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Ansible Developer Tools

IBM Bob

IBM Bob is an AI-first development partner built on VS Code. It is a standalone IDE (not an extension) that provides agentic modes (Ask, Plan, Code, Advance) for orchestrating the full software development lifecycle. Since Bob is a VS Code fork, the Ansible extension is compatible.

Installation

Section titled “Installation”

Install the extension from Bob’s extension panel – search for Ansible (publisher: Red Hat, ID: redhat.ansible). Alternatively, download the .vsix package from the VS Code Marketplace and sideload it via Extensions > Install from VSIX.

Feature compatibility

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All core extension features work in IBM Bob:

  • Sidebar views – Environment Managers, Ansible Dev Tools, Installed Collections, Collection Sources, Execution Environments, Creator, Playbooks, AI Tools, AI Skills
  • Webview panels – Plugin Documentation, Creator Forms, EE Details, Package Details, Playbook Config, Playbook Progress
  • Status bar – Python environment indicator, Ansible metadata indicator
  • Language Server – completions, hover, diagnostics, semantic tokens
  • Playbook execution – run in terminal and run with progress modes
  • Vault – encrypt/decrypt from the editor context menu

MCP integration

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The Ansible extension ships an MCP server that exposes collection discovery, plugin documentation, scaffolding, and playbook generation to AI agents. Bob supports MCP tool-calling through its agentic modes, allowing Bob to use Ansible tools during planning and code generation sessions.

MCP server configuration in Bob may differ from VS Code and Cursor. Consult the IBM Bob documentation for details on how to register MCP servers in your Bob workspace.

The extension’s MCP server binary is available at:

<extension-install-path>/packages/mcp-server/out/server.js

You can also run it standalone via the CLI entry point:

Terminal window
npx ansible-environments-mcp

For details on the MCP server’s capabilities and available tools, see:

Ansible Lightspeed

Section titled “Ansible Lightspeed”

IBM Bob uses its own multi-model orchestration (Granite, Claude, Mistral) for AI-assisted development. Ansible Lightspeed is a separate IBM watsonx Code Assistant service that can be enabled independently via the ansible.lightspeed.enabled setting. Both can run side by side – Bob handles general coding assistance while Lightspeed provides Ansible-specific inline suggestions and playbook generation.

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