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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

#311
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a no-brainer purchase given its instant ROI from time saved. Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s.

JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.

> I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.

To be fair, that's true of almost everything.

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

#312
> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools

Counterpoint:

https://www.jetbrains.com/

Maybe instead of blaming potential customers for not finding enough value for your product, you might need to start looking inward.

I gladly paid for my own personal license for R# that I kept across four jobs over 8 years. I only stopped paying for it because I no longer develop in C#.

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

#313
I like folks here defending their buying strategy. It makes the point even more valid, as I read all of these, they are very few data points. Quantitative and Qualitative -wise, developer tools market are almost non-existence. Better to jump into overall software development process tools if you insist.

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Sublime is too expensive. $99 is too much. They should make a special christmas offer %90 off and many (of those who will never pay otherwise) will pay.

Do that once, and nobody will pay the full price again. They'll just be waiting for the next discount.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because developers want to be able to hack on their own tools: fix bugs, add features, whatever. Graphics designers do not have the skills to hack on their own tools, so there isn't a huge population of them sitting around going "damn, I wish I had feature X -- I know, I'll build my own editor and open source it!"

I have absolutely no desire to hack my own tools. Hacking my own tools doesn’t put any money in my pocket nor is that what I have ever been hired for.

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

#316
post #303
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a much bigger chasm between GIMP and Photoshop than there is between VS Code (with plugins) and JetBrains. I don't believe this to be true. I think the difference is graphic designers tend to use much more of their toolings' functions, whereas almost every day I'm surprised someone I work with doesn't even know some IDE feature was possible, let alone how to use it. Hell, almost every frontend developer I'…

That makes sense though.. Terminal commands are easy to put into team wiki or record in personal notes or put into your CI config. There is a command history, it is easy to chain commands, etc.. Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much more productive (say its debugging does not work without it) it is better to avoid it if possible.

IDE's native tooling makes you more productive because you set it up and never interact with it. If you need to manually do stuff, or do it all the time, you can slap it behind a keybinding. My cmd+F6 to do everything that needs to be done to get the iOS app built and debugging inside a simulator is obviously going to be more productive than having to jump into the terminal every time. Ditto for the run configuration (also cmd+F6 in a different project) that spins up docker and all that blah blah to get the API server running.

This is what I'm talking about, for what it's worth, a programmer doesn't immediately see the utility in the tool and doesn't use it, and that's the story for 99% of the things an IDE does. It's always faster to do it yourself once, or twice, especially considering setup time and learning curve, so people don't make use of the tools. I see people using grep instead of their IDE search because they cbf to figure out how to do it in the IDE!

It's like we're carpenters who hate power tools.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough developers want to hack on their own tools that the market is smaller than you would naively expect, counting the number of developers and how many tools they each use. It's a bit like asking "how come we're having so much trouble selling our extended warranty to professional mechanics, even though professional drivers buy extended warranties all the time?"

The real reason is that there are free alternatives. For many people, “free and open source” is the same as just “free”. Again, I can fix most things on my car. I can afford the tools needed. But I don’t want to because opportunity cost. One thing I have always found weird is the whole, “hey can you look at my computer? It is all slow” is considered okay to ask anyone in IT, but it (at least in the circles I was rais…

Simple. I told my parents if they buy either a Windows computer or an Android device, I couldn’t and wouldn’t help them (yes they can afford Apple devices). During the height of Covid, my dad had emergency surgery and I didn’t want to go see him when he was already weak (he’s better now). I sent them an iPad because it was much easier to use with FaceTime than figure out which badly integrated video calling solution that Google was pushing this week.

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

#318
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you like them. 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. F…

Strange. In my experience, IntelliJ from 2012 is a superior experience to VSCode today.

I use both, and it really depends on the language.

Something like Java is really benefitted from IntelliJ, Spring integration is excellent, but especially scripting languages like Python or JavaScript/Typescript don't get enough uplift and you might as well use VS Code.

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

#319
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can generate the same code, but generally won't.

So Microsoft should provide blanket protections to the developers that use it?

No, for a number of reasons:

1) It's the code license that matters, and the depends on what license the code the developer is building is using

2) License compatibility is undecided (see eg the different views of Apache Foundation and FSF on the compatibility of ASF 2.0 and GPL)

3) It's easy for someone to deliberately produce code that violates a license. MS is a big target and you can bet license trolls would chase it on that.

Probably more reasons, but there's a good start.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until Microsoft grants Copilot users blanket protection over copyright claims from Copilot generated code, I wouldn't even think of touching it.

Same. Never ever I'm risking breaking copyright, and I also don't like Microsoft not including their own code in the model.

> I also don't like Microsoft not including their own code in the model

From allegations I have read across the Internet, Microsoft might be doing those who use Copilot a favor.

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