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BobFix: Find and Fix Bugs
PROBLEM STATEMENT Software bugs—ranging from subtle business logic errors and state corruptions to elusive asynchronous race conditions—drain immense developer productivity and cause costly production outages. When developers task standard AI coding assistants with debugging, existing tools fall short: • Single-agent LLMs get trapped in repetitive chat loops. • Context windows become bloated with log dumps. • AI agents guess superficial patches without empirical validation. • Fixes frequently introduce breaking regressions into adjacent code. THE SOLUTION: BOBFIX BobFix is a universal, token-efficient multi-agent bug investigation and verification framework built natively as an IBM Bob skill. It transforms IBM Bob from an autocomplete copilot into an autonomous software diagnostician capable of reproducing, diagnosing, and mathematically proving fixes for any bug across modern codebases. TARGET USERS & USER INTERACTION BobFix is designed for software engineers, backend developers, and engineering teams across any technology stack. User interaction is completely conversational and effortless: a developer simply reports an observed bug or user symptom in IBM Bob in natural language. For example: "Orders fail with 500 errors when discounts apply." or "Users randomly get logged out when opening multiple tabs." From that single prompt, BobFix autonomously coordinates the entire diagnosis and repair lifecycle: 1. DETERMINISTIC REPRODUCTION Freezes a dedicated reproduction test (repro.test.ts) that reliably captures the failure. 2. ORTHOGONAL TRIANGULATION Spawns two parallel subagents: • Trigger Agent — analyzing input parameters, event sequences, and execution timing. • State Agent — tracking state mutations, database records, and broken invariants. 3. ROOT-CAUSE SYNTHESIS Combines empirical evidence into a structured bug.json and implements a surgical, minimal fix. 4. ISOLATED VERIFICATION Executes an isolated test harness (verify.mjs) to verify that the repro test passes and 100% of existing regression tests remain green. CREATIVE & UNIQUE ARCHITECTURE Unlike monolithic LLM debuggers that guess solutions, BobFix introduces three distinctive innovations: UNIVERSAL ORTHOGONAL TRIANGULATION Dividing the investigation of any bug into Trigger vs. State prevents cognitive bias and isolates the root cause in a single pass. CONTRACT-DRIVEN TOKEN EFFICIENCY Subagents communicate through compact JSON artifacts rather than conversational chat, completing full investigation and repair in under 20k tokens — a 90% reduction compared to standard agent loops. CLOSED-LOOP REFLEXION & VERIFICATION Inspired by SWE-agent research, BobFix provides immediate assertion-level feedback. If an initial fix fails verification, it enters autonomous self-debugging without human intervention until mathematical proof is achieved. PROVEN IMPACT While engineered for general software debugging, BobFix proved its power on a complex production benchmark: diagnosing a sub-millisecond multi-tab token race (RFC 6819) in an e-commerce platform. BobFix autonomously: • Identified the root cause. • Implemented concurrency grace protection. • Verified zero regressions across all 18 backend tests. • Completed the process in under 2 minutes. BobFix delivers trustworthy, production-grade autonomy for IBM Bob.
27 Sep 2026
