Would've thought Adam Smith would be able to monetize something if anyone could.
Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
101–110 of 547 posts
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#102Things I've payed for that I'm still using today:
- Sublime
- GitHub.com
- ACM Digital Library
(The latter two are subscriptions.)
Things I've payed for in the past that I no longer use:
- MS Visual C++
- Omicron Pascal
- Application Systems Modula-2
- Atari ST GFA BASIC 2.0
- Berkeley YACC and FLEX port to TOS/GEM
- ...
Overall, many dev tools are free nowadays, which creates an expectation, perhaps, that it should all be free (I disagree in principle, but of course it is nice to see this trend progressing).
I appreciate that Kite is posting a post mortem for others to learn, and I wish they had been able to find a niche where people pay for their work. I love software tools as a work product, but have been told by many experienced people it's not a good area for making money.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#103"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 wa…
On the contrary, I find Github Copilot extremely helpful and saving me heaps of time. Yes, it's not writing the logic instead of me, but it acts like the best companion I could have in most of the cases.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#104"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 wa…
My experience with copilot has been very different. It easily pays for itself, and getting my employer (seed stage startup) to spring for it for the entire team was an easy sell. Yeah it's pretty dumb most of the time. But I know that, and I don't use code from it without carefully checking it out and modifying it. But it's still a huge help. Just the time saved writing tests alone pays for it. And I've had a few spo…
How are you validating the quality of its tests? Are you trying any mutations, checking branch coverage, etc.?
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#105"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 wa…
The tool just has to be very well integrated and easy to use. That's why copilot is seeing adoption, because Microsoft owns VSCode and has built a very simple integration of Copilot into VSCode.
That said, I'm not even sure VSCode or Copilot is lucrative, if it wasn't owned by Microsoft, could they both be sustainable businesses?
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#106I disagree with their statement that individual developers do not pay for tools. I have paid for tools out of my own pocket on many occasions. However, being able to deliver code 18% faster isn't enough to fork out $9.99 a month. First of all it is relatively expensive. For that amount I can get a personal license for PyCharm. Secondly coding speed never tends to be a bottle neck for delivering a feature or a product…
This metric seems silly on its face. 10 bucks to get 18% more productivity out of a $10k per month developer? If this was indeed the case, everyone who employs software engineers would instantly pay this. Maybe they should have marketed more? Or maybe there are other problems with the technology (e.g., fears over copyright infringement?).
Apparently it wasn't a very good product, even before Github Copilot came out:
https://medium.com/swlh/kite-vs-tabnine-which-ai-code-autoco...
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#107No post body was provided.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I _love_ Copilot but the only reason I use it is because I qualify under their open source developers program, I just can't justify paying $10/month for it.
How much do you love it, then? What would you pay, if it's less than $10/mo?
It saves a bit of time, but doesn't seem to make a difference on time to market of features, products, improvements or bug fixes.
In my experience, it's a quality of life improvement, but the things that dictate actual time to market is bottlenecked by things that aren't solved by copilot, such as overall design, decision making, requirements gathering, code structure/architecture, solution ideation, user acceptance, infrastructure setup, etc.
I think if it eventually could help with those other tasks, you'd see time to market gains, and that would start to make it really valuable.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#109"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 wa…
"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools." I think this is probably true. If you need a tool for your day job, your company ought to be paying for it. Some companies have slush funds for small purchases like books, but subscription costs for services would normally need to be approved. If you're a solo consultant then perhaps you'd pay for tools that make you more productive. But for personal…
If you'll allow me to go on a tangent here;
The sheer volume of subscription services I've signed up for as the CTO for a startup is mind-boggling. $8 here, $19 there, $49 for something important, $99 for something essential.
Some tools are easily worth it, especially when you see what is charged for other (less valuable) tools.
Gitlab, Confluence, Jira, Asana, 1Password, co-pilot, codepen, sentry, jetbrains, gitlab plugins for jetbrains, Visual Studio, Docker Desktop, Perforce, Slack, etc;etc;etc;etc
Then there's things like Spacelift ($250!)!
The most frustrating thing is that:
1) I need to justify these expenses each for what value they bring, some things are nice to have but bring so little value on paper.
2) You can't just enable tools for some people, there's huge overlap and that overlap gets greater
I get that people need to be paid, but these things very quickly add up. I'm paying about 7-13% of peoples salaries already in these subscriptions, and I feel like a total dick for saying no to people or trying to consolidate these.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#110I'm confused.
"we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet."
"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools."
"We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough."
Sounds like you know why people didn't pay for it. If it truly did make people as productive as you claim, it would have sold like hot cross buns on a cold day.