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