and shows once again that Big Blue is not afraid to be Client 0 when it comes to adopting and deploying new AI technologies.

We will be keeping an eye on all of this, obviously, and keep you posted. It may turn out that the Watsonx Code Assistant functionality created by IBM’s respective IBM i and System z labs in Rochester and Poughkeepsie will be woven into Project Bob under the covers and preserved more or less intact.

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