Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

kite.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 547 posts

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

#251

Post by kyawzazaw »

irrational wrote: post #247
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…

I’m a web developer. My company pays for JetBrains IntelliJ for me. And I love it. But, if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket, I’d use VS Code instead. I’ve used both and IntelliJ is superior to VS Code, but not to such an extent that I would pay my own money for it. But I’m more than happy to have my company buy it for me.

Disagree on this example though.

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

#252

Post by dehrmann »

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…

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

Hijacking the quote...

I can't count the number of times I see well-paid developers using the Sublime Text trial.

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

#254

Post by dehrmann »

dmarlow wrote: post #110

I'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 pe…

There are different types of market timing. They're right about the tech not being ready, but others are because you found the right "moment." Wordle was a success because it got traction in a covid winter. The exact same experience was just as viable 10 years earlier, but people weren't looking for entertainment in the same way.

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

#255

Post by javajosh »

andyfleming wrote: post #250
irrational wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a web developer. My company pays for JetBrains IntelliJ for me. And I love it. But, if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket, I’d use VS Code instead. I’ve used both and IntelliJ is superior to VS Code, but not to such an extent that I would pay my own money for it. But I’m more than happy to have my company buy it for me.

This is a product that I actually _would_ pay for as an individual. It's reasonably priced and worth the increase in efficiency and better experience. Plus their pricing is fair and flexible.

Yes, it seems fair to me to spend real money on Jetbrain's tools, if you like them.

It is strange how reluctant programmers are to spend on tools even though they are, as a rule, quite willing to let themselves be paid handsomely for their services. Yet graphic designers pay for Adobe's tools. Who can read this riddle?

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

#256

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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?

> I fell for this. I enabled it because I was curious about trying new development tools, only to find out later it uploaded all of the source code on my computer to their service. What the hell.

An old comment from another user. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14837253

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

#257

Post by Grothendank »

dmarlow wrote: post #110

I'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 pe…

The article was a lot of words uttered specifically to avoid the words, "ppl didn't use kite because it sucked", while conveying the same meaning.

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

#258

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

I pay for tools independently if they are affordable and I can use them commercially (even at work, even if my employer does not pay for it). I pay for JetBrains yearly and am at the lowest renew cost as a result, so theres no incentive for me to stop paying them yearly. I also saw that you can get Visual Studio Pro for $45 a month, which is really decent considering you get a professional grade IDE all to yourself.

The other thing is they have to be tools I want to use. I am an outlier I am sure. I hear often "let your employer pay for it" but they don't always necessarily pay for the tools I need to use. Having my own JetBrains license grants me strong freedom.

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

#259

Post by password4321 »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #140
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…

When I tried kite over a year ago I was relatively unimpressed with it. Even though it ran as a plug-in to jet brains IDE it required a windows installed service and two separate executables running in the background (kite.exe, kited.exe), and that stuff continue to run after exiting my IDE which was unacceptable for me. Kite may have been the first to market but copilot blew them out of the water in terms of overall…

So they wanted to run forever in the background and they'd already gotten in trouble for silently collecting telemetry?

Sounds like everyone has dodged a bullet!

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

#260

Post by arcticfox »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #251
irrational wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a web developer. My company pays for JetBrains IntelliJ for me. And I love it. But, if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket, I’d use VS Code instead. I’ve used both and IntelliJ is superior to VS Code, but not to such an extent that I would pay my own money for it. But I’m more than happy to have my company buy it for me.

Disagree on this example though.

Me too - I would, on the other hand, pay to use VS Code instead of Intellij if I had to.
Post reply on HN