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Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

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Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#201

Post by adamsmith »

sebleon wrote: post #198
adamsmith wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, on Windows the uninstaller is just one step: double click Kite from the Programs & Features section of Control panel. Unfortunately on Mac you have to quit Kite before it can be dragged to the trash. You can do that from the menubar icon or by killing "Kite Engine". (You don't need to quit Kite Helper to drag to the Trash.) See instructions here http://help.kite.com/article/6-how-do-i-uninstall-kite . We'…

Welp - after reading through these comments, seems like privacy and code upload are huge concerns. Might be worth it for you guys to get ahead of this, and address these issues explicitly on the home page and during installation. It will lower short-term usage & install numbers, but probably won't hurt long-term retention and word of mouth sharing.

Thanks, we appreciate the constructive feedback!

We've worked really hard to make sure we're clearly communicating what's happening (transparency), and adding fine grained controls. We have a very clear step during the install flow that talks about how Kite works, and we will prompt for whitelisting within each of the editor plugins that can work without the sidebar (Atom, ST3, PyCharm).

We also have a security page (https://kite.com/security) that points to our various resources related to this, including more details about our control mechanisms—including .kiteignore—and how we think about security (our four principles).

We also know that some companies need on-premise Kite to make this work. We're exploring that now with customers, and would love to chat with you if it's something you need. (https://kite.com/enterprise)

I know none of these are silver bullets. Thanks for your comment as we work with users to figure out how to make this work.

We hope you'll give Kite a spin when you can—we think it's pretty transformative—and we hope to be able to address all of your concerns soon! : )

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#203

Post by Exuma »

deprave wrote: post #156
adamsmith wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, you can uninstall Kite by following the instructions here: http://help.kite.com/article/6-how-do-i-uninstall-kite

Kite feels a lot like malware. It sends your code to the cloud. You have not addressed people's concerns who asked about keys embedded in source code, not entire files to ignore. The uninstall process looks and feels a lot like stopping a rogue process that keeps respawning. You've silently integrated with an unrelated project (autocomplete-python) to collect data. I applaud the idea and UX in the video. I'd love to…

That's about as standard of an uninstall process as you get.

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#204

Post by stwe »

tedmiston wrote: post #186
stwe wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developers of Kite also replaced the functionality of a popular python autocomplete Atom extension from using jedi to Kite without properly warning the users: https://github.com/autocomplete-python/autocomplete-python/i...

The CEO's response in that thread is very clear that they added an additional option to use Kite, and did not make Kite the default or replace the default.

I was a happy user of the python autocomplete package with Jedi for some time. Starting in November 2016 they introduced kite-specific code, shipping kite-installer as a dependency and also added tracking of your autocompletion behaviour (I suspect this is where they get their Kite vs. Jedi performance numbers from).

Only in February 2017 I noticed that the whole package had changed right under me because of an error traceback window caused by their metrics collection going wrong. I looked at the package settings and IIRC there was a checkmark set for the "Use Kite" option which I'm pretty sure I did not set myself.

The telemetry collection alone is a deal breaker for me. But I also don't like the sneaky way they practically took over the package without clear notice and consent. The package README still makes no mention of Kite and the package is running under the innocently looking 'autocomplete-python' GitHub org instead of their 'kiteco' org. To me it's a very fishy 'growth hacking' strategy.

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#205

Post by jameside »

I'd be interested in trying Kite for JavaScript when it's ready. Most of my company's code base is open source and we do a lot of open source work so Kite could be a nice fit one day. Trying out Kite on our actual code base for a week would be a real litmus test for me.

We're comfortable with sending our closed-source code to GitHub and our secrets to Google Cloud and AWS so I can see a path towards being more comfortable with uploading code to Kite as well. Some guarantees around privacy and the ability to delete our code and derived data could help assuage concerns.

In the meantime, perhaps you could highlight that the code uploading is opt-in on a per-file or per-directory basis (though one issue with this is that our open-sourcing system allows for private subdirectories within public parent directories and we'd want finer control)? I'd feel good about having clarity around what's uploaded and what's kept local.

In any case this seems really cool for open-source projects to start with. I'd definitely give the JavaScript version a try. And do you think you could add a VS Code extension?

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#206

Post by ovidiup »

arihant wrote: post #161

Since this program uploads code to the cloud, it would be worthy to clarify if it cleans out strings before upload or not. Because if it does not, it is a serious concern as it puts secret keys in code in awful risk. They also run a background process that needs to be manually killed to be able to uninstall. It feels like a quarantine. This is an editor plugin, is there really no simpler way to provide uninstall capa…

1. On MacOS X it's quite impossible to kill the helper and engine processes, so you can remove Kite.app. Something is restarting them automatically, which is really frustrating.

2. It's completely unacceptable to upload code to the cloud.

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#207

Post by ovidiup »

ovidiup wrote: post #206
arihant wrote: post #161

Since this program uploads code to the cloud, it would be worthy to clarify if it cleans out strings before upload or not. Because if it does not, it is a serious concern as it puts secret keys in code in awful risk. They also run a background process that needs to be manually killed to be able to uninstall. It feels like a quarantine. This is an editor plugin, is there really no simpler way to provide uninstall capa…

1. On MacOS X it's quite impossible to kill the helper and engine processes, so you can remove Kite.app. Something is restarting them automatically, which is really frustrating. 2. It's completely unacceptable to upload code to the cloud.

As far as an uninstall procedure is concerned, the expectations of a MacOS X user do not involve looking up instructions on a web site. The user should be able to quite the app, drag it to the Trash and clean it.

In addition the instructions you posted on the web site do not work. There are two running processes shown in Activity Monitor: a KiteHelper and a KiteEngine. Killing them both does not work, they are resurrected by some process.

I had to manually rm -rf Kite.app, and reboot the machine to get rid of the pesky KiteHelper and KiteEngine processes. Totally unacceptable "uninstall" procedure.

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#208

Post by toomuchtodo »

adamsmith wrote: post #201
sebleon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp - after reading through these comments, seems like privacy and code upload are huge concerns. Might be worth it for you guys to get ahead of this, and address these issues explicitly on the home page and during installation. It will lower short-term usage & install numbers, but probably won't hurt long-term retention and word of mouth sharing.

Thanks, we appreciate the constructive feedback! We've worked really hard to make sure we're clearly communicating what's happening (transparency), and adding fine grained controls. We have a very clear step during the install flow that talks about how Kite works, and we will prompt for whitelisting within each of the editor plugins that can work without the sidebar (Atom, ST3, PyCharm). We also have a security page…

Instead of on-prem to start, you could probably get away with VM appliances people could spin up in their own cloud provider or VPC.

I don't mind code being sent to a server, but it needs to be a server I control.

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#209

Post by [deleted] »

ovidiup wrote: post #207
ovidiup wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. On MacOS X it's quite impossible to kill the helper and engine processes, so you can remove Kite.app. Something is restarting them automatically, which is really frustrating. 2. It's completely unacceptable to upload code to the cloud.

As far as an uninstall procedure is concerned, the expectations of a MacOS X user do not involve looking up instructions on a web site. The user should be able to quite the app, drag it to the Trash and clean it. In addition the instructions you posted on the web site do not work. There are two running processes shown in Activity Monitor: a KiteHelper and a KiteEngine. Killing them both does not work, they are resurr…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#210

Post by yorwba »

inputcoffee wrote: post #165
zeptomu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if it's called "size"?

I think right now we are at the tip of the iceberg. In 5 years, once average computers are very fast, you will get something like. len -> did you mean size() based on the fact that so many other people have entered that. I am sure there are other ideas besides that haven't even occurred to us.

Why wait 5 years? Using a synonym database (or word vectors, if you want to get fancy) would already get you most of the way there. I am not aware of any IDE that specifically tries to give you the most likely alternative, but many absolutely do offer a way to quickly select a different method from a list.
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