Would it be possible to build an AI summer intern?
Kevin Leneway, principal software engineer at Pioneer Square Labs, had that thought last year as an early user of GitHub Copilot who been experimenting with various uses of GPT in his development workflows.
The idea led Leneway to create JACoB, an acronym for the tongue-in-cheek name, “Just Another Coding Bot.” Introduced earlier this year, the project has evolved significantly based on user feedback and validation. This week, it was released as an open-source project by Pioneer Square Labs, the Seattle-based startup studio.
JACoB integrates with GitHub and other common tools, writes and reviews code, turns design into code with Figma, automates mundane development tasks like pull requests, flags potential security flaws and coding bugs, and maps codebases, among other tasks. It’s able to learn patterns and improve the quality of its output.
PSL says the tool includes built-in guardrails to prevent runaway processes. Early usage shows that it improves efficiency and developer productivity without sacrificing quality or security, according to the firm.
“These are all the same steps that you go through if you’re working with a junior developer,” Leneway explained this week. “These are workflows that we, as developers, have been perfecting over the past couple of decades. … Why reinvent the wheel? Let’s just tie into that, instead of trying to create something separate.
Despite the tool’s modest name, PSL says JACoB outperformed eight similar coding agents in its testing.
Another big difference is the fact that it’s now open-source.
In addition to giving developers the ability to inspect the underlying code, and help to improve JACoB over time, the move lets users run JACoB locally if they choose. This option gives developers and companies extra data protection and code security. A hosted version is also available, free during a trial period.
JACoB is focused primarily on TypeScript and JavaScript for now.
“We’ve really tried to focus in on a narrow use case to start, just because if we went too broad, then the quality is not going to be there,” Leneway said. “And that’s just so important for real-world usage.”
So is Leneway’s summer intern about to become PSL’s next startup?
“We’re getting there,” he said. “We haven’t officially spun it out of PSL, but the big news is that we’re officially open-sourcing it. We’re letting people go out and try it today. And then we’ll see how it goes.”
