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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

#481

Post by elzbardico »

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…

Maybe I am older, having started in the late 90's. But I think developer tools nowadays are so cheap compared to my salary that I pay for them without thinking twice.

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

#482

Post by origin_path »

newaccount74 wrote: post #423
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 d…

Could you talk a bit more about your success? What does it do, what pricing model do you use, how long did it take you to acquire customers, do you feel it's worth it? Asking for a friend, of course.

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

#483

Post by jasonjmcghee »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #394
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…

A couple of things off the top of my head. — advanced refactoring for all supported languages: implement interface, extract interface, automatic "generification" for methods and classes, stuff like that. Saves quite a bit of manual typing. — built-in database client (which I have already mentioned) which also provides autocompletion for database/table/column names, both for SQL queries, and various supported librarie…

A few that come to mind for me:

Searchable local history (with selective reverting / diffing) is a large value add for me.

The debugging experience is quite good.

The git integration works well- especially blame / navigating through reflog with diffs.

Autocomplete suggestions / behavior is better than alternatives, in my experience.

Auto-fix suggestions / behavior is better than alternatives, in my experience.

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

#484

Post by RupertEisenhart »

candiddevmike wrote: post #50
arcturus17 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loads of devs I’ve spoken to, from junior to principal level, absolutely love Github Copilot though. Don’t know who is paying it for them, nor if Kite was significantly worse, but I think that at least Copilot has a brilliant future ahead of it.

Until Microsoft grants Copilot users blanket protection over copyright claims from Copilot generated code, I wouldn't even think of touching it.

Do you mind explaining why? What do you think will happen?

This is a serious question, I'm apparently just unaware of the horror-stories that can come out of breaking copyright. (Not from the US so..)

For me its most useful for helping with bash scripts and small simple stuff, just saves a huge amount of time I would spend googling and checking small things. Not sure if copyright is relevant there or not, it certainly isn't something I am worried about. Interested to hear what your fears are based on.

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

#485

Post by jasonjmcghee »

Semaphor wrote: post #424
origin_path wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is there's Fleet, their VSCode competitor, which sounds like you're referring to, and the UI refresh, which parent is referring to.

The UI refresh is the same IDE under the hood, just way simpler. I control the IDE primarily through command palette (I think many do?) so decluttering would be great- the UI is unnecessarily complex when you can press a key and type a few words to do what you want.

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

#486

Post by bastardoperator »

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…

^ This, I may not use copilot as much on production code, but the testing code it produces makes it easily worth it from a time saved and coverage perspective.

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

#487

Post by jasmer »

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.

You may want to reconsider, or rather, consider the value of your own time.

If you value your time just even a little bit, consider how many of those tools are multipliers.

Obviously not 'JIRA' for a single dev, but in many cases JetBrains is worth it.

Would you wear Basketabll sneakers out for a jog? Well you could, but if you're going to run buy a pair of running shoes. Probably once a year. Costs about the same as Jetbrains for a year - as a very crude analogy.

At least in some cases.

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

#488

Post by bombolo »

BMorearty wrote: post #470
bombolo wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GitHub Copilot are the two exceptions for me as an individual programmer I'm sure your boss will be overjoyed when the company will get hit by a lawsuit :)

Oh yes I’m sure my boss is shaking in their boots about being liable for how I spend my own money on my own time for personal projects.

The entire topic of the discussion was engineers buying their own work tools.

You went OT. It happens. No reason to be snarky about it.

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

#489

Post by galaxyLogic »

bombolo wrote: post #464
galaxyLogic wrote: post #323

> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Does it mean employees don't pay for the tools? Or that single-person ("individual") independent developers don't? Why wouldn't a developer pay $100 for a tool that saves a day of work for them?

> Why wouldn't a developer pay $100 for a tool that saves a day of work for them? Because their boss will give them something else to do and now the developer has 100$ less and nothing to show for it.

I was truly wondering why is it developers don't want to pay. But now I think I got it: If they can implement something like the tool themselves, it is clear how much money they are saving by NOT buying it, and implementing something like that themselves.

When you just program you don't really know the value of the code you are creating, you get your salary and company gets the benefits of your code. But if your code makes it unnecessary to pay $100 for something, the value of what you are doing becomes clear, it is at least worth $100.

The value is in the eye of the (would be) buyer.

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

#490

Post by xtracto »

elzbardico wrote: post #481
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…

Maybe I am older, having started in the late 90's. But I think developer tools nowadays are so cheap compared to my salary that I pay for them without thinking twice.

I clearly remember paying around $80 USD for a WholeTomato [1] license back in 2003 for C# when I first came out of University into my first job. And that was a glorified auto-completer.

Software has turned really cheap. The downside of is that it is almost a commodity, but the development effort has not really decreased correspondingly.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030618043241/http://www.wholet...

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