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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

#61

Post by candiddevmike »

vessenes wrote: post #57
candiddevmike wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs almost always lack any kind of purchase authority. Any tool that appeals to devs needs to appeal to their management more, either showing some kind of cost savings over existing tools, increased dev productivity, or the new fangled "dev experience" where this tool, by shear awesomeness, will let devs put aside the low salary, process hell, and keep them employed.

I understand that's Kite's perspective (and yours -- "purchasing won't pay for this"), but devs are not paid meager salaries in general, and definitely might care about their code quality when it's put out in 'public' whether that be internal repos, or github. Payscale estimates average engineering salary as having between $3,000 and $7,000 a month more in disposable income over writers -- and I would guess almost ev…

Like everything in most companies, it's never about money, it's about control/power. It's inevitably someone's job to manage all the SaaS shit at a company, and damnit we just bought a JetBrains license why do you need Copilot?

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

#62

Post by ShamelessC »

jrpt wrote: post #35
ShamelessC wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your anecdote is trivially rebutted with another. I tried Github Copilot _more than twice_ (gasp), and now pay 10$/month for it. Happily.

That's why I tried it twice. I've been hearing people say they liked it. But I haven't found it very helpful, and often distracting, so I ended up turning it off. I'll probably try again next year when the models are improved to see if I feel any differently then.

Yeah, I understand. I just see a lot of people on here who seem to be deliberately looking for reasons not to like Copilot.

You don't fit that stereotype, of course. So feel free to ignore the following.

Developer tools have learning curves. One doesn't simply open vim/emacs for the first time with a full understanding of how to use it (or why it's a good tool to use, even). Historically, we have had _no_ problem with the steepness of this curve. But, when it comes to Copilot, there's a lot of "tried it and it output an obvious bug! how did this make it past quality assurance?? such a liability!" Just very reactionary and all-that.

Anyway, sorry for the toxic response.

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

#63

Post by vinyl7 »

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…

> Developers are somewhat reluctant to pay for tools but I think you can get them to pay for things that are worth it.

Indeed, I payed for a debugger because MSVC is pretty terrible

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

#64

Post by eloff »

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 spooky experiences where it feels like it knows the bug fix before I do. Think of it as a smarter auto-complete.

The technology has a long way to go, but I completely disagree with Kite here. It's already good enough to pay for. If my company didn't pay for it, I would. I already pay for JetBrains, and it costs more than Copilot. I would give up JetBrains before I give up Copilot.

My guess here is Kite positioned themselves as a free alternative to Copilot and then couldn't monetize. There very likely is more to it though.

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

#65

Post by lbhdc »

vessenes wrote: post #11

Condolences to the Kite team. But, congratulations, too - you have some of the highest value engineering experience in the world. I'm sure you'll land somewhere great; try and take some time off if you can afford it! Mulling over business models, and noticing the 'devs won't pay' narrative in the blog post, it's interesting to see the existing business models in AI; basically they seem to be: * API-driven cloud calls…

I am not convinced there is a market there. This is a feature in existing ides, and the grammar suggestions are often wrong.

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

#66

Post by throwthere »

svnt wrote: post #49
throwthere wrote: post #29

> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Throwing salt on the wound here but that’s just false. I mean, there’s copilot and it’s alternative that I can’t think of the name right now. more broadly there’s Jet brains ides, visual studio, Productivity apps, etc. look at product hunt or appsumo or popular show hns. Devs pay for tools, just not Kite. Edit: I should clarify, enough devs pay for t…

You think copilot is self-sustaining/profitable?

> You think copilot is self-sustaining/profitable?

Yes.

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

#67

Post by BoorishBears »

lzooz wrote: post #56
nonbirithm wrote: post #14

One last reminder that they once hijacked several open-source repos to inject advertisements for their service into the codebases. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653

Buying something and then changing it is not "hijacking" that thing.

If you have a nuanced understanding of the language, yes, it is.

The common definitions have to do with stealing, but an equally valid definition of the word hijack is to:

> take over (something) and use it for a different purpose.

Taking over a project so you can have it to advertise your service is exactly that.

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

#68

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

ElKrist wrote: post #58

"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." Are there a lot of businesses where individual developer productivity, with a narrow definition of LOC per hour, is the bottleneck? I've worked for 10 years as a web dev and the bottleneck is very often at the product management lev…

> I've worked for 10 years as a web dev and the bottleneck is very often at the product management level

Anecdotally, this was my experience at many companies before working at FAANG. But it's not my experience now.

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

#69

Post by urthor »

arcturus17 wrote: post #25
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…

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.

It's interesting, the ones I've spoken to are extremely suspicious.

"GitHub Copilot blocks your ability to learn." Is a common refrain.

I don't see ANY industry-wide consensus on whether GitHub Copilot truly helps developers right now.

The only scenario I can get anyone to agree on is generating templates. Aka, JSON or CSS files that you then edit.

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