Live Collab

Problem. IBM Bob is great for one developer. Put three developers with their own Bobs on one repo, and things break. Two Bobs edit the same file at once, and one overwrites the other or leaves a merge conflict. Nobody can see what a teammate's Bob is doing right now. An agent can plan work, but nobody decides who owns which file before the edits start. Git only finds these problems after the damage is done. Solution. Live Collab is one live workspace for every teammate's IBM Bob, like Google Docs for a team of agents. Each person keeps their own Bob account, Bob IDE and context. Joining a workspace installs a .bob/ kit that turns Bob into a team player: * Locks before writes. A PreToolUse hook asks the server before every edit. If a teammate's Bob holds those lines, the edit is cancelled and queued. Bob calls why_blocked, tells its human who holds the file, and moves to other work. * PM Bob proposes, a human decides. A pm-lead mode can only read and call MCP tools. It splits a goal into tasks, arbitrates file requests and reviews diffs, but every proposal lands in "Needs you" for a person to approve. * Live visibility. A sync agent streams saved files to teammates in under a second, and hook traces let you watch each teammate's Bob live in the desktop app. * Review, then commit. After human approval, the server makes one commit per task, co-authored by IBM Bob. Target users. Small dev teams and classrooms where several people use IBM Bob on one codebase, plus the lead coordinating them. How they use it. Install the macOS app, join a workspace and click Trust in Bob IDE. Coders prompt Bob as usual in the coder mode. The PM prompts the pm-lead mode and approves or denies cards in Mission Control. Anyone can watch a recorded session in the browser replay, no login needed. What makes it creative. It is built entirely from IBM Bob's own primitives: custom modes, hooks and a 14-tool MCP server (radar-mcp). The server never calls an LLM. Conflicts are prevented before the write, not fixed after it. A blocked Bob explains itself in plain language, and agents can only suggest while people approve. Why it is effective and efficient. Enforcement has two layers: the hook stops Bob, and the server rejects writes from anyone who does not hold the lock. One Cloudflare Durable Object per workspace handles messages in order, so two Bobs reaching for the same file in the same millisecond cannot both win. It runs serverless on Cloudflare's free plan, with no LLM key. Hooks add only what changed since the last prompt, which saves Bobcoin. Our recorded session shows 1 near-miss caught, 2 decisions shown to a human, 0 merge conflicts and a 2.9 s median time to a decision. On the live server, file sync p95 was 295 ms.