After I replace the original bblayers.conf with bblayers-hob.conf and I run bitbake hob-image, I get this error : Unable to parse /home/andreea/yocto/poky/meta-yocto/conf/layer.conf: Failure expanding variable BBPATH, expression was ${BBPATH}:/home/andreea/yocto/meta-intel:/home/andreea/yocto/poky/meta which triggered exception Exception: variable BBPATH references itself! This happens because the variables BBPATH and BBFILES are not defined in the bblayers-hob.conf.
Closing it as a bug. This is more like an improvement. A new feature request is opened for this: 3007.
I will set it to verified, since 3007 was resolved and verified.