This week, the wait is finally over… a few weeks after signing up for the demo, BOB has finally arrived, and I have the chance to try it out in advance.
For those who are not yet familiar with it, BOB is a new IDE owned by IBM. It is not a completely new IDE; in fact, for those who regularly use Visual Studio Code, the environment will be very familiar, because BOB is based on it. The reasons for this choice are quite simple to identify. First, compared to RDi, Visual Studio Code is much lighter and more performant, as well as being significantly more modular. Second, Visual Studio Code is a standard IDE, convenient for any programming language. In fact, there are extensions for virtually any language, which makes development on IBM i much closer to industry standards.
Now, if BOB were just a copy-and-paste version of VSCode, it would be useless… The real added value of BOB is its native integration with artificial intelligence. In fact, when you open it for the first time, you immediately notice the prompt for interacting with the agent. In this case, compared to other competitors, the artificial intelligence offered here is based on the aggregation of several models, so you have a complete stack that allows you to respond to very different needs. Moreover, as you can imagine, since BOB is from IBM, it is well-trained in all IBM languages, such as RPG.
I’ll start today by attaching the link to BOB’s YouTube channel, where you can see BOB at work on some use cases tested directly by IBM: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-dkbPjzN2bh-k-V4rZQppQ
Now, let’s talk about my experience… as soon as it arrived, I put it to work on one of my Java projects. It’s actually the backend of an HTTP portal that we use to provide services to our customers. First, I asked it to generate some documentation (yes, I don’t like writing documentation), and in about an hour, it wrote all the javadoc for over 140 classes. In addition to writing the documentation, I was pleased to note that it is able to suggest possible improvements to the code. In this case, for example, it highlighted the possibility of SQL injection:
This is just an example; it also suggests possible code refactoring.
Now, let’s talk about evaluations… We are only at the beginning, and I haven’t been able to test it sufficiently yet, but let’s say that expectations are very high. As for the documentation I asked him to write for me, it seems to be very focused on the subject… I still have some doubts about code generation, but I also believe that it should definitely be an aid (and it is) to the programmer, not a replacement. Another definitely positive thing is that it asks for permission before accessing/modifying a file, showing all the changes in a preview and explaining them. On the other hand, the demo comes with a $20 budget, and I’ve already burned through about $14 just with the documentation I asked for, which means I can’t really test it thoroughly.
From my point of view, the next steps concern the RPG world, i.e., the automatic generation of test cases and code documentation. This is because, in addition to the IDE, it is also possible to invoke BOB’s APIs from the CLI, meaning it can be integrated into automatic compilation/release pipelines.
For completeness, I am attaching the link to sign up for the BOB demo in case you haven’t already done so: https://www.ibm.com/products/bob
Have you had the opportunity to test and use artificial intelligence tools in your work? What do you think?
Andrea