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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

#401

Post by lycopodiopsida »

somethingreen wrote: post #388
lycopodiopsida wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains is a czech company. And always was, as in "founded in Prague". Stop spreading FUD.

Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs talking at Czech conferences in Czech? Asking seriously. Because I was a russian speaking Ukrainian until recently and used to listen to tech podcasts and talks in russian all the time, for years, starting back when JB products just started gaining popularity. Not once was the company or it's products regarded as Czech by russians. It was always talked about as r…

Why should an multinational IT company aiming at developers talk in a local language? How does a heritage of founders matters? Google is half a russian company by that metric, as in "Sergey Brin".

JetBrains is a Czech company because it was created in Czech Republic and is operated from Czech Republic. They've had significant development resources in pre-war Russia, like many big companies, because it was a cheap and good. As the war started, they've rescued whoever they could and closed their russian offices.

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

#402

Post by ChrisRR »

keyle wrote: post #277
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 have to disagree. I pay for tools if they're good and they're saving me - time - headache - improve my quality or quantitive results I very often do not want to pay if the product isn't as good as it claims or simply not good enough. Software developers very simply would rather build their own half assed solution to a problem rather than pay for a half assed solution. Offer quality, we'll pay.

Remember that a single data point does not show a trend.

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

#403

Post by dijit »

einpoklum wrote: post #127
dijit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you'll allow me to go on a tangent here; The sheer volume of subscription services I've signed up for as the CTO for a startup is mind-boggling. $8 here, $19 there, $49 for something important, $99 for something essential. Some tools are easily worth it, especially when you see what is charged for other (less valuable) tools. Gitlab, Confluence, Jira, Asana, 1Password, co-pilot, codepen, sentry, jetbrains, gitlab…

> Some tools are easily worth it, especially when you see what is charged for other (less valuable) tools. Maybe, but most of the tools you listed are not in that category IMNSHO.

Which category?

Ones I excluded for bring "not worth it" are Lens ($20/user/mo), Snyk ($139/user/month) and Postman ($36/user/month) - contrast those with Gitlabs pricing to understand the value trade-off.

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

#404

Post by tomashubelbauer »

canadianfella wrote: post #263
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 not a programmer and I pay for github copilot. For me it is worth the productivity boost - even if I just make things for fun.

It is surprising to me to see that you don't view yourself as a programmer. Maybe you're not a professional software developer, but writing code for fun sure sounds programmery to me.

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

#405

Post by lewisl9029 »

Seeing a lot of comments trying to dispute the claim that "individual developers do not pay for tools". The claim does invite these kinds of disputes since it's so absolutist, but I do believe there is some truth to it, at least if we take it as a generalization (rather than a literal statement).

Anyone who's either worked at a developer tooling company or tried to sell to developers themselves (I personally did both, having worked at CircleCI in the past and now building my own developer tooling product at https://reflame.app, Show HN launch thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134059) can probably back the observation that we individual developers are notoriously reluctant to open our wallets, even for products that we love and use daily, despite our high disposable income relative to professionals in other markets.

Gonna share a few of my own hypotheses for some of the contributing factors as comments below for discussion.

Would be fun to see folks share their own! Especially if you've seen successful strategies for how someone might be able to overcome these hurdles to selling products to individual developers at scale (a topic near and dear to my heart these days)!

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

#406

Post by krageon »

batushka3 wrote: post #369
mythz wrote: 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.

Quoted post unavailable.

This sort of fundamentalism isn't what stimulates societies to make peace, which you ostensibly want. The way to peace is tolerance and getting Russia to see that too, not drawing lines in the sand and beating your chest. That leads to more war. It is easy to see examples of this, as the US has been doing this for as long as it's existed (at least, when it wasn't at war with itself - and even then).

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

#407

Post by lewisl9029 »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #405

Seeing a lot of comments trying to dispute the claim that "individual developers do not pay for tools". The claim does invite these kinds of disputes since it's so absolutist, but I do believe there is some truth to it, at least if we take it as a generalization (rather than a literal statement). Anyone who's either worked at a developer tooling company or tried to sell to developers themselves (I personally did both…

We get so many developer tooling products thrown at us, either for free or dirt cheap, that over the decades it's conditioned us to assign much less monetary value to developer tooling products compared to what a simple opportunity cost analysis would yield, given the high monetary value of our time.

I certainly suffered from this myself to a rather extreme degree in the past, having categorically refused to pay a single cent for anything I used to build side projects with, until I started to seriously think about pricing for my own product. Eventually I realized throwing money at almost any problem where it could buy me more free time should be a no-brainer considering how highly I value my free time.

Tangentially, I think there's an interesting analogue in here to what Steam did in the PC games market, but I digress...

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

#408

Post by lewisl9029 »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #405

Seeing a lot of comments trying to dispute the claim that "individual developers do not pay for tools". The claim does invite these kinds of disputes since it's so absolutist, but I do believe there is some truth to it, at least if we take it as a generalization (rather than a literal statement). Anyone who's either worked at a developer tooling company or tried to sell to developers themselves (I personally did both…

Competition for developer tooling products is _fierce_, possibly more so than any other industry, precisely because we really seem to love spending our free time building slightly different versions of the tools we use that suit our preferences better, sometimes before we even try to Google if that slightly different version already exists.

Again, I'm totally guilty of this myself, since Reflame started as a side project initially to scratch my own itch, and I can't claim to have done an exhaustive search on the problem space before I started.

This results in a vicious cycle where every product, however innovative it might be at its inception, gets quickly commoditized by dozens of similar products immediately following any signs of traction, so they end up having to shift to competing on price eventually.

Combined with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691132 means any product that isn't available for free then eventually rots into obscurity due to the unfair distribution advantage of "free" in this market. Thus they are forced to offer a free version themselves and the cycle continues.

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

#409

Post by [deleted] »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #405

Seeing a lot of comments trying to dispute the claim that "individual developers do not pay for tools". The claim does invite these kinds of disputes since it's so absolutist, but I do believe there is some truth to it, at least if we take it as a generalization (rather than a literal statement). Anyone who's either worked at a developer tooling company or tried to sell to developers themselves (I personally did both…

[deleted]

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

#410

Post by berkes »

mkoubaa wrote: post #91

The thesis that helping developers write code has value is flat wrong. We spend so much more time reading, reviewing, designing, arguing/bitching about code than we do writing it. Orders of magnitude more. Any developer tooling company must understand this basic fact.

Indeed! Software development is not about writing syntax, but about "knowing what to write and where to put it".

Having a tool that rapidly creates setters, getters, or even common algorithms in function/method bodies is neat, crucial even. But also a problem that has mostly been solved for decades now.

The actual difficulty, where software devs spend (or should spend?) most time is indeed in what you say "reading, reviewing, designing, arguing". Where I'd like to add that the "arguing/bitching" is crucial if done with the right people (stakeholders, business, etc: creating a domain -or ubiquitous- language).

No AI can help me with that. And the current AIs make that worse. Rather than learning and applying ubiquitous language, rather than evolving a clean, maintainable architecture, it blurps a generic(ish) blurp of code. That often has no place where it was suggested, is inconsistent, breaks encapsulation or coupling and so on. If you blindly accept all the suggestions, the code often becomes worse fast; but you do write a lot of lines of code quickly. Whoever cares about that, though?

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