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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

#361

Post by alibarber »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #276
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…

Yep. 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…

Oh I've had colleagues look at me strange for actually having bought a licence. We are sometimes a parody of ourselves...

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

#362

Post by omnicognate »

eloff wrote: post #64
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…

My experience with copilot has been very different. It easily pays for itself, and getting my employer (seed stage startup) to spring for it for the entire team was an easy sell. Yeah it's pretty dumb most of the time. But I know that, and I don't use code from it without carefully checking it out and modifying it. But it's still a huge help. Just the time saved writing tests alone pays for it. And I've had a few spo…

> If my company didn't pay for it, I would

Testimonials of this form are near worthless to a company. Maybe it's true for you. Statistically, it's highly likely to be misleading.

People overestimate their willingness to pay for something for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is that they incorrectly visualise what the choice to pay or not looks like. They often imagine a moment of abstract choice after which everything remains exactly the same but some small amount of money magically vanishes from their bank account. In reality, paying for something is a tedious inconvenience, and not paying for it more often takes the form of never getting round to putting your card details in than consciously deciding "this isn't worth it".

It can be taken to questionable extremes, but there's truth in the idea that the only real evidence as to what customers will do is what they actually do, not what they say they will do. I don't know if their interpretation is correct, but it sounds like Kite at least has evidence of the former sort.

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

#363

Post by dvdkon »

dmitriid wrote: post #344
qwerty456127 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sublime is too expensive. $99 is too much. On the other hand I have 437 games in my Steam account and countless gadgets I don't use. I guess I can skip a couple of games and a gadget or two to pay for software I use.

That's somewhat true for me as well, but I generally pay under 5 EUR for a game. Deciding between 20 games and a text editor doesn't look so good. Though as long as Sublime Text's developer is happy with the market share and revenue it has, I wouldn't change the price.

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

#364

Post by anigbrowl »

capitalsigma wrote: post #270
javajosh wrote: post #255

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!"

Good god no, I just want it to work. I used to be that way, but you can be too in love with customizing your tools to the point that it gets in the way of doing your own projects. I do not want to spend all my time carving better knife handles.

I think about writing my own IDE sometimes, but then I think how all-consuming such a project would be, and having to support a userbase made up of developers.

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

#365

Post by stevage »

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…

Wow, Copilot's must be very domain-dependent. For me, it saves a ton of time, I'd hate to have to code without it.

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

#366

Post by animuchan »

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…

In my experience JS autocomplete in IntelliJ isn't better, it just shows more stuff. Most of it unrelated and won't work / will be `undefined` if chosen.

It does, however, teach junior developers that the autocomplete is unreliable, which is a good thing I guess — I've seen juniors in statically typed languages like Java fail coding interviews because they couldn't remember any of the syntax, the knowledge was contained in the autocomplete and didn't transfer to a whiteboard.

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

#367

Post by vladvasiliu »

theamk wrote: post #303
oorza wrote: 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.

> 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.

I have a friend who works as a dev for a decently sized software editor, so he's seen his fair share of people interacting with the tools. They work mainly with Java and the company pays for Intellij for everyone.

He's often complaining about how people never try to learn the IDE and always do things manually. They usually don't really know what they're doing in the terminal, either (they mostly use Windows, so the terminal is rarely second nature).

But whenever he shows them a few nicer features, typically around refactoring and such, they're always blown away and never look back.

He has, of course, interacted with his fair share of graybeards who only use vim, but those people don't usually take ages to accomplish simple tasks.

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

#368

Post by cfn »

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.

I have been paying for Resharper (and now Rider and DataGrip) for over fifteen years. Some companies where I worked paid for it other didn't but it didn't matter. It improves the quality of my code and I believe it gives me a competitive edge. It also helps keeping me sane as I work with a lot of legacy code.

I see it like a construction worker that uses his own tools instead of the broken down ones of the site. It makes good business sense that I can work faster and better when I use better tools. I also pay for other tools such as dbForge and SmartSvn/Git but Jetbrains' tools have been the longest running ones (I hope this does not sound like I am a fanboy or something).

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

#369

Post by batushka3 »

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#370

Post by kriro »

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

Not to sound overly mean but it might have been a good idea to start with testing this idea first/earlier. Additionally, it seems to me like they didn't do a great job at identifying their customer. It's probably not individual devs but rather the people they work for. So you're in a B2B business and need to sell it that way.

The meaner response would be that it seems like developers do not pay for YOUR tools. Seems like there are plenty of paying customers for copilot for example.

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