At Think 2026 this week, IBM put Bob into general availability and gave the enterprise coding-agent market its most unfashionable clue. Autocomplete, chat, and another IDE sidebar are the decoys. The serious feature is the boring control surface around the agent, role modes, reusable playbooks, policy gates, audit trails, sensitive-data scans, model routing by cost and task, approvals that can be tuned by workflow.

That is where the category hardens. Consumer coding tools sell fluency because the user is the compliance boundary. Enterprise software has another beast inside it, COBOL, Java estates, tax platforms, government systems, release committees, and risk officers with veto rights. The agent that wins there will resemble a controlled production process with teeth.

IBM is too unfashionable for the hype cycle, which is why this launch is worth watching. Legacy systems are where automation stops being demo theatre and starts eating budget.