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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

#201

Post by simsla »

morelisp wrote: post #104
eloff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

I'd assume you still read the generated code, as if you're reviewing a PR

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

#202

Post by wittycardio »

ShamelessC wrote: post #62
jrpt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I tried it twice. I've been hearing people say they liked it. But I haven't found it very helpful, and often distracting, so I ended up turning it off. I'll probably try again next year when the models are improved to see if I feel any differently then.

Yeah, I understand. I just see a lot of people on here who seem to be deliberately looking for reasons not to like Copilot. You don't fit that stereotype, of course. So feel free to ignore the following. Developer tools have learning curves. One doesn't simply open vim/emacs for the first time with a full understanding of how to use it (or why it's a good tool to use, even). Historically, we have had _no_ problem wit…

The difference between other Dev tools and GitHub is the probability of getting things wrong. Like when intellij types out boilerplate or a compiler generates code it's 100 percent correct and if it fails, it fails predictably. Copilot is impressive sometimes but there's no guarantee of correctness or failure mode. I cannot trust such tools for anything serious. If you're in the habit of copy / pasting code from the internet then I can see why it might help speed that up. But imo that too is dangerous and I avoid it unless absolutely necessary

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

#204

Post by dvhh »

icelancer wrote: post #160
satvikpendem wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why they're a joke?

There are two or three people commenting that in this post and simply not elaborating. It's ridiculous.

Because the incident should be fresh and impactful enough to remember, from my point of view it almost reach levels as bad as Sourceforge adware injection in open source software installers.

For a recap for people who weren't in the industry or have short memory.

Kite took ownership of some popular code editor plugins and injected some adware/tracking code.

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

#205

Post by wolpoli »

NateEag wrote: post #180
jnwatson wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even then, software engineers tend to have more control over the work process than other roles.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #152
eloff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Just the time saved writing tests alone pays for it. This, so much. My code since using Copilot is easily ten times better tested than it was before, and I wasn't especially lazy when it comes to testing. Given 1-2 hand-written unit tests, Copilot can start filling in test bodies that correctly test what's described in the function name. When I can't think of any more edge cases, I'll go prompt it with one more @Te…

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by sanjayio »

grepLeigh wrote: post #154
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…

I'd be curious to hear about services/tools developers do pay for. The diagnosis that developers do not pay for tools seems off to me. A few tools that I put on the company card when I worked at a Big Tech Co as an IC: * DataGrip (Jet brains) * Colab Pro (Google) * Postman Pro These were all small $ enough where I didn't need to justify the expense. It was just assumed that if I thought the tool was worth the $, it w…

I think “company card” is the differentiating point here. I’m not sure how many IC devs have access to that. Which makes me think you don’t fall into the group that they’ve defined as IC.

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

#208

Post by eikenberry »

nerdponx wrote: post #190
malwrar wrote: post #134

“Our 500k developers would not pay to use it. Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.” I don’t like depending on something I could lose in a month or tethers me to the internet. I consider that more a service than a tool. I’d prefer to just buy something once that just works, but that business model might be dead too since people will pirate things that aren't tethered to some serverside com…

Software developers are also more likely than most to be "free software people". I for one am excited to see Kite go open source; if it's truly open, including the underlying recommendation models and algorithms, I will be happy to use it and set up a monthly donation for whoever wants to keep working on it.

Exactly. Non-free software is always paying for a service. If you don't get the source (and the ability to use it) you don't get the software. The source code is the software... the binary is an merely way to access a small part of it.

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

#209

Post by jacurtis »

dboreham wrote: post #111
satvikpendem wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you show an example, or even have the test file open, it will make the other tests for you.

I wonder if this says something about the nature of test code?

Test are always mostly boilerplate and rarely include anything crafty.

95% of tests are: instantiating a class, running a method, and then asserting that the result. Tests do not or should not be crafty creative code snippets. They are boring functional code blocks by design and most are very similar, only changing out inputs and assertions between tests.

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

#210

Post by jacurtis »

dgacmu wrote: post #60
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…

I pay for copilot. It saves me a modest number of minutes of time per week. That's worth a small fee. And before someone jumps in: I and my other co-founder who also uses copilot (We are the only two in the company who do, I think, without checking) are the compliance team. We're both very senior and use copilot basically a line or three at a time as a smart autocomplete. It's still worth it.

> [we] use copilot basically a line or three at a time as a smart autocomplete.

I think this is the best way to think of CoPilot. GitHub is selling it like its going to write all your code for you, but in reality it is just next-generation auto-complete.

That's not a bad thing. In some ways I'd argue its actually better. GitHub needs to change its marketing because even most developers seem to think that its out there to take away our jobs. Its not and can not. But it provides the smartest auto-complete you've ever seen and that can be useful, especially when wading through mundane parts of your codebase.

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