Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

I read about and tried evaluating Kite at the time and it seemed like it was in some kind of private invite stage. I remember thinking it must have been acquired and wasn’t taking new users. This must have been an incorrect take.

I’m surprised Tabnine is not mentioned in this thread at all, though because that was acquired and afaik is still operating.

Before copilot came along, Tabnine, not Kite, seemed like the ai took to beat.

I also remember a Python dev relations person from Jetbrains going on a podcast and clowning on AI code completion. That was in April of 2021. [2] A month later copilot dropped.

The very strange thing about that was Jetbrains described efforts to build an ML-based code completion plug-in in 2016! [3] It obviously failed to follow through on that.

I still think G Co pilot represents a threat to jetbrains IDEs overall. Even the packaged autocomplete can’t compete on basic stuff copilot does now.

I disagree with the idea that AI code completion is not good enough yet. I see that said all the time and yet it can masterfully fill in boiler plate today.

It can be way better, particularly in languages outside JavaScript and Python, but it’s usable now and maybe even profitable as a service if the business is not leveraged by VC capital.

If you listen to the September interview with Eddie Aftandilian of Github Copilot you would realize how early it still is for that product, as how to measure success in code completion is something still requiring behavioral patterns that are still being recorded.

Here’s the episode, listen 20 mins in: https://www.se-radio.net/2022/10/episode-533-eddie-aftandili...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074393

[2] https://twitter.com/jetsetter/status/1379438096232587265

[3] https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2016/09/share-your-stats-to-...

Sublime Text.

I sat through scores of interviews and pairing sessions with developers back when Sublime was a thing and the vast majority (>90%) of devs would rather exit out of that pop-up asking for support then pay the measly $30 or whatever regardless of their massive incomes and increased productivity that Sublime brought them.

We developers are no more altruistic than anyone else regardless of the lies we fed ourselves in the early days of FOSS, internet, bitcoin, etc.

:(

Important caveat here. My only exposure to JetBrains had been through Intellij which was thoroughly unpleasant around 2012-2013. That impression has left me forever sour towards them. Surprised to hear people say that it could be a step up from VSCode.

It looks like "Fleet" is their VSCode competitor? I'm not sure if the homepage does a good job at communicating how this improves over of VSCode. First of all VSCode has an enormous ecosystem of tools which seems hard to replicate. In terms of advertised features for Fleet, it seems like the one most highlighted on the page is multiplayer, which would possibly enable others watching me code live? Sounds nerve-wracking. Although I could imagine some helpful scenarios when pair-programming or something.

Other items that are advertised don't really encourage me to want to make the leap, especially as something I have to pay for. It sounds like they could host your code, or something like that, which could be nice. An annoying part of my workflow is that I work on the same codebase between multiple machines and every time I hop between machines I have to commit the changes to a private repository that is separate from my team's repository. It seems like it would be somewhat straight-foward to have the same code shared between all machines.

Other than that I would be interested to hear on how any Jetbrains products would improve productivity.