Asking IBM BOB to Help with the Tedious Programming Tasks

You know the drill. You fire up the IDE full of hope, and immediately get mugged by debugging hell, fossilized 90s RPG that smells of mothballs, pointless documentation, and soul-crushing code reviews.

Absolute murder.

Enter IBM BOB – my cheeky AI mate who actually enjoys hoovering up all that tedious programming guff for me.

In this post I’m showing exactly how much time you can nick back by simply asking BOB for help. Easily an hour of my day saved… even this grumpy Englishman is impressed.

IBM BOB is on my mind

It’s Sunday morning, fresh out of the shower where I was thinking about one of my personal projects to rebrand and release a new version of my IBM-i Toolkit. I want to add a consistent object description naming standard (YES that is how exciting my Sunday morning showers are).

But I really done want to spend an hour+ wading through hundreds of lines of code.

“Ahh, I wonder if good old IBM BOB can do this for me if I phrase my request right? Might be a good idea for a little VLOG in real time?”

Me. Towel dried. Dressing Gown on.

Why should us programmers choose IBM BOB for these requests?

IBM BOB has quickly become my secret weapon. This clever AI coding assistant is like having a ridiculously smart developer mate sitting right beside you in the IDE happily chewing through all the tedious programming tasks so you don’t have to.

In this post, I’m going to show you exactly how much time you can claw back by simply asking IBM BOB to help with the tedious programming tasks. Let’s look at a real-world example from my own IBM i projects, practical ways to use him every day, and the kind of difference he can make to your development life.

PROBLEM

My project has many CREATE INDEX statements across many hundreds of files. These are for performance reasons, and they have all been created with blank descriptions. I want to add a descriptor to all of them showing a version number and a little text to describe what this index is doing.

I don’t want to spend hours doing it.

I want to drink my cup of tea and eat a slice of toast with marmalade while watching someone else do it.

SOLUTION

Let’s ask our AI friend, IBM BOB, to do this for us. We just have to phrase our request properly.

So, I want to add a repetitive statement to all my source files something like :

LABEL ON INDEX 'index name' IS '[740] Index for Performance';

Let’s start by asking BOB to do this for us.

Asking IBM BOB for help

If you want to ask IBM Bob to stop fiddling with one file and actually scan your entire codebase like a proper nosy colleague, it’s stupidly simple:

1. Open your full project (or clone the repo) in the IBM Bob IDE.
2. Set that folder as your working directory and Bob instantly indexes everything (RPG, CL, DDS, SQL, the lot).
3. Open the chat window and just talk to him.

Bob now sees the whole codebase and understands how files connect.

Examples that actually work:

• “Scan the entire codebase and summarise the main modules and how they fit together.”
• “Go through every file and find all the fixed-format RPG that still needs modernising.”
• “Review the whole project for technical debt, security risks and outdated patterns.”
• “Analyse the full repository and create documentation for the architecture across all programs.”

or how about:

• add a LABEL statement to every ‘create index’ in the database folder something like LABEL ON INDEX indexname IS ‘[740] Index for Performance’;

What did Bob say about this:

That was easy!

Best of all, this took just over a minute!

But wait a minute… I checked around my database folder and found a SQL TABLE and it’s missing the description.

Why did BOB miss this one?

Here’s the cheeky truth: BOB doesn’t actually read your code like a human. He chops it into chunks, does some clever math to decide what matters, and yanks out what he thinks you want. First time round he can easily grab the wrong bits, ignore stuff buried in the middle, or just have a random brain fart (yeah, they call that “temperature”).

Second time? He’s warmed up, remembers the chat, and actually pays attention.

Standard AI nonsense. Not just BOB, all of them do it.

So, I know there are more than 23 create statements in my database folder. I am guessing there are around 35-50 so I tried again and simply worded it like this:

try again looking for any CREATE INDEX statements you might have missed.

Good old bob came back with “I’ll search more thoroughly for any CREATE INDEX statements I might have missed in the database folder.”

A minute later and BOOM all statements are updated.

In Summary

AI tools are excellent, easy to use, hugely time saving but sometimes, just like your kids, they need to be told twice 😉

I recorded this adventure in Realtime for those you that are dorky enough to want to follow along: