Bob Code Assistant Gets Better Understanding Of IBM i Applications
November 9, 2026 Alex Woodie
It has been barely six months since the Bob code assistant became generally available, and just four months since Big Blue shipped the Premium Package for i, which introduced new modes and tools that make Bob useful for IBM i users. But IBM and the open community have not slowed down the pace of development one iota, with two releases of Bob Premium Pack for i in the past two months, including new features to helps IBM i developers understand their applications.
If you are an IBM i developer who is serious about being productive with Bob, you are going to need the Bob Premium Package for i (PPi), which IBM started shipping in June. PPi not only brings critical architectural updates, such as the capability to work from source stored in QSYS or IFS, but it also brings important capabilities, such as the various “modes,” like database mode and developer mode, that help Bob be more productive in particular use cases. It also brings dozens of prebuilt “tools,” such as launching a 5250 session or run RPG unit tests, that make Bob get things done in the IBM i environment.
Bob PPi is moving fast, with new releases coming on a monthly cadence. With the September release, Bob PPi gained an important new capability called the Understand dashboard. This isn’t a mode or a tool. Rather it’s a new visual component in Bob PPi that helps users map, scan, and visualize application code structures, program dependencies, modules, and files in IBM i applications.
Understand is a code intelligence and application mapping component in Bob PPi that allows the AI tool to scan IBM i libraries, map objects, and analyze dependencies like program calls, file access, SQL references, and constraints. Once this scanning and mapping is done, users can query Bob to answer plain-English questions about their code. What’s more, it does this using metadata, so there’s no need to burn Bob Coin.
Workflow of the new Understand feature in Bob PPi.
Tim Rowe, a senior technical staff member for IBM i at the Rochester, Minnesota lab and the platform’s software architect for development tools and systems management, discussed the new Understand dashboard in Bob PPi during the November 4 IBM i Guided Tour.
“I’m super excited about what this provides to our Bob Premium Package users,” Rowe said of Understand. “What we’re doing is we’re providing a metadata repository on your IBM i, of course, built on Db2. When you think about an application on IBM i, every object that’s created tells a story. There’s all sorts of information that is centric to each object, like who calls it, who does it call, what data is leveraged in and used by this object, and all sorts of other pieces of information. That information can be harvested.”
That data is harvested via new SQL code developed by Db2 for i Database Architect and STSM Scott Forstie and his team. This SQL grabs metadata, which is then stored in Db2 for i where it can be queried by Bob in natural language.
“Now that we have a metadata repository using natural language within Bob, we can start asking questions about the overall application,” Rowe said. “So as we ask these overall application questions, Bob can answer them without having to burn Bob coins, because we’re not scanning source for this. We’re leveraging this metadata.”
During the IBM i Guided Tour, Rowe showed a demo of Bob PPi being used to query a large ERP application with more than 7,000 objects. Rowe then asked Bob to show where this ERP application has “dead code,” or code that hasn’t been used in quite a while, which is information that could be used to inform the company’s modernization strategy. Bob was able to take that ERP application and digest it down into 13 entry points and domain relationships within seconds, with almost no usage of Bob Coin, Rowe said.
“I’m so excited about this,” he added. “When you think about how this is used in practice, if I were to go ask Bob, ‘Hey, I’d like to do an impact analysis. I need to do a field change across an application, what’s affected?’ Bob will leverage the Understand to point out the high-level flows of things, but then it’ll turn automatically into source scanning to get down to the field-level details. So the combination of this Understand support, as well as the agentic scanning, works together to provide a robust answer for you.”
Another new feature in the September release of Bob PPi pertains to where Bob agents live. Bob uses a markdown file called “agents.md” to store context used by its agents and to establish repository rules, workflows, and technical standards across conversations. With this release, customers can now store the agents.md file either in QSYS or in the IFS, which helps to tie the context together.
IBM has delivered a number of new capabilities for Bob and the PPi over the past four months. In addition to the above new features, IBM has given Bob the capability to understand RPG II and RPG III fixed-format code, in addition to free-format ILE RPG IV code. Bob also understands how COBOL works on IBM i, including copybooks, subprograms, error handling, and interactive application. There’s also a new DDS generation tool that produces accurate 80-column-safe DDS output. Bob has also learned how IBM’s Integrated Web Services (IWS) facility works, and is able to generate, deploy, start, and stop RESTful APIs running on IBM i.
“It’s yet another great release of new functionality added to our Premium Package for i,” Rowe said. “It is truly amazing how quickly this technology changes and how quickly things improve.”
For more info, check out a recent blog post by Rowe and IBM’s Peter Ma, as well as this YouTube video by Rowe about how to use the Understand dashboard.
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Nice article. Can you provide context on this statement: “Bob also understands how COBOL works on IBM i”? We use COBOL in our application and I am always looking to find support information for it. I am hopeful Bob has more support for environments like ours. Thanks.