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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

#441

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.

Their support is also often stellar - if something breaks in a free product, get ready for some free support also (read, none, DIY). And, maybe you think fixing your IDE yourself makes you a better developer - if you are building IDEs, maybe, sure. I'm more than happy to outsource that a company which does this as its bread and butter. Microsoft, on the other hand, sells (or tries to) enterprise office solutions. The…

To be fair, there is a FOSS binary distribution of VSCode -- VSCodium[1], though it is maintained by the community. It operates in a similar way (licensing-wise) to IntelliJ IDEA Community vs. Ultimate.

[1] https://vscodium.com/

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a product that I actually _would_ pay for as an individual. It's reasonably priced and worth the increase in efficiency and better experience. Plus their pricing is fair and flexible.

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?

> 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.

Ability to find someone willing to pay XYZ for foobar does not imply that I am willing to pay the same amount of money for something similar.

In fact, by doing this exact transactions it means that I find such transaction advantageous for me.

Also, I had enough stories of lock-in and losing access to proprietary systems that I prefer vastly inferior open source.

Also, I am not aware of paid systems worth paying for.

I use primarily Linux (Lubuntu), git, Codium, Python, Kotlin, pgsql, Android Studio, LibreOffice, Firefox, uBlock Origin, Leechblock, sqlite.

For what I can pay that makes it worth it? For contributing back, I prefer working on code over donations (due to geoeconomical situation and ability too direct my effort precisely where I care about things over donations often being wasted)

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What shady stuff they did?

> developers began noticing something: Kite had quietly injected promotional content and data-tracking functionality into open-source apps the company previously had no affiliation with. The discoveries of those injections, and Kite’s initial refusal to roll them back, led to backlash from programmers who felt the company’s actions undermined the open-source community. https://qz.com/1043614/this-startup-learned-the-…

> functionality into open-source apps the company previously had no affiliation with

To elaborate, they bought the open source projects and put in the content without informing people that they were now in control of the project.

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

#444
post #299

Docker and Vagrant are the some of the prime examples. They are clearly useful but people still don't want to pay.

People pay for services around this technology. They pay not for the technology itself, cause there are many other provider. Nobody would use Docker or Vagrant, if they use the same pricing strategy as all competitors before. Red Hat Linux is free, but the company make money, but not directly with the core. Nobody ever would buy a Android license, google has other strategies to make money.

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

#445
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…

> which means copilot is generating tests that only interact with an API that I wrote

It bases this generated test cases on other similar test cases in other software, including GPL licensed

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contai…

I do agree IntelliJ's autocomplete is kinda crap out of the box. But if you turn off all the machine learning stuff it's back to being alright. > 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. Is this really a problem? How much Java code does anyone w…

This is only a problem if they wanted to get hired, and then failed the interview because even the basic syntax of their language of choice is unknown to them in the slightest.

I didn't invent the rules, I'm just doing the interviews, occasionally from both sides of the table.

(However if I did invent the rules, I'd probably still require e.g. a Java developer to know Java at least a little bit. Is this really controversial?)

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

#447
post #43

These guys were a complete joke; and a good example of fleecing the VC community. Good riddance to bad rubbish

The VCs are willingly fleeced - they aren't about companies generating revenue either. Hard to feel sorry for VCs when they're playing the same game Kite is - just hyping the market and flipping an asset, hoping the music doesn't stop before they get out.

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

#449
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, but it's generally the kind of money that only allows having a mom-and-pop store. 1-2-5 employees, that's it. If you have a bigger initiative, you can't do it. Instead, Mega Corp just buys you out when you burn out after many years of development, we see this happening regularly.

In general I think you are probably right. Many developer tools are small projects that can be developed by a single person, and it seems they often struggle to grow into to a bigger company. (I've experienced this struggle myself. For me, the problem was not lack of money)

On the other hand, I think Jetbrains shows that it is absolutely possible to build a huge company that sells nothing but developer tools.

There are also a bunch of mid-size companies that sell developer tools. I'm pretty sure there's more than 5 people at Navicat, Hex-Rays, or Panic, but I'm not sure how big these companies actually are.

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

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some ml/dl tools (think gpt3) seem to be able to answer questions that we previously thought you needed gintelligence for. I think the line between "pure statistics" and "intelligence" are much more blurry than they used to be, and might go away entirely.

Some of the things GPT3 can achieve are very impressive, but once you work you work with it a little bit, you definitely feel that it just regurgitates the masses of text it has been trained on and tries to piece it together in the most cohesive ways. And for production usage, it (and similar models) have huge problems with halucination where it will confidently spit out "facts" that are just plain wrong.

That’s what many people do as well, I feel. Not joking.

That aside, copilot works well as a proactive search tool for idioms, templates, and boilerplate. It can also do things like build the invocation of a CLI tool, with arguments, from a comment line. To me, if nothing more, is the next step in the use of reference. I started with man, .hlp files and books… then progressively replaced them with Google because it was faster even if more noisy… now I use copilot first.

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