Over the holidays, my daughter and I experimented with creating custom nametag stickers for the family members we were traveling with using a cheap portable black-and-white thermal printer and Microsoft’s Bing AI image generator.
When I posted about this on LinkedIn, one of the people who commented was Kevin Leneway, a principal software engineer at the Pioneer Square Labs startup incubator in Seattle, who showed how he used DALL-E-3 (via ChatGPT) to create vivid, colorful illustrated letters to help his daughter learn to read.
Here’s the image he shared:
It was such a interesting example of what AI can do — the type of thing that would take a human artist hours to create, and I appreciated that Kevin was looking for ways to apply AI beyond work, to his personal and family life.
Leneway is a longtime member of the Seattle tech community, the long-ago author of a great blog called A Startup A Day, and a past GeekWire Podcast guest. After our LinkedIn exchange, we ended up catching up via email, with me asking for his insights on various AI technologies for projects we’ve been exploring at GeekWire.
As a software engineer, former Microsoft developer evangelist, and past startup co-founder, his job at Pioneer Square Labs involves working with entrepreneurs to build initial versions of their products, to help get startups off the ground.
Of course, these days, that means he’s working heavily with AI tools.
This has given him an “AI-first mindset,” as he describes it.
“Anything I’m doing, whether it’s a problem I’m trying to solve at work, or even something at home, my first little thought in the back of my head is, huh, I wonder if ChatGPT could help me out with this,” he explains. “Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But I find just having that mindset has unlocked a lot of really weird, and interesting, and creative uses of AI that I would have never thought to do.”
In fact, he has been working on an AI tool of his own, a coding assistant called JACoB, which he introduces in the video below.
The site for JACoB was just launched this week. Leneway and his PSL colleagues are looking for developers to try it and provide feedback. You can sign up via the site.
So that’s how I ended up inviting him back on the show for this wide-ranging conversation about AI from the perspective of someone who is pushing the tools to the edges of their capabilities. We discuss how he’s applying AI to startup ideas and the creative process, how he thinks about AI in his own life and work, big-picture questions about the impact of AI on work and society, and where AI is headed next.
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