IBM Pulls The Curtain Back A Smidge On Project Bob

October 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

We learned last week that Project Bob is in at IBM, and Watson Code Assist for IBM i is out. IBM is gung-ho about the prospects for Bob to function as a do-it-all, AI-powered junior programmer for all of its platforms. But what exactly does this entail for IBM i customers? IT Jungle talked to IBM i chief architect Steve Will to get some answers.

When IBM eventually ships the AI code assistant that is currently called Project Bob, it will offer a range of AI-powered functionality for all IBM customers, including IBM i shops, mainframe customers, and Linux and AIX users.

According to a presentation by Will, IBM i customers can look forward to Bob delivering six core features, including code understanding and code explanation for a variety of languages on the platform (including RPG, CL, DDS, and SQL). It will also be able to generate code, refactor and transform code, and create test cases.

That list of capabilities already goes beyond what IBM had scoped out for its Watson Code Assistant for IBM i (WCA for i) product, which Will first revealed at the POWERUp 2024 conference in May 2024, and which has been in limited customer preview since the POWERUp 2025 conference in May.

WCA for i, which had been slated for general availability in the second half of 2025 before it was canceled in favor of Bob, was supposed to provide three core capabilities, including AI-powered code explanation, code generation, and test case generation. However, to the best of our knowledge, IBM had only delivered code understanding in the WCA for i preview. The other two capabilities had not been built by time the POWERUp 2025 conference rolled around earlier this year, and which were supposed to have been delivered in 2H25.

Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i chief technology officer and distinguished engineer, shed more light on Bob in a call with IT Jungle last week.

Source: IBM

“This is an evolution that does far more than we were talking about doing with that product,” Will said, referring to WCA for i. “One of the great things about Bob is that it does much more than just a code assistant. But even in its code assistant functions, it went farther than we were going to be able to do with the one that was associated only with IBM i. So Bob deals with languages of all sorts. And one of those languages is RPG, but it also does CL and DDS and SQL. And again, we weren’t going to be able to get all of that with our early generation thing. So we’re excited about this.”

Bob will run a mixture of different foundation models, including IBM’s own Granite models, Claude from Anthropic, Meta Platform’s Llama, and models from Mistral, an IBM spokesperson said. When asked whether the earlier RPG training work that IBM had done for WCA for i would eventually end up in Bob, Will said he didn’t know.

“It’s still not clear whether the training that we did with that code is going to ultimately be available through Bob or not,” he said. “We are not sure yet whether the RPG specifically trained Granite model will be part of the GA or not.”

However, that’s not to say the WCA for i work was all for naught. IBM learned a great deal about how to create an AI code assistant thanks to the work it did with WCA for i, which was driven in part by all the RPG source code that the IBM i community sent in to IBM, at Will’s request.

“It’s definitely not wasted effort. It’s just a different application of that effort to the ultimate product,” he said. “There are pieces of what we developed with the prior stuff that we will be able to factor directly into IBM i’s support of Bob.”

Another way that the earlier work helped was the interaction with the IBM i community. Will says that IBM learned a lot about what IBM i customers want to do with an AI coding assistant. Those learnings have allowed IBM to take Bob in its current form and optimize it to do what IBM i customers will want to do with it.

IBM has reassigned several key folks from the WCA for i team to work on Bob. Leading that team are Tim Rowe, the business architect in charge of application development; Edmund Reinhardt, the IBM i application development tools lead for IBM, and Liam Allan, who recently took a new position within IBM as a developer tools engineer.

Bob is a tech builder.

Bob is not shipping yet, and there is no timeline for delivery of a finished product, although a preview will be made available to a limited number of customers; you can request to be added to the line here. However, Bob is already being used quite widely within IBM. According to the company, 3,000 IBMers use it on a daily basis.

Will is one of the early internal Bob testers. While Will knows his way around an IDE, RPG is not one of the languages the Purdue University computer science graduate has mastered. That doesn’t matter when Will has Bob at his side.

“It’s really clear that if you don’t know any RPG, you can still get a lot of programming done with Bob,” Will said. “You will still want to review the code. You will still want to test the code. But I’m a programmer who never learned RPG and I’ve been able to create RPG code, compile it, and run it using Bob. I’m super happy.”

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