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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

#171

Post by yarg »

lolinder wrote: post #157
yarg wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid for intellij - damned near the entire architecture team where I worked had a copy, and the company sure as shit wasn't the one paying for it. (I eventually stopped subscribing, in part because they were too slow distancing themselves from Russia, in part because of their movement away from open source with their newer tooling.) Developers will pay for software, if the value proposition is there.

> in part because they were too slow distancing themselves from Russia I'd cut them some slack here. They had to get their team out of there first—with the way Putin is running things, they sure as hell couldn't announce they were leaving Russia until everyone who was going to follow them was out of there. On the day of the invasion they tweeted a statement condemning the attack, and within two weeks announced they w…

I cancelled the subscription long before the full on invasion.

Two weeks was impressive, just not impressive enough to get me to renew.

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

#172

Post by trip-zip »

premun wrote: post #126
jascination wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, how are you using it to write tests? Do you just write "make a test for functionX" or something? (Don't have much experience with it)

It is amazing for typing out mock data. Say you're testing parsing of XML - it can easily suggest the the assertions over the data parsed from the XML. Example test that was 95% coming out of Copilot: https://github.com/dotnet/arcade-services/blob/61babf31dc63c... It also predicts comments and logging messages amazingly well (you type "logger." add 7/10 times get what you want, sometimes even better), incorporating v…

I honestly thought I'd never use copilot, but when I need to write something to interface with XML via a SOAP API, boy copilot is my best friend...

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

#173

Post by enos_feedler »

It is smart to wind this down. Elon says the biggest mistake engineers make is optimizing something that shouldn’t exist in the first place. AI suggested code is exactly the kind of problem that engineers would fall into this trap for. Its cool and exciting and very alluring. Lets no lose sight of the fact that most code being generated in front of a developer shouldn’t need a developer there in the first place. We should not even be sitting to code a lot of things we are tasked with doing today.

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

#174

Post by JustLurking2022 »

premun wrote: post #126
jascination wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, how are you using it to write tests? Do you just write "make a test for functionX" or something? (Don't have much experience with it)

It is amazing for typing out mock data. Say you're testing parsing of XML - it can easily suggest the the assertions over the data parsed from the XML. Example test that was 95% coming out of Copilot: https://github.com/dotnet/arcade-services/blob/61babf31dc63c... It also predicts comments and logging messages amazingly well (you type "logger." add 7/10 times get what you want, sometimes even better), incorporating v…

That code is wretched... Why have serializer logic embedded in a data object, especially when .NET provides generic discrete serializers?

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

#175

Post by adamsmith »

lolinder wrote: post #163
adamsmith wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it seem to only understand imports of public libraries? If so, it's likely that, rather than understanding the contents of those libraries, it's learning from others' use of those library APIs. If not, it is likely just understanding the words in the API at a shallow depth.

No, it's imports from other files in my project. It's either using the import or the fact that I have another tab open. There are definitely times where it produces a close approximation that's obviously just statistical, but there are other times where there's no question that it picked up something from a different source file that couldn't have possibly been in its training set. I haven't yet decided if it's using…

It could be doing some "fine tuning" based on the repo. That would be cool! That said, what I meant when referring to 'understanding' the non-local nature of code was in a more principled way.

For example, if an object defined in another file has a function called `rename` that takes zero arguments, when calling it from another file Copilot will likely suggest arguments if there are variables like `old` and `new` near the cursor, even though `rename` actually doesn't take any, just because functions called `rename` typically take arguments. This behavior is in contrast to a tool like an IDE that can trace through the way non-local code references work.

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

#176

Post by jonas21 »

arcturus17 wrote: post #25
jrpt wrote: post #18

"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…

Loads of devs I’ve spoken to, from junior to principal level, absolutely love Github Copilot though. Don’t know who is paying it for them, nor if Kite was significantly worse, but I think that at least Copilot has a brilliant future ahead of it.

Some well-known devs like Guido van Rossum and Andrej Karpathy are big fans as well [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/cdiD-9MMpb0?t=8723

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

#177

Post by adamsmith »

sqs wrote: post #151

Sourcegraph CEO here. I respect what you and your team built. It’s tough to build a brand new kind of product, and I heard from many people who loved Kite over the last several years.

Thank you Quinn! It's been both cool and instructive to see Sourcegraph take off. Godspeed!

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

#178

Post by lijogdfljk »

jrpt wrote: post #18

"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…

Yea.. i happily pay for several JetBrains tools and i'd love to pay for even more. I've got several problems that i don't want to spend time solving myself.

Frankly as a developer i've got more problems than i can count and if it involves a GUI i tend to prefer to pay for it. I love FOSS but UX is just not often a focus. I have better experience with paid products. Assuming the licensing isn't punishing.

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

#179

Post by valenceelectron »

esperent wrote: post #147
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real reason is that developers are maybe some of the hardest to fool customers on the planet. Since we literally build all of this our B.S. detection meter is really high. Kite thought it can go after the up and coming new developers by doing slightly shady things. However, developers also have an incredible allergy to such tactics and it forever taints your brand. So overall, developers do pay for tools,…

> Kite thought it can go after the up and coming new developers by doing slightly shady things I briefly tried Kite a few years ago. I didn't notice anything shady although maybe I just didn't stick around long enough. What shady tactics are you referring to?

Essentially, they bought the Atom Minimap plugin and added kite-specific code/offers. This blew up a lot in the respective GitHub repo and also on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857944

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653

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

#180

Post by NateEag »

jnwatson wrote: post #144
dijit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The weird thing is that 13% seems high. It is hard to imagine they are less than 13% more efficient with those tools. It is weird that software engineers are the only engineer-types that are supposed to be able to do their job with just a computer and a built-in editor.

> It is weird that software engineers are the only engineer-types that are supposed to be able to do their job with just a computer and a built-in editor.

Not really. We aren't actually engineers. Someone appropriated the title and misused it, and now there's no putting that genie back in the bottle.

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