Get an overview of IBM Bob and what you learn across this tutorial series, using the Galaxium Travels demo app.

IBM Bob is an AI SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) partner that augments your existing workflows and helps you understand, plan, improve, and work confidently with real codebases while offering proactive insights that keep you in control every step. In these tutorials, you use Bob to add features to the Galaxium Travels fictional luxury space travel booking system.

What you will learn

The tutorials are organized to help you set up Bob and learn how to use Bob to help plan, write, and run agentic software development workflows. You will:

Get started: Give Bob persistent project context with /init and AGENTS.md, and write effective prompts.

Configure Bob: Extend Bob's capabilities with a custom mode, and standardize its behavior across your team with rules.

Understand your code: Inspect an unfamiliar codebase, generate architecture diagrams, and produce audit reports and compliance documentation.

Build software: Plan and implement complex features, create commits and pull requests, generate code from comments with literate coding, and modernize an existing Node.js application.

Secure your code: Audit code against compliance frameworks, and generate secure code with an actor-critic workflow.

Optimize workflows: Manage Bob's context window during complex or long-running conversations.

Prerequisites

IBM Bob IDE

Download and install IBM Bob v2.x or later.

Git

Git is required to clone the example repository.

Architecture of the Galaxium Travels demo app

Galaxium Travels contains the following full-stack architecture:

Layer	Technology
Front end	React, TypeScript
Back end	Python with REST and MCP interfaces
Database	SQLite with seed data

Front end

The React/TypeScript front end connects to the same back-end REST endpoints and presents the data through a user-facing interface. Features available in the front end include:

Viewing available flights

User registration and authentication

Flight booking

Back end

The back end is built around a SQLite database that contains:

Data models that define the domain entities (flights, users, bookings).

Schemas for data validation and structure.

Seed data for development and testing.

The server exposes two interfaces:

REST API: Standard HTTP endpoints for front-end and client consumption.

MCP interface: Lets Bob interact directly with the back end as a tool.

An API browser interface is available locally to explore and interact with the back end endpoints directly, without the front end. This lets you test operations such as flight retrieval, user registration, and booking.

Next steps

In this introduction, you learned that Bob supports the full software development lifecycle, not just code generation. You remain in control at every step and Bob assists you with reasoning and implementation.

Advance to Start a project with /init and AGENTS.md to learn how Bob uses the /init command to set up context in a new or existing project.

Introduction