IBM Dev Day Bob in Action: is it worth it for IBM i shops?

IBM Dev Day: Bob in Action is a free virtual event running Thursday, August 27, and one of its two technical tracks is dedicated entirely to IBM i. An IBM Bob hackathon follows on August 28-30 with conference passes for the top 50 teams and $2,000 for the winner. IBM’s registration page tells you all of that. What it does not tell you is that the free Bob trial excludes every IBM i feature the track is about to demo.

Here is what actually happens that morning, who should give up the time, and what it costs to follow through afterward.

What happens at IBM Dev Day on August 27

The programming runs in two parts. From 10:00 to 11:00 AM ET there is a hackathon enablement session led by Maximilian Jesch, the IBM Bob product manager. That hour exists to get teams ready to compete the following day. From 11:00 AM to 2:30 PM ET the main event runs, and at 11:00 the room splits into two simultaneous tracks: AI-powered development for IBM i, and modernizing IBM Z with Bob.

The tracks run at the same time. You pick one. For an IBM i shop that decision is not hard, but it does mean the Z content is not a bonus you can pick up in the same sitting.

Total commitment is four and a half hours if you take the enablement session, three and a half if you skip it and only want the IBM i track. Registration is free and the event is hosted on BeMyApp’s platform rather than IBM’s usual webcast infrastructure, which matters only in that you should register early rather than assume you can walk in at 10:59.

The speaker list is the real reason to go

IBM is marketing this as a Bob event. Read the IBM i track roster instead.

Tim Rowe, the IBM i Business Architect and an STSM, is speaking. So is Scott Forstie, the Db2 for i Business Architect who also maintains the IBM i Technology Updates wiki that half the platform uses as its actual documentation. So is Liam Allan, the developer tools engineer behind the VS Code work that changed how a lot of shops write RPG. Sanjula Ganepola from IBM i App Dev and AI rounds it out.

Getting those four in one room is not a normal free-webinar lineup. It is closer to a TechXchange session roster, and it is the part of this event that has value independent of whether you ever buy Bob. If you have questions about where Db2 for i is going, or what the tooling roadmap looks like, or how IBM actually expects shops to handle RPG knowledge transfer, this is a free shot at asking the people who decide. The demos will be demos. The Q&A is the product.

That framing also tells you how to prepare. Show up with two or three specific, awkward questions written down rather than planning to absorb slides.

What Bob for IBM i actually does

To judge whether the demos will be relevant, it helps to know what the IBM i Premium Package adds on top of base Bob.

The headline capability is a native connection to the IBM i over a secure shell, which lets Bob read and write source, compile programs, run SQL, and drive test workflows without you leaving the editor. On top of that sit pre-built skills for explain, document, refactor, code, transform, and test, plus IBM i specific workflows: fixed-form to free-form RPG, RPG II and III to ILE RPG, monolithic to modular refactoring, embedded SQL modernization, and DDS-to-DDL conversion. There is also an IBM i database mode with an SQL Index Strategy Advisor and entity relationship diagram generation that works across SQL and legacy DDS.

We covered the package itself when it went generally available in June in the IBM Bob Premium Package for i review, and the multi-agent changes that landed in July in the Bob 2.0 update. If you have read either, the August 27 IBM i track will not tell you what Bob is. It will show you people who built it driving it against real RPG, which is a different and more useful thing.

IBM has published two client references, Jack Henry and MEDHOST. Both are IBM’s own marketing assets. Treat them as vendor claims, and if you get a question in during the session, ask about failure cases rather than wins.

IBM Bob Premium Package for i pricing, and the cost IBM does not mention

This is the part worth the read.

Bob offers a free 30-day trial with 40 Bobcoins. That trial covers base Bob. It does not cover the IBM i Premium Package. The relevant sentence sits in a footnote on IBM’s own pricing page: a subscription is required to trial a premium package.

So the sequence that a lot of attendees are going to walk into looks like this. You watch three and a half hours of demos showing Bob connected to an IBM i, converting fixed-form RPG and generating DDL from DDS. You start a free trial that evening. None of it is there.

The actual paths, verified from IBM’s pricing page as of August 17, 2026. Base plans run $20 per month for Pro with 40 Bobcoins, $60 for Pro+ with 160, and $200 for Ultra with 500. The IBM i premium package is a $40 per month add-on to any of them. New customers get the premium package free for the first month, which means the cheapest legitimate way to reproduce what you saw is Pro at $20 for month one, then $60 per month after that if you keep it. The Bobcoin allowances above are June figures and IBM has since raised all three, so the current numbers and the exact path to a $20 first month are worth checking before you budget.

Twenty dollars is not a barrier for most shops. Being surprised by it three days after a free event is still a bad experience, and the fact that no one has written this down anywhere is the reason to say it plainly: there is no $0 path to the IBM i features, and the price you should budget is $60 per month per developer, not $40.

Prices are indicative and vary by country before taxes and duties, per IBM’s standard disclaimer.

The IBM Bob hackathon, assessed honestly

The IBM TechXchange 2026 pre-conference Dev Day hackathon runs August 28 to 30. The brief asks you to build a working prototype with Bob 2.0 that measurably improves a specific developer workflow: onboarding, debugging, code review, testing, application maintenance, or release and deployment.

Read the constraint carefully, because it is unusually specific. IBM wants you to use agent mode, parallel tasks, subagents, and document understanding to manage multiple steps, and states that assisting with coding is not enough. Judging leans on demonstrated impact, meaning productivity gained, manual effort removed, errors and rework reduced, or task time cut. A clever autocomplete demo will not place.

Prizes are top 50 teams win IBM TechXchange 2026 conference passes, and the winning team gets up to $2,000 plus travel to Atlanta for the conference October 26-29. Be realistic about which of those you are competing for. A conference pass in the top 50 is achievable for a competent team with a focused idea. The $2,000 is a lottery ticket.

The awkward part is tooling. You have 48 hours to demonstrate premium agentic workflows, and premium requires a paid subscription. IBM’s hackathon page promises participants access to Bob without specifying whether that includes the IBM i package. Nobody has published an answer. If you are seriously considering entering, that is the single question to get answered during the August 27 session before you commit a weekend.

Should you go?

If your shop is already evaluating Bob or has a budget line for modernization tooling this year, yes, attend the IBM i track. Three and a half hours to watch the people who built it work through RPG is cheaper than a sales call and more honest.

If you are a working RPG developer with no budget and no mandate, attend for the Q&A and treat the demos as background. The access to Rowe, Forstie, Allan, and Ganepola is the free part that keeps its value regardless of what you do about Bob.

If your manager has started asking what the shop is doing about AI, this is a well-timed thing to have attended and be able to summarize. The 2026 Marketplace Survey put the skills gap ahead of security as the top IBM i concern, and “I sat in on IBM’s IBM i session and here is what is real” is a stronger answer than a link.

If you are hoping for a free way to try Bob’s IBM i features, skip it and save the morning. The event will not give you that, and now you know before you register.

Frequently asked questions

Is IBM Dev Day: Bob in Action free?

Yes. The August 27 virtual event costs nothing and requires only registration. The August 28-30 hackathon is also free to enter. What is not free is reproducing the IBM i demos on your own system afterward, which requires a paid Bob subscription.

Does the free IBM Bob trial include the IBM i Premium Package?

No. The 30-day free trial gives you 40 Bobcoins on base Bob only. IBM’s pricing page states plainly that a subscription is required to trial a premium package. The IBM i package is a $40 per month add-on to a paid base plan.

What is the cheapest way to actually try IBM Bob for IBM i?

Buy the Pro plan at $20 per month. New customers get the premium package free for the first month, so month one costs $20 and month two costs $60 if you keep it. There is no legitimate $0 path to the IBM i features.

Do I need to attend the event to join the hackathon?

No, the hackathon is a separate registration. But the 10:00 AM ET enablement session on August 27 is specifically built to prepare teams for it, so entering without attending puts you behind on a 48-hour clock.

Bottom line

Register, attend the IBM i track, and go in with questions rather than expectations. The speaker lineup is genuinely strong and the price is zero, which makes the calculation easy for anyone with a Thursday morning to spare.

Just know what happens next. The demos run on a $40 per month add-on that the free trial does not include, so budget $60 per month per developer if you want to keep going, and do not let the free event set an expectation the trial cannot meet. If you want a structured way to work through IBM i and AI without a subscription, the IBM i AI Field Guide covers the same workflows against tooling you may already have.