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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

#231

Post by HatchedLake721 »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #142
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 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,…

I’d say it’s the opposite.

Developers easily fool themselves thinking they’ll save $9 p/m by building something from scratch in 3 weeks.

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

#233

Post by the_jeremy »

lmeyerov wrote: post #223

Sorry for the Kite team, but for other folks aspiring here, more optimism is in order: We pay for copilot for Graphistry staff because it works well. Similar story for Docker Desktop: It's new, yet people are already paying for it to the tune of 8 figures revenue per year. I bet similar is/will be happening with Copilot. Credit to where credit is due. I worked in R&D here in a group tackling it for almost a decade ("…

> Docker Desktop: It's new

It's not new, but the requirement to pay for it is.

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

#234

Post by jasonjmcghee »

zomglings wrote: post #216
chucky123 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What shady stuff they did?

The only shady thing that I recall is that they quietly added telemetry into Atom after they took over maintenance of it, without communicating this to Atom users.

> added telemetry into Atom

Weren't they uploading source code without clear communication?

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

#235

Post by LASR »

> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.

I know this first hand, building a developer tool startup and failing to reach any level of revenue. In the end, the tech was bought out by a larger company to recover a fraction of our VC investment.

The challenge is that when you're building software for developers, they already know how it must work.

It's like trying to sell magic tricks to magicians. Sell magic to regular people, and you'll see some significant revenue.

I've used Kite before. It was ok. But I am a SWE. It's entirely possible that Kite would have seen major adoption if the push was towards non-technical folks trying to get their feet wet in software. Eg: Data scientists or business.

The reason why BI tools sell so well at the moment is that you have tons of C-level execs that like the appeal of a business-optimizing tool requiring little to none of any actual software development.

Let that be a lesson to everyone. You can't blow away developers. They're just too damn ~~smart~~ well-informed.

Edit: Another anecdote: A buddy of mine built a bespoke OCR and document indexing/search tool. He has ~60 paying clients (almost exclusively law-firms and banks) that primarily work with printed pages on paper. No Saas. No free tier. The client data resides on an on-premise Windows box, avoiding issues with sensitive data in the cloud etc.

He's a solo dev with support contracts and nets something like $1000/month from each client.

For your average lawyer/paralegal, the ability to locate and reference a single page from thousands of pages in under a second is magic. So they pay for it wholeheartedly.

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

#236

Post by _alex_ »

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 out of pocket for a JetBrains license because it makes me a LOT more productive. I don't spend money on a lot of dev tools, but if it saves me non-trivial time, it's a no-brainer.

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

#237

Post by perrylaj »

nl wrote: post #161
urthor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, the ones I've spoken to are extremely suspicious. "GitHub Copilot blocks your ability to learn." Is a common refrain. I don't see ANY industry-wide consensus on whether GitHub Copilot truly helps developers right now. The only scenario I can get anyone to agree on is generating templates. Aka, JSON or CSS files that you then edit.

Everyone I've spoken to who has actually used it thinks it works extremely well. This includes pretty experienced developers. I've never heard anyone claim it blocks the ability to learn - if anything it's the opposite. Many people like how it shows you APIs you weren't aware of.

I used it for about two weeks total, over two different periods. Mostly Kotlin, Java, Typescript, small amounts of Groovy. I ended up turning it off. In my experience, it has moments of utility, but most of time it felt like it was getting in the way. The kinds of things it completed well were not the kinds of things that cost a lot of time or mental energy. I found wasting more time trying to fix things that when it got close but not quite there, than it saved in spitting out boilerplate.

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

#238

Post by [deleted] »

JustLurking2022 wrote: post #174
premun wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#239

Post by analognoise »

LASR wrote: post #235

> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. I know this first hand, building a developer tool startup and failing to reach any level of revenue. In the end, the tech was bought out by a larger company to recover a fraction of our VC investment. The challenge is that when you're building software for developers, they already know how it must work. It's like trying to sell magic tricks to magici…

You used magicians selling magic tricks to other magician's earlier, then said "smart" later.

I think it's just domain awareness, and the "they're smart" trope needs to be dismantled.

I think it plays into the technocracy problems we have now. We can solve it, we need more tech. More more more. People think we can solve social/political problems with tech - insidious.

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

#240

Post by pritambaral »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #196

I tried Tabnine and had mixed feelings. It can make sensible suggestions and save my time, but Tabnine forcing said suggestions to top priority means I’m spending time to press down key to find the obvious autocomplete. And this can’t be turned off. Not sure about Kite though

Depending on your editor, this may/should be customisable. The tabnine client for Emacs (company-tabnine) is just another completion backend, and the order of completions presented is a just a variable in company-mode that can be set to any order you prefer[1].

1: https://tychoish.com/post/better-company/

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