Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

kite.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 547 posts

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

#421

Post by mritchie712 »

dmarlow wrote: post #110

I'm confused. "we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet." "Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools." "We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough." Sounds like you know why people didn't pay for it. If it truly did make pe…

They say this:

> making their developers 18% faster

If they're claiming 18%, it was probably more like 5% to 10% and it's really hard to sell something that's 5% better (especially when the alternative is free/ do nothing).

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

#422

Post by icemelt8 »

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.

Should I stop using US made products because they funded the genocide in Iraq?

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

#423

Post by newaccount74 »

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…

>> 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.

Just because your startup failed doesn't mean an entire category is unsustainable.

I've been living from sales of a developer tool for the last 10 years, and there are plenty of other paid developer tools out there that show developers absolutely do pay for developer tools.

Now, maybe some of the startups have unrealistic expectations. A Python documentation reader probably wont turn into a billion dollar revenue company no matter how smart it is.

But I'm pretty sure there is a market for dev tools. Maybe the market is smaller, or harder to crack than you thought, but saying "there is no way" isn't going to help anyone.

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

#424

Post by Semaphor »

origin_path wrote: post #398
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if JetBrains does support your language more "natively", what makes it better than using a language server? As a student I can use JetBrains tools for free but personally, I'd much rather use something like VSCode combined with clangd than e.g. CLion, as I don't see anything that would make CLion better, while the JetBrains UI is downright cluttered. As for keyboard use, the command pallete (Ctrl+Shift+P) is rig…

They're launching a new UI that's more VSCode like, way less cluttered: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new...

It’s not just a new UI, it’s ~~crippled~~ faster to be more like VS Code and not cannibalize their existing IDEs.

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

#425

Post by madsbuch »

lolinder wrote: post #152
eloff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Just the time saved writing tests alone pays for it. This, so much. My code since using Copilot is easily ten times better tested than it was before, and I wasn't especially lazy when it comes to testing. Given 1-2 hand-written unit tests, Copilot can start filling in test bodies that correctly test what's described in the function name. When I can't think of any more edge cases, I'll go prompt it with one more @Te…

APIs are not copyrightable (Oracle vs Google). However, the code that interacts with an API might be.

Regardless, it is interesting to think about what domains are easier to generate effective models for. I would expect it to be easier to generate a supervised model => . My intuition is also, that it is easier to generate React component code, and harder to generate feature code.

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

#426

Post by Yizahi »

lycopodiopsida wrote: post #401
somethingreen wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The war started in Feb 2014, just saying. JB closed offices only when they become afraid of getting squashed by new USA secondary sanctions, not because they opposed war.

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

#427

Post by newaccount74 »

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…

> the vast majority (>90%) of devs would rather exit out of that pop-up

Converting just 5% of users to paying customers is considered pretty good for shareware/freemium, so just because you saw a lot of people using the trial does not mean it is unsustainable. I have no idea how much the developer of Sublime Text makes, but considering that they have been around since 2008 I would assume it's definitely sustainable.

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

#428

Post by mmustapic »

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…

I'm a contractor so my case is a bit different, I can't expect a client to pay for every tool I want to use. But I gladly pay for Sublime Text and Sublime Merge because it makes my work more enjoyable and effective, and this is also good for whoever is paying me.

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

#429

Post by that_guy_iain »

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

Quite simply developers are not decision makers. Often engineering managers aren't even decision makers. I fully believe if you want to dominate in that area you need to target decision makers who force it upon their developers. How many of us have been told we're using X database or we're using X project management tool or even X virtualisation system? Management makes these decisions which is why if you go an AWS conference you'll find majority of the people there aren't techies but management and lots of the talks are aimed at management understanding the tech.

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

#430

Post by dspillett »

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…

> Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs talking at Czech conferences in Czech?

Do you have examples of them not talking Czech at Czech conferences? Not talking a particular local language at an international conference is not a significant metric IMO. A great many companies from all over the world send people out to speak English (or at least American!) at conferences. As a linguistically ignorant Englishman this is rather useful to me, but it doesn't make those companies not French, not German, not Indian, not Chinese, etc.

Heck, if (caveat: speculation, I've not looked into this at all) Russian is a common enough second language in the country (or at least amongst local+visiting delegates for conferences about these subjects) then some talks at a conference in the Czech Republic being in Russian would not be surprising, much like you see many talks in English/American countries where English is not an official language (and similar for other languages that are significantly more common if you count people with them as second+ languages as well as native speakers).

> used to listen to tech podcasts

The issue is more acute with podcasts than conferences: the audience is international, so they might not have the luxury of using their native language while serving a large enough target audience.

> Because I was a russian speaking … listen to tech podcasts and talks in russian all the time

I see much room for confirmation bias here. What reason would they have, beyond national pride which is valid of course, to make a point of explaining “we aren't Russian BTW” on a Russian language podcast? Especially give that could be seen as a bit of a down-play of the Russian audience if national pride works the other way against them.

Post reply on HN