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Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

• sanguy 4y ago
  These guys were a complete joke; and a good example of fleecing the VC community. Good riddance to bad rubbish
  • satvikpendem 4y ago
    Can you explain why they're a joke?
    • icelancer 4y ago
      There are two or three people commenting that in this post and simply not elaborating. It's ridiculous.
      • dibt 4y ago
        It's been discussed here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018037
      • dvhh 4y ago
        Because the incident should be fresh and impactful enough to remember, from my point of view it almost reach levels as bad as Sourceforge adware injection in open source software installers. For a recap for people who weren't in the industry or have short memory. Kite took ownership of some popular code editor plugins and injected some adware/tracking code.
  • rexreed 4y ago
    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.
• Mikeb85 4y ago
  Individual developers pay for tools, they just have to be worth it. JetBrains' whole existence is a testament to that. From what I remember, people got super annoyed at Kite for placing ads in open source projects and they just never caught on.
• dopeboy 4y ago
  From one founder (of a much smaller startup) to another: respect for writing this. It probably wasn't easy but the fact that you took the time to do it and share learnings so that the next startup in the space can benefits speaks volumes about y'all.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  I think I’ve tried all of the code completion tools and Kite is the only one I didn’t end up paying for. It just wasn’t useful enough.
• rkagerer 4y ago
  Hey Adam, I still remember sitting in a cafe with you after Xobni when you were contemplating what to do next and Kite was a just a gleam in your eye. Sorry to hear this one didn't pan out, and all the best going forward!
• nnurmanov 4y ago
  A few people would pay, you have to start monetizing your product from day 1 if possible. This was my mistake as well, I had 6,5k users in the group, no money after 8 months. So I shut it down.
• sirsinsalot 4y ago
  This is sad. I make a point of paying for so many development tools, fonts, and so on. 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.
• dmingod666 4y ago
  I pay for jetbrains and GitHub co-pilot from my pocket I find it totally worth it. I think they must have been hesitant in asking for money. Copilot was free for 3 months and then paid.
• dynamicwebpaige 4y ago
  "While we built next-generation experiences for developers, our business failed in two important ways. First, we failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet. 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. You can see this in Github Copilot, which is built by Github in collaboration with Open AI. As of late 2022, Copilot has a number of issues preventing it from being widely adopted. The largest issue is that state-of-the-art models don’t understand the structure of code, such as non-local context. We made some progress towards better models for code, but the problem is very engineering intensive. It may cost over $100 million to build a production-quality tool capable of synthesizing code reliably, and nobody has tried that quite yet. Nonetheless, we could have built a successful business without 10×’ing developer productivity using AI, and we did not do that. We failed to build a business because our product did not monetize, and it took too long to figure that out."
• rubiquity 4y ago
  > First, we failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet. That's not the same thing as being too early to the market. That simply means you didn't have a solution capable of solving a problem.
• mistrial9 4y ago
  code repos https://github.com/orgs/kiteco/repositories https://github.com/orgs/kiteco/repositories
• EGreg 4y ago
  Netscape open-sourcing their code is what led to Firefox and an open Web, as a counterweight to closed source browsers. Safari took WebKit from Konqueror I wish more projects would do this
  • johannes1234321 4y ago
    Mind that they continued working on it and built Netscape versions on top of Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. This people with knowledge of the code base and domain pushed it along.
• MisterSandman 4y ago
  What an honest, transparent message. Kudos.
  • dvhh 4y ago
    Honestly, I would think that after the code injection fiasco for popular Atom editor plugin that their brand would have been forever tainted.
• m00dy 4y ago
  >> It may cost over $100 million to build a production-quality tool capable of synthesizing code reliably, and nobody has tried that quite yet. $100 million is nothing tbh.
  • samspenc 4y ago
    While this maybe true for FAANG and other tech giants, it is unfortunately still a lot of money for most startups that are working their way to IPO. Tbh even at tech giants that make tens of billions of dollars, a $100 million investment is likely a lot, I'm guessing this sort of investment will require sign-off by CEO or at least VP level along with a solid business plan.
  • uJustsaidit 4y ago
    Value assessment in fiat currency is arbitrary. How many working hours, tons of materials will it take? Could they be used on more relevant needs to humanity? If so, why use them on a moonshot we will die before humanity achieves? Essentially approving burning up resources on unverifiable, perhaps unachievable outcomes? We still fund a lot of agency to iterate on high minded potential as if future humans have an immutable obligation to carry on the work. Secular norms and justifications are not sacrosanct. The dollar is a made up token of power.
  • svnt 4y ago
    $100 million on zero product-market fit is a lot.
• azhenley 4y ago
  Kite rejected me for a position years ago which motivated me to go raise $1M from the NSF to research AI-based dev tools before I moved on to Microsoft. They seemed like a really cool team, I wish them the best.
  • rexreed 4y ago
    How did you go about that NSF fund raise? Was it a SBIR? Did you already know how to fundraise through SBIR or whatever vehicle you used? Were you funding just yourself or a team? What ended up happening to the thing you fundraised from NSF?
  • alsodumb 4y ago
    If you are on the Copilot team now - seems like a perfect revenge story.
• codetrotter 4y ago
  > 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. You can see this in Github Copilot, which is built by Github in collaboration with Open AI. As of late 2022, Copilot has a number of issues preventing it from being widely adopted. True, AI assisted coding does not deliver 10x. But as a user of another AI assistant, I feel that it gives me ~1.25x to ~2x improvement for the keyboard typing when I code. And that is respectable too :) AI for me currently allows me to tab complete some things that previously an IDE on its own was not able to.
  • lawxls 4y ago
    Which one do you use?
    • codetrotter 4y ago
      https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12798-tabnine-ai-code-completion-js-java-python-ts-rust-go-php--more https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12798-tabnine-ai-code-c... Tabnine for JetBrains CLion. It works with Rust and several other languages.
• lolinder 4y ago
  > The largest issue is that state-of-the-art models don’t understand the structure of code, such as non-local context. Depending on how local he's talking, this isn't really true of Copilot. In my experience it will use context all the way up to the top of the file, even in very long files. And at least the Rust version even seems to look at the imports—if you have a use declaration it will actually correctly build and use structs in other files regardless of whether you've yet used them in the current file.
  • ShamelessC 4y ago
    I had a similar thought. I think in this instance, they mean something like a labeled/supervised training approach where the model is given not just the tokenized code, but also perhaps is grounded in the possible structure (indentation vs. semicolons, function-scope, etc.). My understanding is that copilot is largely a self-supervised approach. They feed a massive body of (somewhat noisy) code into the model. The model really does learn a lot of structure on its own and this is a testament to deep learning on noisy datasets. I'm guessing the "hooks" that they have already from IDE's, language-servers, etc. _are_ quite "structure-aware" - so they want the predicted structure as well as the code, so they can improve the typing experience beyond line-completion. I think the estimation of 100 million for such a task is maybe too high? I don't know - it feels like you could actually get quite close to such a system by simply using thousands of custom prompt engineering tricks that prepend structure examples to the prompt?
  • adamsmith 4y ago
    Yes, this was precisely what I was referring to. In small-enough programs (e.g. one file) Copilot has all the context. The other extreme would be something like the Chromium codebase. Because of this, Copilot looks better in quick demos than real-world use. (Though of course it is very impressive and this tech will get there, hopefully very soon!)
    • lolinder 4y ago
      But what I'm saying is that it does use imports, at least in Rust. I'm assuming that somehow behind the scenes they're concatenating the contents of the imports into the prompt. I can imagine this is easier in a language like Rust that has a really strict module system, and to be fair the project that I've been using it on is a side project that isn't over 10,000 lines of code yet. If I were up to 30 imports per file I can imagine concatenating would become much less effective.
• vessenes 4y ago
  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 (this is a way to get high value out of your existing cluster if you're AWS, MS, etc.) * Platform play + possible eventual lock-in: OpenAI/Microsoft * Subscription service for very specific needs (Grammarly, writing support) I wonder if engineers would pay $9.99/month (or even $49.99/month) for a 'grammar checker for PRs' - essentially: "Avoid embarrassing bugs before you commit". That is, I wonder if Kite could have been successfully sold as the third tier - sub service for something very specific. I guess if it's a good idea, someone could pull the Kite repos and launch it -- but my guess is there may be a market in there.
  • candiddevmike 4y ago
    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.
    • vessenes 4y ago
      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 every professional writer pays for grammarly. But, I agree that this is a new concept, and just spitballing -- right now, these sorts of linters and code formatting tools are mostly open source, so it would be some product marketing work to see if the market would actually pay.
• happytiger 4y ago
  Thank you for open sourcing your startup. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I think you deserve a big congratulations for being the first to really go after this problem. It’s a correct problem — it’s a big market and the solution will come eventually — I’m just sorry it turned out to be too gnarly to solve for you right now! I would have loved for it to have worked out better. I agree that Kite didn’t deliver the 10x. I was an early user and tried hard to use it but didn’t find the benefit compelling enough to drop into my workflows, but it was very exciting. I’m sure I speak for all of HackerNews when I wish you the best for whatever is next for the team. Also, what are you good folks doing next?
• jawns 4y ago
  > We failed to build a business because our product did not monetize, and it took too long to figure that out. This is the one-sentence summary about why the business failed, but it's kind of a strange way of putting it. I am dead sure that there were plenty of advisers along the way who told the company's executives that its monetization plan was weak and unlikely to succeed. But everyone assumes that they'll be the exceptional case. "It took too long to figure that out" makes it seem like the most likely scenario wasn't staring them in the face the whole time.
• nonbirithm 4y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • lzooz 4y ago
    Buying something and then changing it is not "hijacking" that thing.
    • BoorishBears 4y ago
      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.
      • _cs2017_ 4y ago
        > take over (something) and use it for a different purpose. You are misleading readers in order to promote your agenda. You clearly speak perfect English, so you know what hijack means. "take over (something) and use it for a different purpose." is not found as a definition of "hijack" in any dictionary. "Hijack" implies "unlawfully" or "without having a right to do so". Of course, every word can be used in a slightly different meaning; for example, in software can (harmlessly) hijack an entity (circumventing the usual API for expediency or performance). Such broadened semantics is perfectly fine when there's no confusion about the meaning. Very clearly in the case of OP, there was a clear intention to imply "unlawful" or "without having a right", so this exception doesn't apply. The sad thing is that I actually support your agenda. I just don't support promoting it through misleading statements.
        • 4y ago
• tommica 4y ago
  I'm sorry that it did not pan out, but thanks for sharing the code! Hopefully the next project goes well!
• dibt 4y ago
  Good riddance. I still remember how they were phoning-home without being 100% transparent about it, and the injection of ads. > We failed to build a business because our product did not monetize, and it took too long to figure that out. Yet people always defend telemetry in software, saying it's how they improve their product. 7 years of telemetry, and they couldn't figure it out?!
• jrpt 4y ago
  "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 was similar, the reason I'm not paying is that coder AIs are not providing any value. Developers are somewhat reluctant to pay for tools but I think you can get them to pay for things that are worth it. I've been paying for code editors for years.
  • didibus 4y ago
    The tool just has to be very well integrated and easy to use. That's why copilot is seeing adoption, because Microsoft owns VSCode and has built a very simple integration of Copilot into VSCode. That said, I'm not even sure VSCode or Copilot is lucrative, if it wasn't owned by Microsoft, could they both be sustainable businesses?
  • stevage 4y ago
    Wow, Copilot's must be very domain-dependent. For me, it saves a ton of time, I'd hate to have to code without it.
  • ivalm 4y ago
    I pay for github co-pilot. It seems surprisingly bad for typescript and excellent for python.
    • cowmix 4y ago
      I tried it. Ironically, it was pretty good for Powershell and so so for Python (in my case at least).
      • ivalm 4y ago
        Yeah, where it seems very good for me is just writing flask or fast api boilerplate, esp if I have a good function sig + doc string. I kind of hoped that it would propose good tsx for my components (react+mui) but instead it’s basically useless. Maybe problem is that I chose “filter out exact code reproductions.”
• refulgentis 4y ago
  This is a very self-serving recap: "we were too early and we're still too early and Copilot proves it because its not 10x": it is 10x, sorry.
  • vagab0nd 4y ago
    Yeah, I was very confused by that paragraph. Copilot is not perfect, but it's "good enough" that I'm happily paying $10/mo.
  • throwaway675309 4y ago
    Yeah having tried kite years ago, copilot absolutely destroys them in terms of helpful suggestions both at a line level and at a code block level. Its contextual awareness of surrounding code is also fantastic. Now whether or not that's due to the fact that copilot had the financial resources to train a significantly superior ML model is another question, but throwing shade at copilot is a fairly transparent move.
• rockzom 4y ago
  > Our 500k developers would not pay to use it. lol
• ACV001 4y ago
  It failed because they did it exactly in reverse of how it should have been done. First they assembled the team, then they outlined the product then marketing and then only then they realized nobody would pay for that. You're supposed to first sell your product and then build it! I wonder whether anyone raised this issue in the early stage...
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    correction: sell your product first and then hire another firm to build it to your specifications
• netik 4y ago
  Ten years too early? no. They got wiped out by microsoft, github copilot, and litigation issues around AI provided code.
  • TheRealPomax 4y ago
    I think you'll find that trying to make copilot in 2014 was definitely 10 years too early. Hell, even Copilot is a few years to early at the moment.
  • tgv 4y ago
    What that says to me is: we were absolutely not capable of developing the required technology, went to market anyway, and feel spite because someone else developed tech that could have made us successful 10 years ago.
• solarkraft 4y ago
  I never cared a lot about Kite. But oh boy, suddenly it's the only product in a category I do care about! Thank you!
  • ShamelessC 4y ago
    What category is that? Open source code generation?
    • satvikpendem 4y ago
      If so, there are others too, like Fauxpilot, and the Salesforce one, both are open source I believe.
      • solarkraft 4y ago
        Indeed. I find it very exciting when a product category dominated by proprietary products gets a FOSS alternative. I wasn't aware of the others, thanks!
• throwthere 4y ago
  > 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 tools to make the market sustainable. Not all devs pay for tools.
  • marcinzm 4y ago
    How much of that is paid for by devs and how much is paid for by their employers?
    • vkou 4y ago
      Getting my manager to spring for an IntelliJ license instead of a free Eclipse was the easiest thing in the world. (That manager getting the purchase order approved through corporate took months and months, but that's neither here nor there.)
  • jmnicolas 4y ago
    Frankly I don't pay for tools. Money is tight at work and at home, so if it's not free it ain't happening.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      If you could actually prove it provided real benefits, it would still be worth it since you could know for sure that spending $5 on a tool will result in $10 extra earned. Sounds like people just didn't believe that there was that value being generated.
  • svnt 4y ago
    You think copilot is self-sustaining/profitable?
    • 4y ago
• legerdemain 4y ago
  Kite made me a very good (for a startup) job offer a few years back. They had a very friendly and welcoming bunch of people, and even Adam, the founder, came off as a typical human being in conversation. Easily the best job I've ever turned down, even knowing that Copilot would eat their lunch a year or two later.
• acyou 4y ago
  Value generation in software doesn't equal profit generation. Is it a flawed business model to pursue growth first and profit later? No, as long as there is a good plan to get that future profit. If the 500k developers weren't driving business spending decisions enough to pay for Kite, either it isn't particularly useful or it's a sign of the times. I'm guessing from the rest of the context it's the former, no one seems to be crying out that this is a great product that will be widely missed. This sort of failure is good and a good decision by the business leaders. It keeps our economy healthy, you want the real winners to win, and not every bet works out.
• gibsonf1 4y ago
  The key issue is that ml/dl is pure statistics - there is no intelligence or learning or conceptual awareness of space-time, so that technology can never do so many things people try to do with it.
  • perlgeek 4y ago
    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.
    • gibsonf1 4y ago
      Actually, I think the industry is finally realizing that there is no intelligence there, especially with gpt3 which can figure out with great precision what statistically comes next, but there is zero understanding of the space-time conceptual meaning for gpt3 in that answer - its not designed to do anything but figure out statistically what is most likely to come next. Gary Marcus has been doing a good job of exposing this: https://garymarcus.substack.com/ https://garymarcus.substack.com/ Another key piece of evidence, the failure of all FSD attempts trying to use ml/dl thinking its more than just statistics.
      • hobofan 4y ago
        > Another key piece of evidence, the failure of all FSD attempts trying to use ml/dl thinking its more than just statistics. I would almost put FSD as a good example here. Yes, some attempts here are very naive and try to use ML as a magic black box tries to covers a long stretch of the system from vision to turning the steering wheel. However the best performers just utilize ML for small well-defined parts of the system and in a "statistics on steroids" way with most of the other parts utilizing much more traditional methods.
    • hobofan 4y ago
      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.
• neilv 4y ago
  Opensourcing code when you shut down has the nice effect of making it available to the world. It also has the nice effect of keeping the code available to the people most familiar with it, as they move on to other ventures.
  • imiric 4y ago
    Open sourcing when you're shutting down is only marginally better to not releasing anything. It means that you didn't believe in open source while you were in business, and are only doing so now to score some points with your customers. There's no guarantee that someone will step up and maintain the project for you.
    • dr_kiszonka 4y ago
      I am glad they open-sourced their code. If you ever wanted to write an autocomplete plugin for SublimeText or VSCode or wondered how to implement a GitHub crawler in Go, their repo is very informative.
• oxfordmale 4y ago
  I disagree with their statement that individual developers do not pay for tools. I have paid for tools out of my own pocket on many occasions. However, being able to deliver code 18% faster isn't enough to fork out $9.99 a month. First of all it is relatively expensive. For that amount I can get a personal license for PyCharm. Secondly coding speed never tends to be a bottle neck for delivering a feature or a product on time. I can see why Engineering Managers are not willing to pay for this. I do wish the Kite team all the best, and I hope they can re-use their skills in products that are commercially viable.
  • ignoramous 4y ago
    > I disagree with their statement that individual developers do not pay for tools. They were a VC backed start-up and it was indeed go big or go home for them. As they seem to have identified, enterprise sales is one way to go big. Timing is also crucial. Right now, by iterating relentlessly over a decade on just the models, OpenAI and Cohere have commoditized access to the AI itself via APIs: Perhaps a better go-to-market than Kite's which had to build both the AI (ex: OpenAI Codex) and the end-product (ex: GitHub Copilot). Even though they had 8 years to execute, they had zero leverage on the kind of network effects and developer mindshare that GitHub has or access to bottomless funding like OpenAI. Hindsight is 20:20.
  • avidphantasm 4y ago
    This metric seems silly on its face. 10 bucks to get 18% more productivity out of a $10k per month developer? If this was indeed the case, everyone who employs software engineers would instantly pay this. Maybe they should have marketed more? Or maybe there are other problems with the technology (e.g., fears over copyright infringement?).
    • oxfordmale 4y ago
      Apparently it wasn't a very good product, even before Github Copilot came out: https://medium.com/swlh/kite-vs-tabnine-which-ai-code-autocomplete-should-you-choose-eb6eba85c3a6 https://medium.com/swlh/kite-vs-tabnine-which-ai-code-autoco...
    • 4y ago
• perlgeek 4y ago
  I've tried Kite once, and wasn't really impressed. For example, back when I tried it, it wouldn't offer any kind of autocompletion within a string. Even vim's built-in autocomplete tries to complete words for you there, based on other words you've used before. Kite did sometimes offer some good suggestions in regular code, but it tried really hard to understand your code, and went belly-up when it didn't. At that time, I tried some other ML-based autocompletion tool which wasn't specific to python, and which usually worked much better, except that it used far too much memory and caused regular crashes. Maybe they improved kite since I tried it, or maybe "individuals don't pay for dev tools" isn't the whole story. Or maybe both. Anyway, kudos for both trying and for open-sourcing the code at the end!
• ElKrist 4y ago
  "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 level (tickets not ready, goals changing, haven't got the credentials for the 3rd party API yet..) and a minority of the time it's my brain (yes sometimes I need to think before I write code). It's rarely how fast I can write a function. So if you make me 18% faster at something I do 1% of the time... good luck making money out of me
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    > 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.
• tomcam 4y ago
  Mad props for facing the truth and unsparingly admitting responsibility. So so rare. Whoever wrote this will go far.
• didip 4y ago
  This is the first time I heard of Kite and I frequent HN a lot. Maybe they should have spent more budgets on marketing. That said, I agree that no one wants to pay for developer productivity. The only exceptions are IDE and databases.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  I pay for Copilot. Integrates with my neovim and my Jetbrains IDEs. I love it. Great stuff honestly. My favourite use is at the command line. It's great! I pay for it myself and use it in all sorts of contexts. EDIT: Actually, perhaps that is actually smart. If you want to find people who would pay for dev software you probably should target people who pay for dev software already. Jetbrains is better for paid plugins than VS Code by this logic.
• peter_d_sherman 4y ago
  >"First, we failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet." I highly doubt that you failed! You blazed a trail forward for people in the future to follow. Financial success is not the same thing as taking a super tough problem to solve and then making inroads solving or starting to solve the many sub-problems (and their sub-problems) that invariably show up as a result of taking that path. >"Then we grew our user base. We executed very well here, and grew our user base to 500,000 monthly-active developers, with almost zero marketing spend." That's extremely impressive in my book! (By comparison, I failed to get 2 users -- for one of the apps I built -- and that was with marketing spend! <g>) >"Then, our product failed to generate revenue. Our 500k developers would not pay to use it." You might mean that there may have been an issue with communicating the VALUE of your product such that users would "see" (magical word, "see" -- "percieve", "understand", "observe in a way that you do") the VALUE of it -- such that they would be willing to equally-and-oppositely exchange their money for that VALUE... Finally: I do not think that you failed, and you have no reason to apologize to your investors, customers, employees and others. You pushed the envelope -- and you created great value for future generations who will no doubt benefit from your pioneering steps in this gargantuan undertaking. Well done -- and I think more people should appreciate you for that!
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Once it's done, your product manager will push any improvements to the bottom of the backlog.
• avidphantasm 4y ago
  I would never willingly pay for AI coding tools. Why should I help improve a product that has a chance of putting myself or my fellow software developers out of work in the future?
• synergy20 4y ago
  copilot might impact kite's future, it's hard to compete against microsoft. copilot: "Get code suggestions in more than a dozen coding languages including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, and Ruby", how about c, c++ even lua here? if they cover c and c++ I can pay $10 per month right away.
• mkoubaa 4y ago
  The thesis that helping developers write code has value is flat wrong. We spend so much more time reading, reviewing, designing, arguing/bitching about code than we do writing it. Orders of magnitude more. Any developer tooling company must understand this basic fact.
  • berkes 4y ago
    Indeed! Software development is not about writing syntax, but about "knowing what to write and where to put it". Having a tool that rapidly creates setters, getters, or even common algorithms in function/method bodies is neat, crucial even. But also a problem that has mostly been solved for decades now. The actual difficulty, where software devs spend (or should spend?) most time is indeed in what you say "reading, reviewing, designing, arguing". Where I'd like to add that the "arguing/bitching" is crucial if done with the right people (stakeholders, business, etc: creating a domain -or ubiquitous- language). No AI can help me with that. And the current AIs make that worse. Rather than learning and applying ubiquitous language, rather than evolving a clean, maintainable architecture, it blurps a generic(ish) blurp of code. That often has no place where it was suggested, is inconsistent, breaks encapsulation or coupling and so on. If you blindly accept all the suggestions, the code often becomes worse fast; but you do write a lot of lines of code quickly. Whoever cares about that, though?
• bdg 4y ago
  Automating software is a really hard problem. I think I can imagine a possible roadmap to it, but it's so hard to explain it in under an hour, it would require several sequential new technologies, and some of it hinges on parts of information theory I don't know enough about, and statistical ML isn't part of the core.
• satvikpendem 4y ago
  I've used Kite, it simply wasn't as good as Copilot. I'm not sure why they say that Copilot still doesn't work well, it works well enough for me and I presume everyone else who pays for it. That being said, glad to see a lack of Our Incredible Journey type language here and more of a true postmortem of their business and technical decisions. It is rare to see a company go into so much detail when shutting down.
• RandyRanderson 4y ago
  Would've thought Adam Smith would be able to monetize something if anyone could.
• jll29 4y ago
  Things I've payed for that I'm still using today: - Sublime - GitHub.com - ACM Digital Library (The latter two are subscriptions.) Things I've payed for in the past that I no longer use: - MS Visual C++ - Omicron Pascal - Application Systems Modula-2 - Atari ST GFA BASIC 2.0 - Berkeley YACC and FLEX port to TOS/GEM - ... Overall, many dev tools are free nowadays, which creates an expectation, perhaps, that it should all be free (I disagree in principle, but of course it is nice to see this trend progressing). I appreciate that Kite is posting a post mortem for others to learn, and I wish they had been able to find a niche where people pay for their work. I love software tools as a work product, but have been told by many experienced people it's not a good area for making money.
  • janoc 4y ago
    I don't think people have problem paying for tools that are genuinely useful for them, regardless of whether or not there are free tools around. The problem with Kite seems that their engineered first ("This machine learning AI is so cool, what can we do with it?" "I am a VC, are you doing AI? TAKE MY $$$$!") and only after burning through millions started to look at how to actually make money out of it. And discovered that: a) Hobbyist/individual developers rarely want to pay yet another subscription (can't justify it if you aren't making money with it & even $10/month subscriptions do add up!) b) Corporate developers don't have purchasing authority. Everything must get approved, by both accountants and legal/compliance. Expecting a large company to pay a huge monthly/annual subscription fee for what is essentially a better autocompleter? Good luck with that. That "Oh but your developers will be 18% faster!" argument is BS. 90% of the corporate developer's time isn't spent on typing code but on debugging, design, maintenance and meetings. Kite (or Copilot) don't help with that. c) What about copyright/compliance issues? This has been trained on Github repositories - i.e. the same as Github's Copilot. How do I know where does the completed code come from? What about licenses on that code? Can I filter only for permissive/non-contagious (i.e. non-GPL) licenses? What about my code/whatever I type? Does it get sent to your servers? That alone is a complete no-go for companies. In other words, a classic case where one shouldn't ask whether something could be done but whether it should. Someone outside of their engineering bubble and with a bit of business acumen would have told them that. Or at least told them to do a market research first, before spending all that time and money. But hey, they had a good ride for the VC's money and are winding it down in an organized manner, without leaving a ton of shattered lives and a mountain of debt behind. So that's a plus.
• inglor 4y ago
  > As of late 2022, Copilot has a number of issues preventing it from being widely adopted. I see CoPilot all around me and it's generally well regarded and pretty widely adopted given how new it is. Is there any data for this statement you can share? (Thanks for working on kite and good luck!)
• nnoitra 4y ago
• dmarlow 4y ago
  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 people as productive as you claim, it would have sold like hot cross buns on a cold day.
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    Sounds to me like blaming everybody other than themselves. However major props for open sourcing it when the company failed.
    • ehsankia 4y ago
      Exactly, they started a decade earlier and got outdone despite the massive head start. Then again maybe without the big data they had no hope of succeeding, but they should've mentioned that specifically instead of giving a bunch of contradicting statements.
  • make3 4y ago
    plus, again, they had zero developer trust because of all the ultra shady stuff they did
    • chucky123 4y ago
      What shady stuff they did?
      • ApolIllo 4y ago
        > 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-hard-way-that-you-do-not-piss-off-open-source-programmers https://qz.com/1043614/this-startup-learned-the-hard-way-tha...
• oofbey 4y ago
  I think they're spot on to say they were too early. But their analysis of the current state is pretty tainted by their personal situation. Many people I know find copilot extremely helpful. I think tools like it are about to become extremely important to the productivity of everyday developers. I seriously doubt it will take $100M to develop. The company Kite might have needed $100M to get there, but I bet you a few smart people working evenings in their garages can get there too. Also the "nobody pays for dev tools" line is pretty obviously a weak excuse. Github is a developer tool that was worth $7B+. The truth was they just didn't provide _enough_ value to get people to pay for it. That's clearly true, and goes along with their idea that they were too early. Not that the problem is impossible.
• jokethrowaway 4y ago
  As a fellow failed startupper, this blog post reads like any other failed startup goodbye post. Sure, your people were great but they didn't innovate enough to make an attractive product (granted, AI code autocompletion is hard - I doubt we'll get something I'd be happy to pay before we reach GAI and we'll be all out of a job by then). Oh and the "It's not the tech fault which is amazing, it's just a sales pipeline issue!" Look, I understand caring about your employees and I said the same BS when my company failed trying to shift all the blame on me and not on my team. When you are in a startup it's everyone's job to say "hey, btw, what we want to do will suck because the tech is not there". If you see something raise it and try to pivot, or you'll be out of a job with worthless grades.ß in Maybe you could have cut your losses earlier on.
• dgudkov 4y ago
  >Our 500k developers would not pay to use it. You need to have 500 users to understand that, not 500K. A well-written postmortem otherwise.
• malwrar 4y ago
  “Our 500k developers would not pay to use it. Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.” I don’t like depending on something I could lose in a month or tethers me to the internet. I consider that more a service than a tool. I’d prefer to just buy something once that just works, but that business model might be dead too since people will pirate things that aren't tethered to some serverside component. I guess what I’m saying is that I want to buy tools, but people are only renting. Personally I’m largely holding out hope this becomes someone’s open source passion project and I can truly own my tools.
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    Software developers are also more likely than most to be "free software people". I for one am excited to see Kite go open source; if it's truly open, including the underlying recommendation models and algorithms, I will be happy to use it and set up a monthly donation for whoever wants to keep working on it.
    • eikenberry 4y ago
      Exactly. Non-free software is always paying for a service. If you don't get the source (and the ability to use it) you don't get the software. The source code is the software... the binary is an merely way to access a small part of it.
      • dazzawazza 4y ago
        I don't care about software licenses. I'm a contractor. I pay for software that makes me better at my job AND I trust the vendor will support ME. My time is valuable to me and my clients.
        • eikenberry 4y ago
          Never said you should or shouldn't use those services, just that you are paying for a service and not buying software.
    • 4y ago
• rch 4y ago
  > the Kite Engine, which performs all the code analysis and machine learning 100% locally on your computer (no code is sent to a cloud server). I was never aware they changed the architecture to keep code analysis entirely local. I would have purchased a subscription, had I known.
• sqs 4y ago
  Sourcegraph CEO here. I respect what you and your team built. It’s tough to build a brand new kind of product, and I heard from many people who loved Kite over the last several years.
  • adamsmith 4y ago
    Thank you Quinn! It's been both cool and instructive to see Sourcegraph take off. Godspeed!
• victorvosk 4y ago
  I find co-pilot useful when I am working with a language I am not familiar with but I imagine that isn't the case for most developers working their day to days. I see ML and AI in dev as more of a code generation tool. Describe something large in a prompt, get a bunch of code. Then a dev can run through it like a code-review, making changes and tweaking it to suite the need of the client/business.
• poidos 4y ago
  No opinions on the product itself as this is the first I’m hearing of it. But: I am very impressed and happy to see the open-sourcing of their code like this. I often find myself thinking about how much human knowledge and effort disappears when a company shutters and all of their documents, code, etc go with them.
• truetraveller 4y ago
  Kinda funny: the most revenue you guys might actually get is selling your domain!
  • truetraveller 4y ago
    I think this comment was in bad taste, but I can't edit or delete it now. So please accept my apologies.
    • forgotpwd16 4y ago
      May be joke but you've got a point. A 4-digit .com domain price ranges from $5K (unpronounceable; made only of consonants) to over $50K.
• dhosek 4y ago
  It’s a bit weird to me that developers (myself included) are reluctant to pay for tools. When I first started out in the 90s, I spent significant amounts of money on developer tools: Zortech C/C++. Borland Pascal, Borland C/C++, Paradox for database work, not to mention the hundreds of dollars I spent on printed books. Now, the only things I’m spending money on are subscriptions to IntelliJ and CLion and infrequently books. I wonder how much this reluctance to spend money is holding back software development.
• enos_feedler 4y ago
  It is smart to wind this down. Elon says the biggest mistake engineers make is optimizing something that shouldn’t exist in the first place. AI suggested code is exactly the kind of problem that engineers would fall into this trap for. Its cool and exciting and very alluring. Lets no lose sight of the fact that most code being generated in front of a developer shouldn’t need a developer there in the first place. We should not even be sitting to code a lot of things we are tasked with doing today.
• rsynnott 4y ago
  > First, we failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet. This seems to be very much the standard story for "AI"; not quite there yet. Given the history, it's, er, surprising that people are constantly surprised by this.
• lopkeny12ko 4y ago
  > Then, our product failed to generate revenue. Our 500k developers would not pay to use it. I don't pay for Kite (or any other proprietary developer tooling like Github) because one day your company can choose to shut down, change its terms, or raise my prices and I'd be left without recourse, while also being locked in to a proprietary workflow. Just like you did today, which validates my hesistation. Kite should have been open source from the very beginning. I hope the team can take away this learning for their next startup. I applaud teams like GitLab who build entirely in the open--and, as a result, have highly successful products and businesses.
  • arshbot 4y ago
    Now that it's open source, what's stopping you from integrating it into your workflow? Have you ever even tried it? I don't think the being locked in a proprietary workflow bit is your real reason, because when you break it down - this doesn't make much sense. Fear of needing to switch workflows down the line outweighs the [potentially temporary if company dies] boost in productivity? Of course, this assumes kite fits your workflow well and you find it delivers value (you don't cancel immediately)
• TruthWillHurt 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but the reason I didn't pay for Kite was that I moved to Tabnine which is free, and does a better job, with a simpler AI model... just scanning my local code provided better recommendations than Kite (and I never got any of the promised multi-line suggestions). Even plain old Jedi was a decent competitor to Kite. So you we're no beat by billion-dollar CoPilot I'm afraid...
• charlieyu1 4y ago
  I tried Tabnine and had mixed feelings. It can make sensible suggestions and save my time, but Tabnine forcing said suggestions to top priority means I’m spending time to press down key to find the obvious autocomplete. And this can’t be turned off. Not sure about Kite though
  • pritambaral 4y ago
    Depending on your editor, this may/should be customisable. The tabnine client for Emacs (company-tabnine) is just another completion backend, and the order of completions presented is a just a variable in company-mode that can be set to any order you prefer[1]. 1: https://tychoish.com/post/better-company/ https://tychoish.com/post/better-company/
• chasing 4y ago
  > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. I’m an individual developer and I pay for tools all the time. They just have to be of value to me. If developers weren’t paying for your tool, maybe look within.
  • marssaxman 4y ago
    What kinds of tools are you willing to pay for? I can't think of any dev tools I've paid for in this century; it seems better to rely on open source infrastructure.
• 6d6b73 4y ago
  You gotta be high as a kite to use AI in its current state to help you write your software. ;)
• blondin 4y ago
  sorry to see this happen, but there were early signs. kite was that autocomplete solution that required you to have an account right? and they shipped your code to their servers? i remember trying it. some of us raised early concerns but our voice is not the loudest. so again, the main problem is that kite was an intrusive solution for corporate networks. a developer needs to justify, through millions of layers, a solution like it. that it is safe to run it in a corporate environment. why are you comparing yourselves to copilot? it's github! not a single CISO will blink at trusting github, or microsoft, or google. a startup? it's not the kind of product that's helpful on a hobby project. the individual developer will pay where it makes sense. it makes sense in the corporate environment where there is tons of code to write. so yeah, okay, that new terminal thing called warp. that autocomplete in the terminal called fig. you all ask people to create accounts and ship their data home? don't act surprised later.
• awill88 4y ago
  > The largest issue is that state-of-the-art models don’t understand the structure of code, such as non-local context. When I read “non-local context,” it really drove home for me just how off the mark they were and changed the whole tone. It also makes me think were they just hoping the solution would fall out of the sky? Seems irresponsible if that was part of their calculus.
• zomglings 4y ago
  Thank you for open sourcing your code. Thank you for your effort. 7 years is a long time to work on something, and I hope you all recover a bit from the previous campaign before moving on to your next things. > It includes our data-driven Python type inference engine I couldn't find which repository this lived in. I am very interested in it, as my team maintains a few open source static analysis and code generation tools. We'd be interested in trying this out.
• lmeyerov 4y ago
  Sorry for the Kite team, but for other folks aspiring here, more optimism is in order: We pay for copilot for Graphistry staff because it works well. Similar story for Docker Desktop: It's new, yet people are already paying for it to the tune of 8 figures revenue per year. I bet similar is/will be happening with Copilot. Credit to where credit is due. I worked in R&D here in a group tackling it for almost a decade ("program synthesis"), and while Copilot has a lot more to do, it solved so much of the usability & basic use case gap of what the R&D community had been attempting for years. Large language models & transformer models have been out for years, and the Github team executed well on adapting them. (Separately: There _is_ an interesting question whether this space is VC-investable -- how likely will at least 1 startup here make it to 9-10 figures of revenue. But that's another story.)
  • the_jeremy 4y ago
    > Docker Desktop: It's new It's not new, but the requirement to pay for it is.
• dzink 4y ago
  I remember when Kite launched. The feedback on HN was that few people wanted all of their code sent to Kite’s servers. Copilot took all open source code instead and made it autocomplete into your IDE. It would be hard to sell to any company giving away their IP for some auto completion, but it’s easy to sell autocompleting from open source code.
• jl2718 4y ago
  Code automation seems like a poor substitute for effective abstractions in a language, but, having seen this game before many times, I think it’s the way we are headed. Writing code will become entirely idiomatic, like the pidgin language we’ve developed for searching google, and the actual source will be unintelligible and useless, probably JavaScript simply because there is the most data available for the AI to train on, relying entirely on the compiler for efficiency. The code sizes will be monstrous, as there will be no more effort put into maintaining modules, because the AI doesn’t need to organize things this way. From an old programmer perspective, it doesn’t make much sense, but a new programmer will not want to learn the old way, which will be effectively obsolete from lack of updates. If there’s any value to be derived from it, perhaps it is demand for hardware that will run enormously-inefficient code. The way that now you see people doing full sorts to get the third-largest value just because it’s easier to write it that way, you will see code that also does analytics and builds a distributed hash table to accomplish the same task, just because more capability means more usage means more suggestions to carry along that code. I think it was a mistake to think of computer programs as a linear text language, but I don’t see this turning back. At some point, the concept of programming a machine will merge entirely with the method of interacting with a machine, which is to say, communicating intent, and then I suppose we can relax into a very comfortable full-service 5-star extinction.
• rayrey 4y ago
  Love it.
• LASR 4y ago
  > 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 magicians. Sell magic to regular people, and you'll see some significant revenue. I've used Kite before. It was ok. But I am a SWE. It's entirely possible that Kite would have seen major adoption if the push was towards non-technical folks trying to get their feet wet in software. Eg: Data scientists or business. The reason why BI tools sell so well at the moment is that you have tons of C-level execs that like the appeal of a business-optimizing tool requiring little to none of any actual software development. Let that be a lesson to everyone. You can't blow away developers. They're just too damn ~~smart~~ well-informed. Edit: Another anecdote: A buddy of mine built a bespoke OCR and document indexing/search tool. He has ~60 paying clients (almost exclusively law-firms and banks) that primarily work with printed pages on paper. No Saas. No free tier. The client data resides on an on-premise Windows box, avoiding issues with sensitive data in the cloud etc. He's a solo dev with support contracts and nets something like $1000/month from each client. For your average lawyer/paralegal, the ability to locate and reference a single page from thousands of pages in under a second is magic. So they pay for it wholeheartedly.
  • analognoise 4y ago
    You used magicians selling magic tricks to other magician's earlier, then said "smart" later. I think it's just domain awareness, and the "they're smart" trope needs to be dismantled. I think it plays into the technocracy problems we have now. We can solve it, we need more tech. More more more. People think we can solve social/political problems with tech - insidious.
  • irrational 4y ago
    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.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  > non-local context Is it easier to build AI for pure functional programming languages?
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  > Then we grew our user base. We executed very well here, and grew our user base to 500,000 monthly-active developers, with almost zero marketing spend. > Then, our product failed to generate revenue. Our 500k developers would not pay to use it. Isn’t it better to work with a smaller number of users but more closely first. Otherwise you burn the chance to impress all of those users. Plus with 100 users you have a decent sample but you can also reasonably interview them all one on one.
• qiller 4y ago
  > The largest issue is that state-of-the-art models don’t understand the structure of code, such as non-local context. Copilot ended up being rarely helpful for me. But on the other hand, MS IntelliCode (I think it only works for C# in full Visual Studio) was a fantastic productivity tool that actually sped up writing code because it does understand the structure of C# and your codebase. Wish it was available for other languages and VSC
• ilija139 4y ago
  Great post, such a clear writing style. Farewell Kite!
• dlkf 4y ago
  > 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. What sounds more plausible you: - engineering managers hate free money - it’s obvious to everyone that this statistic is bullshit
• wentin 4y ago
  this is one of the most transparent writing I read about shutting down startup. It is very insightful in a cut-throat way, I really appreciate that.
• bredren 4y ago
  I was a relatively early Tabnine user and suggested this time two years ago that people were “sleeping” on AI code completion. [1] I read about and tried evaluating Kite at the time and it seemed like it was in some kind of private invite stage. I remember thinking it must have been acquired and wasn’t taking new users. This must have been an incorrect take. I’m surprised Tabnine is not mentioned in this thread at all, though because that was acquired and afaik is still operating. Before copilot came along, Tabnine, not Kite, seemed like the ai took to beat. I also remember a Python dev relations person from Jetbrains going on a podcast and clowning on AI code completion. That was in April of 2021. [2] A month later copilot dropped. The very strange thing about that was Jetbrains described efforts to build an ML-based code completion plug-in in 2016! [3] It obviously failed to follow through on that. I still think G Co pilot represents a threat to jetbrains IDEs overall. Even the packaged autocomplete can’t compete on basic stuff copilot does now. I disagree with the idea that AI code completion is not good enough yet. I see that said all the time and yet it can masterfully fill in boiler plate today. It can be way better, particularly in languages outside JavaScript and Python, but it’s usable now and maybe even profitable as a service if the business is not leveraged by VC capital. If you listen to the September interview with Eddie Aftandilian of Github Copilot you would realize how early it still is for that product, as how to measure success in code completion is something still requiring behavioral patterns that are still being recorded. Here’s the episode, listen 20 mins in: https://www.se-radio.net/2022/10/episode-533-eddie-aftandilian-on-github-copilot/ https://www.se-radio.net/2022/10/episode-533-eddie-aftandili... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074393 [2] https://twitter.com/jetsetter/status/1379438096232587265 https://twitter.com/jetsetter/status/1379438096232587265 [3] https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2016/09/share-your-stats-to-improve-code-completion-via-machine-learning/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2016/09/share-your-stats-to-...
• hsn915 4y ago
  > First, we failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet. What? You're supposed to create the technology, not wait for others to create it. That's why VCs give you money, isn't it? > We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers at the time, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because the state of the art for ML on code is not good enough. Aren't you supposed to advance the state of the art? > but the problem is very engineering intensive So you weren't a technology company?
• KAUSHIL 4y ago
  I am hacker not suck from responsh from inda
• KAUSHIL 4y ago
  Kaushil name Radha agrawal andlike and support me in short video of the day of the month of the video done
• hgs3 4y ago
  > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Disagree. I pay for Visual Assist as an individual because its a huge productivity booster. I suspect the issue is pricing vs perceived value.
• heywoodlh 4y ago
  It's unfortunate when companies fail and I hope I am not coming off as celebrating their misfortune but I love this trend of companies open sourcing their products when they are unable to continue with their existing business model. I feel like it gives their products a chance to continue a positive legacy. I've recently noticed a couple of companies open sourcing their product upon discontinuing the company -- is this a new trend or has it happened for a long time and I am only just recently noticing it?
• didip 4y ago
  Docker and Vagrant are the some of the prime examples. They are clearly useful but people still don't want to pay.
  • LtWorf 4y ago
    systemd-nspawn is there too
  • progx 4y ago
    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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nikisweeting 4y ago
  Kite messed up privacy expectations one too many times by uploading everything in my home folder without consent. They were repeatedly shamed for this on HN and every time it seemed like they didn't understand why people were mad about consensual analytics.
  • nebulous1 4y ago
    > uploading everything in my home folder "just" the code you were working on, surely?
• scarface74 4y ago
  > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools Counterpoint: https://www.jetbrains.com/ https://www.jetbrains.com/ Maybe instead of blaming potential customers for not finding enough value for your product, you might need to start looking inward. I gladly paid for my own personal license for R# that I kept across four jobs over 8 years. I only stopped paying for it because I no longer develop in C#.
• Existenceblinks 4y ago
  I like folks here defending their buying strategy. It makes the point even more valid, as I read all of these, they are very few data points. Quantitative and Qualitative -wise, developer tools market are almost non-existence. Better to jump into overall software development process tools if you insist.
• galaxyLogic 4y ago
  > 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?
  • bombolo 4y ago
    > 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.
    • galaxyLogic 4y ago
      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.
• iepathos 4y ago
  I think if they open sourced Kite from the start rather than as they call it quits that they could've had a ton of free development done on their products by interested developers. Developers not paying for tools is simply not true. Developers do pay for good tools. Sublime text is one such tool many devs pay for and it's quite profitable and completely built and operated by a two person team.
• hemantv 4y ago
  I know good developers pay for tools. Maybe the lesson for someone who wants to be best at what they do is do things 90% of people they are competing with wouldn't do.
  • bombolo 4y ago
    You know there is no score board for software engineers right? And you know that the company is supposed to buy this stuff and you can get fired for using unapproved tools that send code and probably violate copyright.
• fire 4y ago
  Sad to see, but happy they're open sourcing things. I went ahead and filed an issue on kiteco-public[0] about their derived data because the readme states: > By the way, we are happy to share any of our open-source-derived data. Our Github crawl is about 20 TB, but for the most part the intermediate and final pipeline outputs are pretty reasonably-sized. Although please let me know soon if you want anything because we will likely end up archiving all of this. However, I have no idea if this is the right way to contact them 0: https://github.com/kiteco/kiteco-public/issues/5 https://github.com/kiteco/kiteco-public/issues/5
• visarga 4y ago
  Besides open sourcing code, are there any datasets of interest, code generation related?
• KAUSHIL 4y ago
  748339844739202926633947590432974849302
• brandelune 4y ago
  The AI hype is finally over. Meta's language models, GH Pilot, real life car auto-pilot. When it fails, it fails big. And the "we were 10+ years early to market" is just a big lie that bought them plenty of VC money. Good for them.
  • bjarneh 4y ago
    > The AI hype is finally over. At least partially over. It's one of those things though; when you first see what's possible with neural networks it does get your hopes up. When you later realize the limitations, it's hard to walk back your old claims. Even Elon Musk has to realize that FSD is never going to happen by now. Google with all their learning and training data, still can't correctly find and smudge license plates or faces correctly on Google maps. If that much processing power cannot correctly identify two classes of objects, what chance do these cars have to classify tons more objects + adapt how they steer based on that information in real time?
    • carlmr 4y ago
      The internet was a hype cycle, which ended with the dot com bubble burst. But some of the companies that came out of the bubble came out strong. AI has had multiple hype cycles, like every washing machine with "fuzzy logic" in the 90s, they usually end, but they do usually leave us with more than we had. This AI hype cycle is ending now, and we have seen a lot of progress on image detection, video editing, etc. but the highest targets haven't been reached. It's kind of the explore-exploit dichotomy. You have some new technology (internet), in the first few years you have exploration and all the low hanging fruit are implemented, then everybody just starts iterating on similar ideas, which lead to less and less gain. The Uber/AirBnb/Amazon for X pitches. If you hear those you're in the late phase of the hype cycle. Because Y for X just means it's not a really new idea and plenty of people have thought of those. Similarly you have some new technology like fuzzy logic, then some people thought of some good applications. But because the hype train was running it was put everywhere where it didn't make sense. Or deep learning which was the first to have useful image processing. Now most research is tuning some parameters, adding compute, and hoping for better results. But in the end we'll be left with some technological advances, and maybe in ten or twenty years somebody has a new idea which beats deep learning in learning efficiency.
• kriro 4y ago
  """Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.""" Not to sound overly mean but it might have been a good idea to start with testing this idea first/earlier. Additionally, it seems to me like they didn't do a great job at identifying their customer. It's probably not individual devs but rather the people they work for. So you're in a B2B business and need to sell it that way. The meaner response would be that it seems like developers do not pay for YOUR tools. Seems like there are plenty of paying customers for copilot for example.
• Shahpriyanka01 4y ago
  [flagged]
• Dave3of5 4y ago
  I wonder if a better approach is to build and train the ML model to recognize the AST of the code in question rather than text. The workflow would be Build AST -> run ML to get an optimised solution render new code out from that optimised AST. A lot of work I think and as is pointed out here devs wants their tooling for free.
• progx 4y ago
  2 years ago i try to register, not working. Write some mail to support, no response. Hello GitHub CoPilot. Have convinced myself and am also willing to pay for it. I can't understand Kites Argument, that their users did not want to pay.
• jwmoz 4y ago
  > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. * Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for OUR tool.
• lewisl9029 4y ago
  Seeing a lot of comments trying to dispute the claim that "individual developers do not pay for tools". The claim does invite these kinds of disputes since it's so absolutist, but I do believe there is some truth to it, at least if we take it as a generalization (rather than a literal statement). Anyone who's either worked at a developer tooling company or tried to sell to developers themselves (I personally did both, having worked at CircleCI in the past and now building my own developer tooling product at https://reflame.app https://reflame.app, Show HN launch thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134059) can probably back the observation that we individual developers are notoriously reluctant to open our wallets, even for products that we love and use daily, despite our high disposable income relative to professionals in other markets. Gonna share a few of my own hypotheses for some of the contributing factors as comments below for discussion. Would be fun to see folks share their own! Especially if you've seen successful strategies for how someone might be able to overcome these hurdles to selling products to individual developers at scale (a topic near and dear to my heart these days)!
  • lewisl9029 4y ago
    We get so many developer tooling products thrown at us, either for free or dirt cheap, that over the decades it's conditioned us to assign much less monetary value to developer tooling products compared to what a simple opportunity cost analysis would yield, given the high monetary value of our time. I certainly suffered from this myself to a rather extreme degree in the past, having categorically refused to pay a single cent for anything I used to build side projects with, until I started to seriously think about pricing for my own product. Eventually I realized throwing money at almost any problem where it could buy me more free time should be a no-brainer considering how highly I value my free time. Tangentially, I think there's an interesting analogue in here to what Steam did in the PC games market, but I digress...
  • lewisl9029 4y ago
    Competition for developer tooling products is _fierce_, possibly more so than any other industry, precisely because we really seem to love spending our free time building slightly different versions of the tools we use that suit our preferences better, sometimes before we even try to Google if that slightly different version already exists. Again, I'm totally guilty of this myself, since Reflame started as a side project initially to scratch my own itch, and I can't claim to have done an exhaustive search on the problem space before I started. This results in a vicious cycle where every product, however innovative it might be at its inception, gets quickly commoditized by dozens of similar products immediately following any signs of traction, so they end up having to shift to competing on price eventually. Combined with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691132 means any product that isn't available for free then eventually rots into obscurity due to the unfair distribution advantage of "free" in this market. Thus they are forced to offer a free version themselves and the cycle continues.
• isthisthingon99 4y ago
  > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. They do pay for tools, but not enough to make it a full time. I've got a few "side" projects that bring in a few K/month each.
• revskill 4y ago
  Ahh, why Python ? Except for social networking website (which's harmful), like reddit, instagram, choosing Python is bad for the world. Use better tooling, better languages to spread the good sides computing instead.
• ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
  Two things are not providing for a bright future of IT: - developers willing to use AI crutches instead of their own brains to write their code; - developers unwilling to pay other developers while being paid themselves by companies whose profit models are often far removed from the honest craft of developing something wholesome.
• asim 4y ago
  It's always a shock to see startups like this get shutdown. I guess initially there's a lot of hype and excitement, almost like an inevitability that will lead to raising more and more funding until a business model is found. It's always two things that stop that from happening 1. Run out of money 2. The founders quit. To persevere through covid, war, etc is no easy feat, to do it when you started in 2014 and then see fresh faces on the scene in the AI space in 2022, much harder. It's also demoralising to see an entire category form without you, especially when you were working tirelessly towards it early on. I've really learned this the hard way also. Good luck to the Kite team in their future endeavours.
• that_guy_iain 4y ago
  > 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.
  • vladvasiliu 4y ago
    This. I've seen many other commenters lament the fact that "even though devs make a boatload of money, they don't want to pay for their tools". This may be true. But I think the biggest issue is that most developers are only developers "at work". And I've seen far too many people work with subpar tools (old, dingy PCs that would take ages to do anything). Management thinks this is fine, and that a 5 yo intel U laptop with 8 GB RAM is AOK for running heavy computations in 2022. So, going out of their way to buy some "text editor" when vscode is free? Not gonna happen. Even if the devs themselves are convinced.
• HeavyStorm 4y ago
  > You can see this in Github Copilot, which is built by Github in collaboration with Open AI. As of late 2022, Copilot shows a lot of promise but still has a long way to go. This sounds like spite. Sure, copilot can be even better (what can't?) but it's already a great tool. It has a small learning curve (which is just getting comfortable with it) and then it can add a lot to your productivity. Of course, this is orthogonal to any copyright polemics out there. Kite never got close to what copilot is.
• dsign 4y ago
  Oh well Kite team, may your members find well-paying jobs and exciting adventures elsewhere, you deserve it well.
• rajnathani 4y ago
  Thread from 2017 about Kite using some shady practices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653
• mgkimsal 4y ago
  > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.” 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).
• plgonzalezrx8 4y ago
  "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." So basically, everyone's fault but their own. Got it. Edit: Also I want to say, that WE DO pay for stuff if it brings us value. Out of my pocket I pay for JetBrains, Github, Temius, and the SublimeText 4.
• raveenb 4y ago
  Kite was good, integrations were plentiful, sad to see them go! I hope Tabnine learns from this and ups their game, I love what they are doing. Not so sold on Github Copilot yet, and probably the observations of Kite are applicable to Github Copilot, but due to their deeper pockets they may survive long enough to make to the AI breakthrough needed to get this product/class of products flying!
• mosselman 4y ago
  I wish I could still click around the website and have a look at the product. Now it just redirects to the blog.