IBM Dev Day: BOB in Action & Hackathon
I recently attended IBM Dev Day: BOB in Action — a day packed with talks on where IBM Bob is headed and what it can already do. And right after that, I was part of the IBM TechXchange 2026 Pre-conference Dev Day Hackathon. Three days, one idea, built it alone.
Let me tell you how it went.
First: What Even Is Bob?
If you haven't encountered IBM Bob yet, here's the short version — Bob is IBM's AI coding assistant, built directly as a IDE.
I've been part of the Bob Early Access Program, I'd already seen what Bob could do in its earlier form. But I was curious about Premium Package for IBM i, and I wanted to understand what that actually meant in practice.
The Dev Day Talks: Bob Gets Serious About IBM i
The session on the Premium Package for IBM i was the one I was most interested in, and it delivered. Here's what stood out.
Modes That Actually Understand IBM i
Bob now ships with two dedicated IBM i modes baked in:
IBM i Developermode — purpose-built for IBM i source work. It understands the context of the platform, the toolchain, the conventions. You're not fighting a generic AI assistant that vaguely knows what RPG is.IBM i Databasemode — focused on Db2 for i. Schema awareness, SQL generation, data exploration — all within the context of IBM i's database architecture.
This matters because the problem with using VS Code for IBM i work has always been the gap between what the editor knows and what the platform demands. Bob closes that gap in a way that feels deliberate rather than bolted on.
Skills and Workflows — Already Wired In
One of the quiet frustrations of working with AI tools is the configuration tax.
With the Premium Package, the skills and workflows IBM i developers actually need are built in. No separate configuration. No hunting for the right MCP server setup. You open Bob, you switch to the right mode, and it just works.
What You Can Actually Do
Compile source directly from the editor
Run CL commands without leaving the editor
Access IFS — browse, read, edit files on the integrated file system
Access PASE — shell access, scripting, the Unix-side of IBM i
Run a 5250 session — yes, the green screen, right there in your IDE
RPG unit testing — write and run tests with
RPGUnitintegrationMCP built-in — the Model Context Protocol is wired in, no additional configuration needed
Why This Matters for RPG Modernisation
Bob, with the IBM i Premium Package, you can be in the legacy code, understand what it's doing with AI assistance, write modern free-format RPG alongside it, compile, test, and iterate — all without context-switching out of your editor. That's not a small thing. That's the difference between a modernisation project that moves and one that stalls.
IBM i is not going away. There are hundreds of thousands of systems running in production, powering some of the most critical business processes in the world. The developers maintaining those systems deserve tooling that meets them where they are. Bob is starting to do that.
Then Came the Hackathon
Three days. Forty Bob coins. One idea. One Developer.
In the IBM TechXchange 2026 Pre-conference Dev Day Hackathon I went in with a problem I genuinely cared about — something I'd hit myself, something I'd seen other IBM i developers hit — and I used Bob to build a working prototype from scratch.
"Code for IBM i Developer Detective"
Stay tuned! I will put out a detailed blog
