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Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

kite.com

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Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#11

Post by vessenes »

Condolences to the Kite team. But, congratulations, too - you have some of the highest value engineering experience in the world. I'm sure you'll land somewhere great; try and take some time off if you can afford it!

Mulling over business models, and noticing the 'devs won't pay' narrative in the blog post, it's interesting to see the existing business models in AI; basically they seem to be:

* API-driven cloud calls (this is a way to get high value out of your existing cluster if you're AWS, MS, etc.)

* Platform play + possible eventual lock-in: OpenAI/Microsoft

* Subscription service for very specific needs (Grammarly, writing support)

I wonder if engineers would pay $9.99/month (or even $49.99/month) for a 'grammar checker for PRs' - essentially: "Avoid embarrassing bugs before you commit". That is, I wonder if Kite could have been successfully sold as the third tier - sub service for something very specific.

I guess if it's a good idea, someone could pull the Kite repos and launch it -- but my guess is there may be a market in there.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#12

Post by happytiger »

Thank you for open sourcing your startup. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I think you deserve a big congratulations for being the first to really go after this problem. It’s a correct problem — it’s a big market and the solution will come eventually — I’m just sorry it turned out to be too gnarly to solve for you right now! I would have loved for it to have worked out better.

I agree that Kite didn’t deliver the 10x. I was an early user and tried hard to use it but didn’t find the benefit compelling enough to drop into my workflows, but it was very exciting.

I’m sure I speak for all of HackerNews when I wish you the best for whatever is next for the team.

Also, what are you good folks doing next?

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#13

Post by jawns »

> We failed to build a business because our product did not monetize, and it took too long to figure that out.

This is the one-sentence summary about why the business failed, but it's kind of a strange way of putting it.

I am dead sure that there were plenty of advisers along the way who told the company's executives that its monetization plan was weak and unlikely to succeed. But everyone assumes that they'll be the exceptional case.

"It took too long to figure that out" makes it seem like the most likely scenario wasn't staring them in the face the whole time.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#15

Post by samspenc »

m00dy wrote: post #7

>> It may cost over $100 million to build a production-quality tool capable of synthesizing code reliably, and nobody has tried that quite yet. $100 million is nothing tbh.

While this maybe true for FAANG and other tech giants, it is unfortunately still a lot of money for most startups that are working their way to IPO.

Tbh even at tech giants that make tens of billions of dollars, a $100 million investment is likely a lot, I'm guessing this sort of investment will require sign-off by CEO or at least VP level along with a solid business plan.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#17

Post by dibt »

Good riddance. I still remember how they were phoning-home without being 100% transparent about it, and the injection of ads.

> We failed to build a business because our product did not monetize, and it took too long to figure that out.

Yet people always defend telemetry in software, saying it's how they improve their product. 7 years of telemetry, and they couldn't figure it out?!

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#18

Post by jrpt »

"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Their manager might, but engineering managers only want to pay for discrete new capabilities, i.e. making their developers 18% faster when writing code did not resonate strongly enough."

I never used Kite, but I've tried Github Copilot twice, and found it marginal at best (and distracting at worst - which is why I turned it off both times). If Kite was similar, the reason I'm not paying is that coder AIs are not providing any value.

Developers are somewhat reluctant to pay for tools but I think you can get them to pay for things that are worth it. I've been paying for code editors for years.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#20

Post by johannes1234321 »

EGreg wrote: post #5

Netscape open-sourcing their code is what led to Firefox and an open Web, as a counterweight to closed source browsers. Safari took WebKit from Konqueror I wish more projects would do this

Mind that they continued working on it and built Netscape versions on top of Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. This people with knowledge of the code base and domain pushed it along.
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