Project Bob Supercharges IBM i’s Plans for an AI Code Assistant
IBM i CTO Steve Will describes how the platform-neutral, AI-Powered IDE will assist along the entire development pipeline
Following IBM’s October announcement of Project Bob, the IBM i community is learning more about the forthcoming AI-powered integrated development environment (IDE). That included a recent update from IBM i CTO Steve Will, who has been expressing IBM i’s need for an AI code assistant for over a year and a half.
In May, that dream took a step toward reality with the announcement of watsonx Code Assistant for i (WCA), which promised to help developers modernize applications written in RPG. But then, Project Bob entered the picture, and the capabilities of WCA are now being rolled into the platform-neutral IDE. In addition to the capabilities already built into Project Bob, Will said a version optimized with “the IBM i special sauce” will also be available.
This isn’t merely a rebranding for IBM i’s promised AI code assistant. “Project Bob can do so much more than the code assistant that we were focused on developing for most of the last year and a half,” Will said during the Oct. 29 edition of the IBM i Guided Tours series (replay available here). “We’re talking now about bringing AI assistance that can help you with application development, not just code assistance, but developing the application.”
Will stressed that in addition to code transformation, that assistance covers the entire CI/CD pipeline, including tasks such as:
- New code generation
- Dependency mapping
- Documenting components of legacy applications
- Code Explanation
- Security Analysis
- Issue reporting
- Deployment
Code Assistant Features Fast-Tracked
When introducing WCA in May, Will noted that the product would be able to help developers understand RPG and document RPG applications running on IBM i. The goal was to introduce additional features later, including transforming RPG, plus testing and support for languages including COBOL for i, CL and SQL.
Though IBM is yet to announce a release date, Project Bob will be able to do all of that at launch, Will said.
“And as it turns out, if you use AI properly, if we help you by developing an AI tool, you can take skills that may not be specific to IBM i and they can do IBM i things, and that’s the promise that Bob is bringing into reality far faster than we were going to be able to do it with our old approach,” Will said.
In addition to the coding languages that Project Bob knows, users will be able to interact with the IDE in a number of different human languages beyond English, like Spanish, Japanese … and even Klingon, which Will tested himself.
“I know this is silly,” Will said, “but I want you all to have an expanded view of what you can ask this thing to do.”
Those who want to see for themselves can put their names on a waitlist to preview Project Bob.