honestly that would still probably mean more than story points. maybe all this AI insanity has an upside that the new cargo cult washes out the old one.

> M.R. Williams is advancing its IBM i modernization strategy with new mobile solutions and accounting system improvements, while leveraging IBM Bob to quickly interpret older RPG code, automate documentation, and streamline development workflows.

This is exactly the kind of endorsement I’d expect to see from an IBM customer.

It's puzzling, considering they made some strides towards improving their design language and systems in past years, which produced IBM Plex etc. under Mike Abbink.

They have a decent component system with Carbon[0] and a whole design principles website[1] which they could have easily pointed their LLM of choice to.

Even the ibm.com landing page isn't close to the design system spec, rounded corners and whatnot...

[0] https://preview.carbondesignsystem.com/ [1] https://www.ibm.com/design/language/

As far as I can tell, IBM has mostly been putting out junk for twenty years.

Pretty sure a lot of people got fired over Microsoft Bob though

Nope, but they'll probably get laid off at some point to boost share price.

Nobody who got fired uses IBM Bob

Can we say it's Bob's fault, though? Bob did it, not me.

There is so much business software out there and ecosystems that have evolved around it. Systems still running cobol on IBM mainframes; or, more "modern" stacks like Java apps running in IBM websphere. There are relatively small numbers of HN reading folk that went to some of the best CS programs and/or work(ed) at FANG caliber companies (whatever you call them now). The rest of the software engineer types are a diverse crowd and turning to IBM Bob might be more natural than some creepy looking orange starfish offering. That's my hypothesis anyway.

I'm sure tons of companies have retainer spends with IBM for software, hardware, consulting, etc., and this is another way for their corporate clients to spend down / increase their retainers faster

That IBM Z skill locked behind an "enterprise only" pay point would be a good starting point.

See: Kiro by AWS

It's been a while since Sonnet 4.5 could be considered frontier :D

IBM knows their customers very well, the additional context unlocks a lot of value.

"frontier" is pretty load bearing there, I think it tops out at sonnet 4.5?

The memes write themselves

They took a page from AWS on whatever the hell a Kiro token is supposed to represent.

Nope, not predictable at all.

Because they auto route still your requests, you never know if something costs one coin or a tenth of a coin

[dead]

"Bob" is also the most difficult to listen to Primus song.

Probably by design considering the songs subject matter.

Clippy came out of that....