Show HN: JACoB – Open-Source AI Coding Agent for Real-World Productivity

[bfioca]

Hi, we're Kevin, Chris, and Brian, the creators of JACoB (Just Another Coding Bot), an open-source AI coding agent designed to streamline the development process. As veteran developers, we know that while AI isn't perfect, it can be a valuable tool for tasks like code reviews, converting designs to React components, and writing high-quality GitHub issues. We’ve been building JACoB over the past year to assist with our real work, and today we’re open sourcing it under an Apache 2.0 license. Our goal is to create the first fully open-source tool that matches the quality and polish of many closed-source alternatives.

JACoB focuses on specific, time-consuming tasks that AI handles well, like generating code from Figma designs, fixing simple bugs, and writing boilerplate code like API endpoints. You can even converse with JACoB to refine existing GitHub issues or help write new ones. It integrates seamlessly into your workflow, from GitHub issues to pull requests, ensuring all code passes tests before finalizing.

JACoB is available on GitHub today, where you can customize it to your needs, such as running with local models. We're also developing a hosted version - sign up for the waitlist at https://jacb.ai. Currently, JACoB works best with JavaScript or TypeScript projects, especially with frameworks like Next.js.

To evaluate JACoB’s real-world abilities, we created our own benchmark arena since none existed for design-to-code tools. JACoB outperformed eight popular tools and human-written code, scoring an ELO of 1183, over 100 points higher than the nearest competitor. More details on how we achieved this are available in the technical whitepaper found in the repo.

AI is transforming software development, and we believe developers should lead this change, not large corporations. JACoB is our contribution to that future, respecting your privacy and security while remaining transparent and open. We'd love your feedback. Visit our GitHub repo to try it out and find more demo videos and a link to our technical whitepaper. https://github.com/jacob-ai-bot/jacob

Let's build the future of AI in software development together. We’re excited to hear your thoughts and answer any questions!

[toobulkeh]

There's definitely not enough of these solutions being open-sourced. Definitely makes it more accessible to compliance or restricted environments. More AI should go this route. Definitely will be trying it out in my next build.

[randfish]

VERY much like this part: "integrates directly into your GitHub workflow, transforming Figma designs into deployable code and understanding your entire codebase." Getting on the waitlist.

[telaandrews2]

Agents that make front end development easier go a long way to making bootstrapped entrepreneurship more accessible. Love that this is open source!

[jefflub]

Very cool! How hard is it to add more technologies? I'd love something like this that could write my API endpoints in my Rails app.

[kleneway1]

We architected JACoB to make it relatively easy to add new frameworks. There are templates that dynamically build prompts based on the languages and tools defined in a jacob.config file that lives in your repo. Then you can just add new files with custom instructions for the new language. Here's the prompts folder with examples for the technologies we support today: https://github.com/jacob-ai-bot/jacob/tree/main/src/server/p...

I'm personally not a Rails dev so I haven't tried it, but my intuition is that Rails would actually be a good candidate to work well with JACoB due to the relatively standard conventions that most projects use.

[deep_origins]

Excited to see JACoB in the wild! Very much appreciate the ability to support local models with Ollama.

[cajohn0205]

Excited to try this out with new wireframes. Most figma to code solutions so far have let me down

[PiersonMarks]

Very cool. Looking forward to using it this upcoming week.

[l0gr1thm1k]

Awesome to see this go live!