Bob+ Skills and Modes – AI

IBM Bob ships with purpose-built Skills and Custom Modes for every AI building block, giving engineers an AI-assisted workflow to plan, build, configure, and operate agents, trust frameworks, and engineering capabilities directly from their IDE.

How to install the Skills

The Skills have been packed into a single .zip that you can easily download and install. Go to the skills.zip page and click the Download raw file icon at the upper-right of the page. Copy all skill folders at either the global, ~/.bob/skills, or project-level, <project>/.bob/skills

Skill Taxonomy

Each Skill for IBM Building Blocks often aligns with an IBM product but not always. For specifics on how each skill works, read through the associated SKILL.md.

AI Skills
Agents	Agent Skills Build and deploy enterprise-ready AI agents that automate business workflows, orchestrate complex tasks, and accelerate software development through intelligent automation.
AI Control Plane	Real-Time Guardrails Add runtime safety and quality guardrails to Gen AI, RAG agents, and watsonx Orchestrate tools using watsonx.governance. Pass/Flag/Block at input, retrieval, generation, and output. Agent Ops Plan and run evaluations, red-teaming, and runtime observability for watsonx Orchestrate agents across Developer Edition and SaaS — benchmark authoring, metric diagnosis, attack catalog, traces, Langfuse cost analysis. Model Evaluation Evaluate GenAI models and applications — prompts, RAG pipelines, LLM outputs, agentic tool-calling — using watsonx.governance metrics.

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AI Modes

Instructions and related files for these custom modes can be found in their respective repository.

AI Modes
Agents	Agent Builder Foundation mode for agent building workflows. Bob uses watsonx Orchestrate's ADK and documentation MCP servers to build custom agents. Domain Agent Builder Bob builds a tool-augmented RAG agent for a partner's custom business domain. Voice Agent Builder Build voice-enabled agents (TTS & STT) with multi-channel support (phone, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack). MCP Builder Expands on the Agent Builder mode to build and deploy MCP servers on watsonx Orchestrate. Agent Model Gateway Comprehensive mode for integrating third-party LLM models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure, AWS Bedrock, and more) into watsonx Orchestrate. Agent Integrate End-to-end support for integrating watsonx Orchestrate agents into applications via REST API — authentication, connection testing, and code generation across IBM Cloud, AWS, AWS GovCloud, and on-premises.
AI Control Plane	Agent Ops Foundation mode for pre-deployment evaluation of watsonx Orchestrate agents. Bob automates benchmark generation and provides a structured workflow for assessing agent behavior across key dimensions — agent-specific metrics, cost and latency, and adversarial robustness through red-teaming. Model Evaluation Bob helps you evaluate GenAI apps (RAG pipelines, LLM outputs, chatbot safety) using IBM watsonx governance SDK and custom watsonx governance MCP server.

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For the complete list of all Building Block skills across AI, Data, and Automation, see the Bob+ Skills page.