If you were at POWERUP 2026 in New Orleans and heard Tim Rowe's keynote, you already know Bob got some big upgrades this spring. Specifically, IBM released a new version of Bob, V2, along with a cost-plus feature: the Premium package. It’s probably worth taking some time to look at both improvements and get a clear picture of what Bob can bring you now.

By Dave Shirey

Full disclosure – IBM has already published two announcements earlier this summer: one for V2 and one for Premium. I pulled much of the detail for this article from those two documents, and in many cases I used the same order for the list of new elements because the IBM list seemed to be ordered from most important first. In the end, I thought it would be helpful to have a single article (this one) that describes both enhancements.

Bob V2

We will start with V2 because it is the more boring of the two. Premium is the sexy enhancement, and I want to hold that off so we can finish with a bang.

First, if you are already on Bob, you'll likely HAVE to upgrade to V2. In fact, if you are currently on Bob 1.0.3 or 2.0.0, they will both stop working on September 30, 2026. This is from IBM, and I don’t think they’re kidding. How do you know what release you are on? When you are signed in to Bob, find the gear icon near the upper right corner of the screen. On the screen that comes up, the version appears somewhere on the left side of the center panel. Anyway, on to what V2 does.

The catchphrase for V2 is ‘Faster, better, smarter’, all good things, and V2 has the kinds of things that you would expect in a new software release. That is, as I said above, things that are very important, but boring.

The big thing, of course, is that V2 is not ‘Bob on the I’. That is Premium, a cost-plus product that we will discuss below. The question that immediately comes to mind is – do I have to upgrade to V2 to go to Premium? And the answer to that is – pretty much yes. Premium will work with V1, but it works much better with V2. Since 1.0.3 and 2.0.0 are no longer getting bug fixes, and won’t work at all after the end of September, you might as well upgrade now (details below).

The next question then is: OK, suppose I go to V2. What does it really do for me? The following information comes from “Bob V2: Faster, better, smarter.”, an IBM publication.     

New Architecture

First and foremost, V2 has a new architecture.

Bob V1 used a relatively simple architecture, with Bob IDE and Bob Shell (the two clients you use to tell Bob what to do) built on two separate foundations. The idea was to get Bob in your hands as soon as possible. But using separate foundations meant IBM had to build all tools twice. Not a sustainable option.

With V2, IBM replaced that duality with a single three-tier architecture: the Agent, the Harness, and the Clients.

The Agent is an agentic loop where all reasoning and code generation happens. This part of the architecture controls action and finishes skills, using subagents to handle separate tasks in parallel, with subsequent efficiency improvements.

The Harness is shared infrastructure that handles security (authorization), logging, feature flags, and telemetry (probably to Voyager I or II) to support major agent and client actions.

Finally, the Clients are the interface to the Bob IDE and the Bob Shell, which is how you will communicate with Bob. Quick Note – Bob IDE is a GUI-type editor and is the one you will default to now that the product is configured. Bob Shell is a terminal-style application that lets you interact with Bob using a set of basic commands. Both formats run on a single, unified agent and support parallel tool calling, subagents for specific work, and a 270,000-token context window.

The result is a Bob that runs faster and with less ‘weird’ stuff (my own words; IBM likes to call it a ‘quieter’ Bob). It is also more secure, and the three-level architecture makes a great jumping-off point for adding additional features later.

New Modes

Originally, Bob V1 had five ‘modes’ or personalities: Ask, Explain, Edit, Generate, and Run. If you have already memorized these and figured out how you will use them, I have bad news.

They have been cut back to three inV2: Plan, Ask, Agent. How do you know which to use?

If you are just getting started with a project, then Ask or Plan is the way to go. We'll cover the two in more detail in an upcoming article.

If you are ready to dig in and code or refactor, use Agent.

To keep things from getting stale, Premium will remove one of these (Agent), leaving Ask and Plan, and add Developer and Database modes. Always in motion is the future.

Approval Changes

In V2, IBM added set up file reads for automatic approval. All other actions, like file updates, MCP tool calls, commands, etc., are manual approval tasks by default.

But V2 lets you set up auto-approvals for several of these actions. To do so, click on the ‘Permiss …’  verbiage at the bottom of the right-hand column on the Bob screen. This will open a window. Then select the actions you want to auto-accept. Closing the window will save the new settings. And no, I don’t know if turning on the Auto-Accept button at the bottom of the window will automatically turn all actions to auto-accept (it doesn’t look like it does, but what other purpose could it have?). I looked around, didn’t find an answer, and then I just quit. You can’t really expect me to come up with all the answers.

Background Tasks

Bob can now perform several conversations at the same time, letting the ones you are not looking at run in the background. Each conversation (task) has its own thread and context, so it doesn't lose its place when you switch from one to another. The activity panel shows you what is running, what’s done, and what needs attention. Fortunately, attention-type messages won’t flash up on the screen you are working on and distract or frighten you. The status will show on the activity panel, and you can take it from there. When jobs are finished, Bob will do any necessary cleanup (but won't remove it from the panel).

Rollback, Rebuilt

Under V1, Bob had checkpoints tied to the Git repo. You could use those to roll back. Since they were tied to the Git level, any project without a repo was out of luck for checkpoints.

V2 has brought this down to the agent level, so all conversations have access to it, and you can roll back any specific task, adding another layer of protection for the apps you are building.

Cleaner Context Window

Under V1, as you go through a Bob task, there are tons of things happening, many of which you don’t really need to know about but which Bob feels compelled to tell you about so that the context window fills up quickly, and it can be challenging to find the important stuff.

Bob V2 puts much of this info into sub-agents, which can run in parallel and whose activity isn't displayed in the context window, clearing it out a bit.

Parallel Processing

V1 is single-threaded. But V2 can issue calls to a variety of tools at once and run them in parallel, greatly speeding up processing. At the same time, it removes the XML (remember when that was the future?) wrapped around the calls, which reduces overhead. One benchmark I saw dropped a 30-second process down to 10 seconds.

Working with Documents

V2 can read .docx, pdf, and .xlsx documents and use the information in them directly, eliminating the need to type it into Bob separately. On the output side, Bob will create an HTML document summarizing what happened in the job, which you can view in any browser.

Working Well with Others

If you have already done some work on a task in another AI product, this should roll right into Bob as long as the other tool can connect to an MCP server. V1 gave each MCP its own settings tab. But in V2, a dedicated skills tab has been attached to each of those so that you can add or delete skills associated with a particular MCP without needing to hand-edit a file. 

Workflows

One thing about AI is that while it can do one thing well, it can’t easily do that one thing multiple times. Each request you make will be figured out in a potentially different way. Workflows can define a task as a sequence of steps so it can be repeated as often as needed.

Each step can then be directed by whatever type of action is required: human intervention, AI, or automation.

Miscellaneous

Finally, several things probably belong to V2 but may also get upgraded a bit in Premium. Things like performance monitoring tools (Bobalytics, task history, and usage tracking with performance metrics and cost optimization info). To get to Bobalytics, sign in to Bob, click Admin, then select Bobalytics. I'm not going into detail now because the description of what it can show is fairly long, and I have already been typing for several hours.

V2 also provides more robust security features (embedded policy enforcement, prompt normalization, sensitive data scanning, and vulnerability detection), a friendlier user interface, simplified management of hardware and software resources, and more comprehensive support.

Getting V2

Getting the new version is easy. When you log into Bob and are on V1, you should see messages in the lower right corner telling you to upgrade. Clicking this link starts the download, which can take a while if you are doing it at a coffee shop or another dispenser of liquid refreshment. When that is done, you will be asked to hit the restart button. Bob will shut down; there will be a brief period (maybe 30 seconds) when it seems nothing is happening, but remain calm. Eventually Bob will start up again. When it does, it will ask you a question about moving stuff from the V1 copy to V2 (like whether you want everything moved, just the last 14 days, etc.). Bob will then shut down, and you can sign back in and be all set on V2.

Premium Package

Just a final warning. The Premium package is not the same as V2—two very different things. Yes, you should have V2 to get Premium, but you can still work on Bob without Premium. It’s just that all your work will have to be on your PC, not the i.

The second thing we want to talk about is the Premium Package, and as noted above, it isn't free and doesn't come bundled with V2. A subscription to Bob alone does not give you access to Premium. It is a product in its own right and costs $40 per month per user. That cost is flat, regardless of your Bob plan. So, if you are on the Pro Plus Bob plan, which costs $40 per month, adding the Premium package makes your Bob cost $80 per month per user. It will not be a separate bill; it will roll into the Bob subscription automatically when you download Premium.

Because it is levied against each license individually, you can give that facility only to certain people, although I can't think of a reason you would want to. The question then is whether anything in Premium makes it worth it. The IBM document that highlights this package is here: “Premium Package for i is now available.”

‘Bob on the i’

The big thing Premium gives you is the ability to work directly with source code on the i from the PC Bob interface.

Before Premium, any objects Bob created lived on your PC, not on the i. You would then have to upload the module to your i and compile it. The reverse would be true then if you wanted to modify an object currently on the i. You would download it to your PC, do whatever you needed to do to the object, then upload it back to the IBM i. Even describing the process makes me a bit light-headed.

Now, with the Premium Package, that is no longer necessary, since you can work directly with the source files on the good ole i. Specifically, it lets you work directly in both QSYS and the IFS to create code, compile it, run CLs and SQL stuff, and bring up a 5250 session.

Some setup is required to connect Premium to your PC, and it is detailed below under ‘Installing Premium’.

Additional Skills and Workflows

But wait – there’s more! Premium also adds about 40 skills and workflows to what is available.

A ‘skill’ will create a reusable set of instructions, like a recipe. You can combine them into a series of steps that define a workflow. Among the skills that have been created are:

Replacing record-level database access with SQL,

Writing unit test cases based on your code, 

Pulling business rules out of your code for documentation,

Compiling,

Converting fixed format to Free

Skills can be used for refactoring, generating display files, and creating SQL queries and stored procedures.

Workflows are pre-defined, multi-step functions that perform specific, well-known tasks. They execute a series of steps (which could be skills if you have set them up) to perform agentic and non-agentic tasks. Agents or sub-agents perform the agentic tasks. 

New Mode

As noted above, the mode is like a personality; it focuses on certain things.

Premium will also change the modes. I know, V2 just did that (going from five to three: Agent, Plan, and Ask ). Now the Premium package will take one of those three, namely the Agent, and replace it with two new ones: Developer Mode and Database Mode.

Developer Mode will focus on development in IBM i, including RPG, COBOL, SQL, DDS, and CL.  It will make information about the i and the connection available to Bob, so its responses are more closely attuned to your specific machine. Essentially, it takes the standard, machine-agnostic RPG language and introduces it to the i's features and quirks. Available data includes the connection name, host name, user profile, user home directory, CCSID settings, OS version, current library, full user library list, temporary library, and IFS directory.

The Database Mode is SQL-oriented and can be used when you have a complex database structure and while writing or testing SQL for DB2 scripts. Again, Bob will have access to a variety of data, including connection name, user profile, host name, CCSID settings, OS version, SQL job name, job ID, SQL naming, schema, library list, and transaction isolation level.

RAG Support 

One problem AI might run into is picking up late-breaking information. Remember, for AI to be aware of something, that information has to have been used in the model's training. And sometimes this means that no matter how often you retrain, some data may be overlooked.

Support for RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), which picks up recent external data that is of interest to the LLM, embeds it in the LLM outside of normal training, and so generates more accurate and timely data.

Installing Premium

Installing Premium is not as simple as bringing up V2. 

You will need to start with Visual Studio Code. You don’t need to use VSC to do your work in Bob (you would use Bob IDE or Bob Shell ), but you need the ‘Code for i’ extension that is in VSC. So, if you have not already downloaded VSC and added the Code for I extension, please do that now. You can download VSC from here. Once it's loaded on your PC, open the Code for i extension.

OK, now for the weird part. According to the IBM instructions, you can then click on the ‘Code for i’ icon in the far left column, and a window will open up where you can select ‘Create Connection’. By entering the data in the resulting window, you can create the connection between Bob on your PC and your i.

Of course, those instructions do not work for me. For quite some time now, I have been collecting data to prove that most major software houses have two versions of their products: one for everyone, and one for just me. And the one for me doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. Pretty soon I will have a case and can go to a lawyer.  

The point is, when I click on the VSC ‘Code for i’ icon, it doesn’t give me anything. Instead, I have to go to the bottom half of the second panel from the left and click on the ‘+’. This opens a window where I can enter the connection name, Host or IP Address, the SSH port to use, and a username.

In addition, there are several security options (other than your normal IBM username and password), including MFA, SSH agent, and a private key.

Final Word

All in all, both advancements add a lot of functionality to Bob.  Going to V2 is a no-brainer. Premium requires some thought, unless working on your PC is just not tolerable to you. Either way, the choice is yours, but your best bet is to get busy on Bob as soon as practical because it seems to be here to stay. 

David Shirey is president of Shirey Consulting Services, providing technical and business consulting services for the IBM i world. Among the services provided are IBM i technical support, including application design and programming services, ERP installation and support, and EDI setup and maintenance. With experience in a wide range of industries (food and beverage to electronics to hard manufacturing to drugs--the legal kind--to medical devices to fulfillment houses) and a wide range of business sizes served (from very large, like Fresh Express, to much smaller, like Labconco), SCS has the knowledge and experience to assist with your technical or business issues. You may contact Dave by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or by phone at (616) 304-2466.

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