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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

#351

Post by izacus »

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.

IntelliJ suite is like 120$ a year, is that too much out of developer pay?

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

#352

Post by jillesvangurp »

throwthere wrote: post #29

> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Throwing salt on the wound here but that’s just false. I mean, there’s copilot and it’s alternative that I can’t think of the name right now. more broadly there’s Jet brains ides, visual studio, Productivity apps, etc. look at product hunt or appsumo or popular show hns. Devs pay for tools, just not Kite. Edit: I should clarify, enough devs pay for t…

Most devs don't pay for their tools. Because they are employees and they need their bosses to sign off on expenses. I know some free lancers that pay for some tools but way more that don't. So, it's a small market that sustains a handful of really nice tools. Jetbrains is one of the more successful tool vendors in this space. But their tools are really essential to many developers.

As a CTO, most of my budget goes to paid services that add clear value with a clear value proposition. The value proposition with developer tools is usually quite murky. It's all very subjective and preference based. So, something like kite is a hard sell.

It's remarkable that they attracted so much investment. But of course that put them under enormous pressure to meet what were probably highly unrealistic revenue goals as well. That team might have made them a nice acquihire target at best.

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

#353

Post by jve »

mythz wrote: post #267
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.

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.

Few times I tried JetBrains rider trial because was fed up with Visual Studio performance issues and occasional crashes. But rider won't even compile my solution OOTB. Meh.

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

#354

Post by jackcviers3 »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #326
petesergeant wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some examples of the differences I would see as a TypeScript developer using a “full-blown IDE” over VS Code.

For TypeScript there's little difference since most of TypeScript support comes from the same language server running in the background (there's an option in the menus to restart it if it breaks, same as in vscode). Although autocomplete is better (especially for pure JS), it doesn't warrant paying for a license IMHO. Personally, I use IDEA for TS because I use it for other languages where it blows everything else ou…

I almost never use the mouse in vscode, emacs keybindings and the command pallete and keyboard shortcuts created any time I touch the mouse. But I also don't get everything I want, (like macros and web browsing and face customization and rectangular editing) that I get with emacs, so I only use vscode for liveshare.

Incidentally, I use and pay for tabnine (another ai assistant) in emacs and it's fantastic - single line completions are superior to whole snippets I have to read with copilot, and don't get me out of my flow.

I am surprised the tabnine company completions are way easier to work with than in vscode. With grouped backends, company lsp + company tabnine is great. I'd encourage kite users to try it. Well worth the money.

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

#355

Post by jackcviers3 »

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…

Tabnine, in emacs, with lsp mode gives you single line completions and predicts and fills out word by word in a very effective manner. It's an actual timesaver and worth the money (in emacs). The vscode experience is more problematic, but that's vscode's completions guis fault, not the tabnine server's.

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

#357

Post by anigbrowl »

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, even though I'm kinda broke and would prefer to save a few hundred a year - my IDE delivers a lot of value and the support is excellent (thanks Jetbrains). I installed Kite briefly but it seemed so resource hungry I switched it off soon after without ever really trying to use it. That's not a judgement on Kite, I just didn't have the time or resources to spend at the time I encountered it.

I'm sorry it hasn't worked out for them, but they get my respect for this unusually frank self-assessment, real humility, and following through on the fine words with the actions of sharing their tools they built. They achieved a lot and I hope their future endeavors are wildly successful.

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

#358

Post by jackcviers3 »

premun wrote: post #126
jascination wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, how are you using it to write tests? Do you just write "make a test for functionX" or something? (Don't have much experience with it)

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…

Yeah, tabnine kills it at the data entry parts of test dev as well for sure.

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

#359

Post by throwaway675309 »

mythz wrote: post #267
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.

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.

It's completely worth it to me to pay for the entire jetbrains suite annually. I'd say I use DataGrip, Webstorm, and Pycharm on a daily basis.

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

#360

Post by kikimora »

petesergeant wrote: post #322
Semaphor wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surprised to hear people say that it could be a step up from VSCode. VS Code is very* lightweight. Both in speed and in features. Comparing it with IntelliJ makes it seem very basic. Now, for some people that’s okay, but JetBrains IDEs are full-blown IDEs. *: Compared to something like JetBrains tools, or literally any other electron software.

Could you give some examples of the differences I would see as a TypeScript developer using a “full-blown IDE” over VS Code.

I write a bit of TypeScript recently in both VSCode and WebStorm, I also have many years of experience using both tools. Started with VSCode since it lightweight and this is what I use to edit most of the text. Unfortunately VSCode had troubles indexing the project, refactoring, figuring out types and navigating between methods. Everything works but VSCode hangs for a few seconds every time I do an action that needs a code analysis e.g. go to a method definition. Most of the time it was faster to search and replace rather than to rename a method. WebStorm was the opposite - opens in a few seconds, but then everything works instantly.
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