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Comment by prodigycorp | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying IBM shouldn't try, but really – why is IBM building coding CLIs? They're like the company version of the Steve Buscemi "How do you do, fellow kids?" meme.

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Part of the problem here is all the vendor lock in with the tools. It's a new category so it's to be expected, but currently any company that sells an enterprise cloud platform kind of needs their own AI coding tool suite to be competitive.

I would have expected IBM to buy and integrate another AI coding company or license one, instead of trying to build it themselves. IBM doesn't have a good track record of building products. Maybe they didn't have time, or were convinced it was too easy.

I couldn't think of a better signal to flee a job interview than seeing an IBM LLM cli on someone's screen.

IBM has a huge history with AI, Deep Blue, Watson.. Ok, maybe not huge, but they've always been in the game even before most of us wore pants.

and the tech behind the original google translate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_alignment_models

Because they need something to put in powerpoint decks to help their sales teams sign overpriced consulting contracts. See - IBM Watson.

For once, one might actually get fired for buying/hiring IBM

Everyone is building one these days. None of them really have any differentiating features other than the LLMs they use, but I guess it's a cheap way to try and block off some market share from your competitors.

It's $50B a year revenue tech company, I guess I would flip the question and ask why wouldn't build it's own coding CLIs?

Because it’s becoming obvious that these coding agents are going to succeed on the basis of a company’s ability to not only build the harness, but tune the model for the harness.

I guess it’s fine if IBM is trying to do it as a marketing kind of thing but maybe know your competencies?

With so many LLMs around and tooling around it’s not hard to cobble something together. At their size they can get special pricing and discounts, too, to reduce per seat cost.

The last company that didn't integrate AI had to fire 75% of their engineering team.

AI sells.

Too soon.

75% sounds like a lot but 3 sounds like nothing.

Something to do with shareholders I guess?

I saw an IBM presentation about AI at a conference years ago, during the previous wave of AI hype (2018-ish). IIRC they were advertising some specialized AI chip/hardware. The presentation was kind of meh, but it shows they've been trying to dab in this space for a while.

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