451–460 of 547 posts
Kinda funny: the most revenue you guys might actually get is selling your domain!
I think this comment was in bad taste, but I can't edit or delete it now. So please accept my apologies.
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If Copilot generates the exact same code as the source, I don't see how that process could be exempt, it's like using the clipboard on your PC with extra steps.
It can generate the same code, but generally won't.
> 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…
A bit tangential to the original post, but where does this belief that data scientists are non-technical folks? I am a data scientist myself, and in my view it's way more technical than most software development. Albeit I wouldn't still call neither data scientists nor software engineers "smarter" than the average.
Sure, if you want to train your bread and butter text classifier it just takes 10 lines of boilerplate code. But you don't need an AI-assisted tool for that - you just go to hugging face, copy paste those 10 lines, done, it's certainly faster than getting some AI-assisted code editor work for you.
For everything that is a bit more complicated, you need endless adjustments to your code, and it's quite unlikely more than a handful of people before you ever wrote the same code. It is, indeed, a somewhat painful and slow process (because just "testing" your code often takes minutes, if not hours, so finding out bugs becomes annoying). And a somewhat simple, AI-based, error highlight tool might be useful to weed out the most stupid ones and save some time.
But I will never trust something like copilot (or Kite, I guess, which I never tried) to write my code for me, as the challenging parts of the work involve long-term connection between different pieces of code (data loader, loss function, model function) that are written independently but must "cooperate" in a very non-trivial way. It is not at all uncommon that I make hours-long screen sharing calls with a colleague, discussing non-trivial mathematical computations, only to end up changing one or two lines of code that don't have an immediate link with the problem we are trying to solve.
This kind of things are notoriously hard for AI to grasp, so they can't do any decent job in writing that for me. Add on top that a lot of the code you find freely online is just ridiculously bad or broken, and you might only get unusable models generated by AI engines trained on those.
So, what kind of work are you referring to when talking about "data scientists or business" in your comment?
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> 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.
You either care about licenses of dependencies or just decide copyright doesn't apply to you :D Seems that using both is a contradiction.
Builders buy hammers, drills. We should be parting with our money for tools that multiply our earning capacity as contractors and consultants.
I would pay 5x as much for many of the tools I buy too, such is their value.
> 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…
> towards non-technical folks trying to get their feet wet in software. Eg: Data scientists or business. A bit tangential to the original post, but where does this belief that data scientists are non-technical folks? I am a data scientist myself, and in my view it's way more technical than most software development. Albeit I wouldn't still call neither data scientists nor software engineers "smarter" than the average…
In the software world people seem to be referred to as technical when they write software systems not as much as singular scripts.
Data science is definitely technical but a lot of code work tends to happen in Jupyter notebooks or something similar. The main challenge is in understanding the ML/AI algorithms, the possible choices for your analyses that actually make sense for the problem, ... .
Besides that, due to the AI hype, there are so many people in data science who don't know much about coding or software engineering. Therefore, helping these people might be profitable (or not).
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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 a…
ActiveState used to be another, back in the day. They're still around but with minor mindshare.
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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.
> Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s. I feel that's not my problem as an employee. I work the same amount of time regardless.
Example: without Intellij, you deploy some back end code interacting with an OCR solution.
Example: with Intellij, you can build the whole OCR solution yourself.
Doing the latter translates long term into higher salaries and more money in your pocket. You have to talk about what you did in interviews and your answers will be reflected in the offers you get.
The only way this would not apply would be if you can say “I am absolutely sure I will never move on from, or be laid off by, my company,” which is not a recommended strategy in this economy.
Sadly, I never heard of Kite until copilot came out. As someone who pays for tools, I would have considered it (have paid for JB for years, various atlassian tools, and other utilities/etc).