Bob is not a code-completion tool. It’s an agentic assistant — give it a goal, it plans and executes: reads your codebase, writes files, runs tests, iterates. After a year leading Bob adoption across EMEA, a few things are consistently true: the biggest value is collapsing time to understand legacy code from weeks to days; skills and MCP servers make it enterprise-grade; and the plan→review→execute loop is how you get adoption in regulated industries.
The flight400-demo is the scenario I run with customers: a fictional IBM i airline, Bob reading and explaining the RPG reservation logic, generating tests, then exposing an API — live, no pre-baked output.
IBM i is where Bob has the most impact. The codebase is old and dense, the developer pool is shrinking, and the platform is still better than anything that would replace it. Bob doesn’t replace IBM i. It makes it legible for the next generation.