[HN Gopher] Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
___________________________________________________________________
Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
Author : dynamicwebpaige
Score : 1021 points
Date : 2022-11-20 20:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kite.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kite.com)
| EGreg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| You gotta be high as a kite to use AI in its current state to
| help you write your software. ;)
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| synergy20 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| dgudkov wrote:
| >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.
| iepathos wrote:
| 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.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > uploading everything in my home folder
|
| "just" the code you were working on, surely?
| sanguy wrote:
| These guys were a complete joke; and a good example of fleecing
| the VC community.
|
| Good riddance to bad rubbish
| rexreed wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Can you explain why they're a joke?
| icelancer wrote:
| There are two or three people commenting that in this post
| and simply not elaborating. It's ridiculous.
| dvhh wrote:
| 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.
| dibt wrote:
| It's been discussed here on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857944
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902630
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018037
| rayrey wrote:
| Love it.
| KAUSHIL wrote:
| I am hacker not suck from responsh from inda
| malwrar wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Knowing examples such as Hudson CI & co, that probably makes
| it "no one", at a statistical scale.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I think it's a combination of a few behaviors: Developers have
| this "if I can do it myself albeit in 10 times more time I
| won't pay for the service even if it doesn't make any financial
| sense whatsoever" and "This is cool but requires investment of
| my time while not providing way out of they start to suck or
| disappear" and "this is clever but what I need is help with the
| boring bits" mentality.
|
| The stuff most developers are comfortable paying for is things
| like hosting, tools that do something the developers find very
| boring or have no domain overlap and don't have viable free
| alternative.
|
| "Why would I pay 9.99 if I can set up a free alternative in a
| few days and host it myself for 4.99? If I can't host it myself
| I don't trust you anyway"
| wentin wrote:
| I like what the other has said in under another comment --
| selling software to software engineers is like selling magic to
| magician. You are a magician, a very unfriendly use case to
| prioritize. It is reasonable for you to want what you want, but
| it would be suicide for the business to prioritize acquiring
| you as a customer.
| truetraveller wrote:
| Kinda funny: the most revenue you guys might actually get is
| selling your domain!
| truetraveller wrote:
| I think this comment was in bad taste, but I can't edit or
| delete it now. So please accept my apologies.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| 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.
| Shahpriyanka01 wrote:
| fire wrote:
| 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
| bdg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| KAUSHIL wrote:
| Kaushil name Radha agrawal andlike and support me in short video
| of the day of the month of the video done
| MisterSandman wrote:
| What an honest, transparent message. Kudos.
| dvhh wrote:
| Honestly, I would think that after the code injection fiasco
| for popular Atom editor plugin that their brand would have been
| forever tainted.
| awill88 wrote:
| > 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.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for
| tools
|
| Counterpoint:
|
| 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#.
| dlkf wrote:
| > 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
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
|
| Another key piece of evidence, the failure of all FSD
| attempts trying to use ml/dl thinking its more than just
| statistics.
| hobofan wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| elondaits wrote:
| That's what many people do as well, I feel. Not joking.
|
| That aside, copilot works well as a proactive search tool
| for idioms, templates, and boilerplate. It can also do
| things like build the invocation of a CLI tool, with
| arguments, from a comment line. To me, if nothing more, is
| the next step in the use of reference. I started with man,
| .hlp files and books... then progressively replaced them
| with Google because it was faster even if more noisy... now
| I use copilot first.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| 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.
| zomglings wrote:
| 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.
| hgs3 wrote:
| > 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Docker Desktop: It's new
|
| It's not new, but the requirement to pay for it is.
| m00dy wrote:
| >> 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.
| svnt wrote:
| $100 million on zero product-market fit is a lot.
| samspenc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dzink wrote:
| 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.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| 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.
| azhenley wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you are on the Copilot team now - seems like a perfect
| revenge story.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| 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.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| > 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.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > it fell short of the 10x 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 wrote:
| Which one do you use?
| codetrotter wrote:
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12798-tabnine-ai-
| code-c...
|
| Tabnine for JetBrains CLion. It works with Rust and several
| other languages.
| visarga wrote:
| Besides open sourcing code, are there any datasets of interest,
| code generation related?
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| adamsmith wrote:
| Does it seem to only understand imports of public
| libraries? If so, it's likely that, rather than
| understanding the contents of those libraries, it's
| learning from others' use of those library APIs. If not, it
| is likely just understanding the words in the API at a
| shallow depth.
| lolinder wrote:
| No, it's imports from other files in my project. It's
| either using the import or the fact that I have another
| tab open.
|
| There are definitely times where it produces a close
| approximation that's obviously just statistical, but
| there are other times where there's no question that it
| picked up something from a different source file that
| couldn't have possibly been in its training set.
|
| I haven't yet decided if it's using imports or opened
| files in the editor, but it's definitely not just using
| the single file I have active.
| adamsmith wrote:
| It could be doing some "fine tuning" based on the repo.
| That would be cool! That said, what I meant when
| referring to 'understanding' the non-local nature of code
| was in a more principled way.
|
| For example, if an object defined in another file has a
| function called `rename` that takes zero arguments, when
| calling it from another file Copilot will likely suggest
| arguments if there are variables like `old` and `new`
| near the cursor, even though `rename` actually doesn't
| take any, just because functions called `rename`
| typically take arguments. This behavior is in contrast to
| a tool like an IDE that can trace through the way non-
| local code references work.
| heywoodlh wrote:
| 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?
| vessenes wrote:
| 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.
| lbhdc wrote:
| I am not convinced there is a market there. This is a feature
| in existing ides, and the grammar suggestions are often wrong.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > I understand that's Kite's perspective (and yours --
| "purchasing won't pay for this"), but devs are not paid
| meager salaries in general
|
| Perhaps an under-appreciated perspective - most of us don't
| come from _families_ that were paid the sort of salaries we
| get; and consequently we are more likely to be irrationally
| stingy about money as a result of having grown up
| (relatively) poor. I know that $200 /year is not a
| significant cost at my salary; but I do remember a time
| when that would have been totally out of reach for me.
|
| And also there's the fairness aspect - do I want to be
| participating in a system where only rich devs can get
| access to good tools? Yes, I understand that the world is
| not fair and _already_ works that way, but I should
| probably not perpetuate that system; and instead, make work
| pay for it.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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?
| keeptrying wrote:
| If you don't have a massive platform (ie if you aren't Amazon
| or MS) the vertical end to end solution is much more easy to
| sell - ie sell the benefit directly.
| neilv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| asim wrote:
| 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.
| happytiger wrote:
| 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?
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| 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...
| jawns wrote:
| > 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.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| randomdata wrote:
| Most importantly, coding is the fun part of the job. This seems
| like trying to sell a DALL-E-esq product to a visual artist
| promising 18% faster deliverables. Even if it is true, who is
| going to be in a rush to give way in that aspect of the job and
| sell their manager on it to spend more time doing the less fun
| things?
|
| On the other hand, create an AI that can stand in during
| pointless meetings and the blank checks will shower down.
| selimnairb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Apparently it wasn't a very good product, even before Github
| Copilot came out:
|
| https://medium.com/swlh/kite-vs-tabnine-which-ai-code-
| autoco...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah the problem is the "if" part. It may well be true but
| productivity is notoriously hard to measure and anyone making
| any claims about exact productivity increases is clearly
| pulling a number out of the air. People know this.
|
| We have plenty of techniques that we know improve
| productivity (e.g. static types) but some people still don't
| believe it because it's really hard to _prove_ productivity
| increases.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| lzooz wrote:
| Buying something and then changing it is not "hijacking" that
| thing.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Hey if we're going to talk language, maybe you should just
| use 'Kife', it looks like Kite and means to steal.
| (Allegedly derived from Old English word 'kip', net says
| it's British slang, but I've heard it a few times in
| northeast US.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| > 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| You should let Cambridge know: https://dictionary.cambrid
| ge.org/us/dictionary/english/hijac...
|
| > to take control of or use something that does not
| belong to you for your own advantage:
|
| And Encyclopaedia Britannica:
| https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/hijack
|
| >: to take or take control of (something) for your own
| purposes
|
| And Merriam Webster: https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/hijack
|
| > : to take or take control of (something) as if by
| hijacking > often, specifically : to change the topic or
| focus of (something, such as a conversation) : REDIRECT
|
| It wasn't my statement by the way, I just figure if
| you're going to nitpick you should at least be correct
| about the nit.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Hmm yes you are correct. I didn't realize how common
| these meanings were...
| nielsole wrote:
| The claim in the referenced article is maybe more fitting:
|
| > many programmers would consider [this] a violation of the
| open-source spirit.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| I encourage you and everyone else to follow ethical rules in
| fighting unethical behavior of corporations.
|
| Instead of making the untrue statement above, just say
|
| "They used, in my opinion, an unethical way to advertise their
| product; specifically, they bought OSS products and put their
| ads in there."
| perlgeek wrote:
| 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!
| RandyRanderson wrote:
| Would've thought Adam Smith would be able to monetize something
| if anyone could.
| LASR wrote:
| > 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.
| canadianfella wrote:
| I'm not a programmer and I pay for github copilot. For me it is
| worth the productivity boost - even if I just make things for
| fun.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| It is surprising to me to see that you don't view yourself as
| a programmer. Maybe you're not a professional software
| developer, but writing code for fun sure sounds programmery
| to me.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Sublime Text.
|
| I sat through scores of interviews and pairing sessions with
| developers back when Sublime was a thing and the vast majority
| (>90%) of devs would rather exit out of that pop-up asking for
| support then pay the measly $30 or whatever regardless of their
| massive incomes and increased productivity that Sublime brought
| them.
|
| We developers are no more altruistic than anyone else
| regardless of the lies we fed ourselves in the early days of
| FOSS, internet, bitcoin, etc.
|
| :(
| xavdid wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that a ST4 license is $99 USD (and ST3
| used to be $80).
|
| Still a relative drop in the bucket for how powerful ST is
| and how much value its users derive from it, but there _is_ a
| bit of sticker shock when comparing it to most other
| software.
|
| I say this as someone who, as a broke college student, got
| very good at hitting esc every 10 times I saved (which is how
| often it asks). I eventually switched to VSCode, and the rest
| is history.
| wingerlang wrote:
| I've been using Sublime Text for as long as I can remember
| and being good at exiting the popup is pretty accurate, I
| feel as if I don't even recognize it being there anymore.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I think ST was a huge financial success overall though.
| alibarber wrote:
| Oh I've had colleagues look at me strange for actually having
| bought a licence. We are sometimes a parody of ourselves...
| newaccount74 wrote:
| > the vast majority (>90%) of devs would rather exit out of
| that pop-up
|
| Converting just 5% of users to paying customers is considered
| pretty good for shareware/freemium, so just because you saw a
| lot of people using the trial does not mean it is
| unsustainable. I have no idea how much the developer of
| Sublime Text makes, but considering that they have been
| around since 2008 I would assume it's definitely sustainable.
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, but it's generally the kind of money that only allows
| having a mom-and-pop store. 1-2-5 employees, that's it. If
| you have a bigger initiative, you can't do it.
|
| Instead, Mega Corp just buys you out when you burn out
| after many years of development, we see this happening
| regularly.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| In general I think you are probably right. Many developer
| tools are small projects that can be developed by a
| single person, and it seems they often struggle to grow
| into to a bigger company. (I've experienced this struggle
| myself. For me, the problem was not lack of money)
|
| On the other hand, I think Jetbrains shows that it is
| absolutely possible to build a huge company that sells
| nothing but developer tools.
|
| There are also a bunch of mid-size companies that sell
| developer tools. I'm pretty sure there's more than 5
| people at Navicat, Hex-Rays, or Panic, but I'm not sure
| how big these companies actually are.
| oblio wrote:
| Jetbrains is probably the exception, out of the dev tools
| devs actually like to use.
|
| ActiveState used to be another, back in the day. They're
| still around but with minor mindshare.
| mmustapic wrote:
| I'm a contractor so my case is a bit different, I can't
| expect a client to pay for every tool I want to use. But I
| gladly pay for Sublime Text and Sublime Merge because it
| makes my work more enjoyable and effective, and this is also
| good for whoever is paying me.
| edanm wrote:
| > It's like trying to sell magic tricks to magicians. Sell
| magic to regular people, and you'll see some significant
| revenue.
|
| Just FYI, magic tricks are basically _only_ sold to magicians.
| There 's a thriving market of magic shops, especially online,
| where magicians go to buy new tricks (in the form of
| books/videos), new "gimmicks", etc.
|
| I'd wager that a significant portion of all magic that is done
| is actually by magicians, for magicians, and partly in order to
| sell magic tricks.
| keyle wrote:
| I have to disagree. I pay for tools if they're good and they're
| saving me - time - headache -
| improve my quality or quantitive results
|
| I very often do not want to pay if the product isn't as good as
| it claims or simply not good enough.
|
| Software developers very simply would rather build their own
| half assed solution to a problem rather than pay for a half
| assed solution.
|
| Offer quality, we'll pay.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| Remember that a single data point does not show a trend.
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| I clearly remember paying around $80 USD for a WholeTomato
| [1] license back in 2003 for C# when I first came out of
| University into my first job. And that was a glorified auto-
| completer.
|
| Software has turned really cheap. The downside of is that it
| is almost a commodity, but the development effort has not
| really decreased correspondingly.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030618043241/http://www.who
| let...
| irrational wrote:
| I'm a web developer. My company pays for JetBrains IntelliJ for
| me. And I love it. But, if I had to pay for it out of my own
| pocket, I'd use VS Code instead. I've used both and IntelliJ is
| superior to VS Code, but not to such an extent that I would pay
| my own money for it. But I'm more than happy to have my company
| buy it for me.
| izacus wrote:
| IntelliJ suite is like 120$ a year, is that too much out of
| developer pay?
| snorremd wrote:
| For someone working out of Silicon Valley? No. For someone
| working out of Bangalore, maybe?
| OOPMan wrote:
| I pay for IntelliJ myself so I always have my preferred tool
| no matter where I work.
|
| When GitHub Copilot decided they wanted to charge $10 a month
| after the beta was over I noped out.
|
| For what it does, it sure as shit isn't worth paying more
| than my yearly subscription to IntelliJ...
| andyfleming wrote:
| This is a product that I actually _would_ pay for as an
| individual. It's reasonably priced and worth the increase in
| efficiency and better experience. Plus their pricing is fair
| and flexible.
| javajosh wrote:
| Yes, it seems fair to me to spend real money on Jetbrain's
| tools, if you like them.
|
| It _is_ strange how reluctant programmers are to spend on
| tools even though they are, as a rule, quite willing to let
| themselves be paid handsomely for their services. Yet
| graphic designers pay for Adobe 's tools. Who can read this
| riddle?
| brabel wrote:
| I also pay for JB tools. But that's because it's well
| beyond me or other open source developers to make a
| product that's competitive with it, and the competition
| is well behind (VS Code and Eclipse are good, but once
| you learn IntelliJ more advanced stuff, you feel like a
| programming God - something worth paying for ;) ). An IDE
| is insanely complex nowadays. I am not sure what Kite had
| in mind, but to me, what they were proposing would be
| "just" an IntelliJ Plugin. And I don't pay, and can't see
| myself paying, for any plugin.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I donate to the FSF and subscribe to iTerm2's patreon,
| FWIW.
|
| I have to admit, though, I think the world would be a
| much more drab and less productive place if open source
| were completely dominant. We'd all be chiding each other
| to donate more and pitch in more, while barely scraping
| by in comparison to the vast wealth sloshing around
| today. Maybe it would be a BETTER world if it weren't all
| fueled by addictive mobile games, privacy invasive
| advertising, etc. But we'd be a lot less rich
| nikkwong wrote:
| > if you like them.
|
| Important caveat here. My only exposure to JetBrains had
| been through Intellij which was thoroughly unpleasant
| around 2012-2013. That impression has left me forever
| sour towards them. Surprised to hear people say that it
| could be a step up from VSCode.
|
| It looks like "Fleet" is their VSCode competitor? I'm not
| sure if the homepage does a good job at communicating how
| this improves over of VSCode. First of all VSCode has an
| enormous ecosystem of tools which seems hard to
| replicate. In terms of advertised features for Fleet, it
| seems like the one most highlighted on the page is
| multiplayer, which would possibly enable others watching
| me code live? Sounds nerve-wracking. Although I could
| imagine some helpful scenarios when pair-programming or
| something.
|
| Other items that are advertised don't really encourage me
| to want to make the leap, especially as something I have
| to pay for. It sounds like they could host your code, or
| something like that, which could be nice. An annoying
| part of my workflow is that I work on the same codebase
| between multiple machines and every time I hop between
| machines I have to commit the changes to a private
| repository that is separate from my team's repository. It
| seems like it would be somewhat straight-foward to have
| the same code shared between all machines.
|
| Other than that I would be interested to hear on how any
| Jetbrains products would improve productivity.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| I have to say I had the same experience with IntelliJ
| when developing for Android in 2013-15 or so. This year
| when trialing CLion I was very positively surprised by
| the evolution of their platform, it's easily the most
| usable environment for C++ development I have used.
|
| I have experience from pure VIM, VSCode, Visual Studio
| for Windows, the reliable refactoring features alone are
| worth the price. With VSCode I would find the refactoring
| support not reliable and the intellisense features also
| might just stop working randomly depending on the
| project.
|
| Prompted me to move to WebStorm also for web development,
| and I must say I have been very positively surprised
| there also.
|
| Seems they have made some important strides in the past
| years, can highly recommend testing their environments
| out.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Surprised to hear people say that it could be a step up
| from VSCode.
|
| VS Code is very* lightweight. Both in speed and in
| features. Comparing it with IntelliJ makes it seem very
| basic. Now, for some people that's okay, but JetBrains
| IDEs are full-blown IDEs.
|
| *: Compared to something like JetBrains tools, or
| literally any other electron software.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Could you give some examples of the differences I would
| see as a TypeScript developer using a "full-blown IDE"
| over VS Code.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| For TypeScript there's little difference since most of
| TypeScript support comes from the same language server
| running in the background (there's an option in the menus
| to restart it if it breaks, same as in vscode).
|
| Although autocomplete is better (especially for pure JS),
| it doesn't warrant paying for a license IMHO. Personally,
| I use IDEA for TS because I use it for other languages
| where it blows everything else out of the water (so
| muscle memory).
|
| Also, if you're doing server-side development, it has a
| very good built-in client for two dozen databases (which
| pretty much replicates the functionality of their
| DataGrip product), so you get decent data editing /
| import / export / DDL support, and excellent
| autocompletion for your SQL (interspersed among TS code,
| or not -- doesn't matter).
|
| Edit: also, 100% of their products' funtionality can be
| used from keyboard. I don't touch the mouse at all. I
| think vscode can support something like that, but with
| very heavy customization (and even then I'm not sure).
| Out of the box it pretty much forces you to use the mouse
| for many things.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| 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 right there and should be able to do anything. And
| thanks to the magic of language servers you can use any
| editor you like, including (Neo)Vim or Emacs, while
| keeping most of the capability for language specific
| stuff.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| 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 libraries like ORMs.
|
| -- navigation (jump to definition/declaration, find all
| references, etc.) works _everywhere_ : any supported
| programming language, XML, files like JSON schema, YAML,
| you name it. For example, you can put the cursor to a
| primary key of a table, press your "find all references"
| shortcut, and it will show the list of all foreign keys
| referencing that primary key. Same with things like URLs
| on the client side (for example, the first argument to
| the browser's fetch() function) -- put the cursor on the
| URL, press "jump to definition", and it will jump to the
| controller method that implements that URL, including the
| correct HTTP verb if there are multiple method for that
| URL. This is just one example, there are dozens of little
| things like that. All that makes it much easier to work
| with fullstack projects (to me at least).
|
| -- the UI and its "control interface" (so to speak) is
| _consistent_. For example, you use the same key
| combination to jump through search results, list of
| issues, list of references, etc. etc. Same for other key
| combinations -- they jump make sense, you press what you
| think will work and it usually just works.
|
| -- it also supports fuzzy search _everywhere_ , not just
| in the command palette. For example, you open up the list
| of databases, start typing in the name of the table (or
| database, or foreign key, or procedure, or whatever), and
| it highlights matching entries and lets you jump between
| them. Press Up and Down to go though its suggestions. The
| same mechanism works in filesystem tree, search results,
| issue list, and so on.
|
| > JetBrains UI is downright cluttered
|
| All of that can be hidden. I have the filesystem tree to
| the side, the main editor taking 90%+ of screen real
| estate, and the tab bar on the top, everything else is
| hidden behind a keypress.
|
| > As for keyboard use, the command pallete (Ctrl+Shift+P)
| is right there and should be able to do anything
|
| This is not the same at all. _Everything_ can be done
| through keyboard shortcuts without typing in obscure
| commands (even though fuzzy search helps, it 's pretty
| slow).
|
| You should use what you think is convenient, I'm not
| forcing anyone. The more pressure you put on JetBrains by
| using the alternatives, the better for us.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| 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.
| origin_path wrote:
| 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...
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's not just a new UI, it's ~~crippled~~ _faster_ to be
| more like VS Code and not cannibalize their existing
| IDEs.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Ah damn, you are right. Didn't seem too much vs code
| like, though.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| I almost never use the mouse in vscode, emacs keybindings
| and the command pallete and keyboard shortcuts created
| any time I touch the mouse. But I also don't get
| everything I want, (like macros and web browsing and face
| customization and rectangular editing) that I get with
| emacs, so I only use vscode for liveshare.
|
| Incidentally, I use and pay for tabnine (another ai
| assistant) in emacs and it's fantastic - single line
| completions are superior to whole snippets I have to read
| with copilot, and don't get me out of my flow.
|
| I am surprised the tabnine company completions are way
| easier to work with than in vscode. With grouped
| backends, company lsp + company tabnine is great. I'd
| encourage kite users to try it. Well worth the money.
| animuchan wrote:
| In my experience JS autocomplete in IntelliJ isn't
| better, it just shows more stuff. Most of it unrelated
| and won't work / will be `undefined` if chosen.
|
| It does, however, teach junior developers that the
| autocomplete is unreliable, which is a good thing I guess
| -- I've seen juniors in statically typed languages like
| Java fail coding interviews because they couldn't
| remember any of the syntax, the knowledge was contained
| in the autocomplete and didn't transfer to a whiteboard.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I do agree IntelliJ's autocomplete is kinda crap out of
| the box. But if you turn off all the machine learning
| stuff it's back to being alright.
|
| > I've seen juniors in statically typed languages like
| Java fail coding interviews because they couldn't
| remember any of the syntax, the knowledge was contained
| in the autocomplete and didn't transfer to a whiteboard.
|
| Is this really a problem? How much Java code does anyone
| write on a whiteboard outside of an interview or teaching
| setting?
| animuchan wrote:
| This is only a problem if they wanted to get hired, and
| then failed the interview because even the basic syntax
| of their language of choice is unknown to them in the
| slightest.
|
| I didn't invent the rules, I'm just doing the interviews,
| occasionally from both sides of the table.
|
| (However if I did invent the rules, I'd probably still
| require e.g. a Java developer to know Java at least a
| little bit. Is this really controversial?)
| Semaphor wrote:
| While I use it for TS/Vue projects, my main experience of
| differences is with C# and Java, so I'm afraid I can't.
| kikimora wrote:
| I write a bit of TypeScript recently in both VSCode and
| WebStorm, I also have many years of experience using both
| tools. Started with VSCode since it lightweight and this
| is what I use to edit most of the text. Unfortunately
| VSCode had troubles indexing the project, refactoring,
| figuring out types and navigating between methods.
| Everything works but VSCode hangs for a few seconds every
| time I do an action that needs a code analysis e.g. go to
| a method definition. Most of the time it was faster to
| search and replace rather than to rename a method.
| WebStorm was the opposite - opens in a few seconds, but
| then everything works instantly.
| smaudet wrote:
| Their support is also often stellar - if something breaks
| in a free product, get ready for some free support also
| (read, none, DIY).
|
| And, maybe you think fixing your IDE yourself makes you a
| better developer - if you are building IDEs, maybe, sure.
| I'm more than happy to outsource that a company which
| does this as its bread and butter.
|
| Microsoft, on the other hand, sells (or tries to)
| enterprise office solutions. They may have optimized for
| a single use-case (TypeScript), outside of promoting
| their web-strategy (typescript), I wouldn't expect them
| to care one lick about VSCode, once it stops being
| particularly important.
|
| Its also not open source (VSCode), so I would have no
| qualms regarding that - there is
| (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode) OFC but the license
| for the product everyone uses is not
| (https://code.visualstudio.com/License/). Similar story
| for Jetbrains -
| https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/ is open source
| while of course IntelliJ, Webstorm are not
| (https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/)
| taink wrote:
| To be fair, there is a FOSS binary distribution of VSCode
| -- VSCodium[1], though it is maintained by the community.
| It operates in a similar way (licensing-wise) to IntelliJ
| IDEA Community vs. Ultimate.
|
| [1] https://vscodium.com/
| acchow wrote:
| Strange. In my experience, IntelliJ from 2012 is a
| superior experience to VSCode today.
| nikkwong wrote:
| Granted; I was very junior then--and I think my issues
| may have been mostly related to the finnicky nature of
| java tooling and dependencies rather than the IDE itself.
| happymellon wrote:
| I use both, and it really depends on the language.
|
| Something like Java is really benefitted from IntelliJ,
| Spring integration is excellent, but especially scripting
| languages like Python or JavaScript/Typescript don't get
| enough uplift and you might as well use VS Code.
| realusername wrote:
| To each their own, I would still continue to use VSCode
| even if IntelliJ's current version was free.
|
| Even Jetbrain themselves realised this since they are
| creating a VSCode clone called Fleet.
| TheGeminon wrote:
| I think it's because the free and OSS tools are of such a
| high quality for developers. There is a much bigger chasm
| between GIMP and Photoshop than there is between VS Code
| (with plugins) and JetBrains.
|
| It's hard for many to get over the fact that JetBrains is
| infinitely more expensive than VS code in dollar terms.
| oorza wrote:
| > There is a much bigger chasm between GIMP and Photoshop
| than there is between VS Code (with plugins) and
| JetBrains.
|
| I don't believe this to be true. I think the difference
| is graphic designers tend to use much more of their
| toolings' functions, whereas almost every day I'm
| surprised someone I work with doesn't even know some IDE
| feature was possible, let alone how to use it. Hell,
| almost every frontend developer I've ever seen use either
| VSCode or WebStorm orchestrates everything from the
| built-in terminal and is baffled when they never see me
| use one - because it's all configured via run
| configurations, and that's a _basic_ feature.
| theamk wrote:
| That makes sense though.. Terminal commands are easy to
| put into team wiki or record in personal notes or put
| into your CI config. There is a command history, it is
| easy to chain commands, etc..
|
| Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much more
| productive (say its debugging does not work without it)
| it is better to avoid it if possible.
| oorza wrote:
| IDE's native tooling makes you more productive because
| you set it up and never interact with it. If you need to
| manually do stuff, or do it all the time, you can slap it
| behind a keybinding. My cmd+F6 to do everything that
| needs to be done to get the iOS app built and debugging
| inside a simulator is obviously going to be more
| productive than having to jump into the terminal every
| time. Ditto for the run configuration (also cmd+F6 in a
| different project) that spins up docker and all that blah
| blah to get the API server running.
|
| This is what I'm talking about, for what it's worth, a
| programmer doesn't immediately see the utility in the
| tool and doesn't use it, and that's the story for 99% of
| the things an IDE does. It's always faster to do it
| yourself once, or twice, especially considering setup
| time and learning curve, so people don't make use of the
| tools. I see people using grep instead of their IDE
| search because they cbf to figure out how to do it in the
| IDE!
|
| It's like we're carpenters who hate power tools.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much
| more productive (say its debugging does not work without
| it) it is better to avoid it if possible.
|
| I have a friend who works as a dev for a decently sized
| software editor, so he's seen his fair share of people
| interacting with the tools. They work mainly with Java
| and the company pays for Intellij for everyone.
|
| He's often complaining about how people never try to
| learn the IDE and always do things manually. They usually
| don't really know what they're doing in the terminal,
| either (they mostly use Windows, so the terminal is
| rarely second nature).
|
| But whenever he shows them a few nicer features,
| typically around refactoring and such, they're always
| blown away and never look back.
|
| He has, of course, interacted with his fair share of
| graybeards who only use vim, but those people don't
| usually take ages to accomplish simple tasks.
| H1Supreme wrote:
| Designers have to spend money on their tools. There's no
| other option. Developer's don't. Plus, developers can
| make their own tools if they need to.
| iopq wrote:
| Because I'm always disappointed with paid proprietary
| software eventually. Despite some shortcomings, I used
| Windows 7. Anything after that had a confusing interface
| with two settings panels, some kind of an attempt to
| bring a tablet interface to desktop, loss of control over
| my computer.
|
| After installing NixOS, I never actually boot into
| Windows 10 anymore. Naturally, I never use MS Office or
| Photoshop anymore.
|
| It would feel weird to buy some proprietary software,
| even if it is good. Why not contribute to an open source
| effort?
| capitalsigma wrote:
| Because developers want to be able to hack on their own
| tools: fix bugs, add features, whatever. Graphics
| designers do not have the skills to hack on their own
| tools, so there isn't a huge population of them sitting
| around going "damn, I wish I had feature X -- I know,
| I'll build my own editor and open source it!"
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| Some do. Probably over-represented on HN. Others want to
| work their hours and spend the rest of their time with
| non-technical hobbies, or with family, or literally
| anything else. If that isn't you, no big deal. But we
| should not paint all developers with the same brush.
| capitalsigma wrote:
| Enough developers want to hack on their own tools that
| the market is smaller than you would naively expect,
| counting the number of developers and how many tools they
| each use. It's a bit like asking "how come we're having
| so much trouble selling our extended warranty to
| professional mechanics, even though professional drivers
| buy extended warranties all the time?"
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| The real reason is that there are free alternatives. For
| many people, "free and open source" is the same as just
| "free".
|
| Again, I can fix most things on my car. I can afford the
| tools needed. But I don't want to because opportunity
| cost.
|
| One thing I have always found weird is the whole, "hey
| can you look at my computer? It is all slow" is
| considered okay to ask anyone in IT, but it (at least in
| the circles I was raised) inappropriate to ask a mechanic
| in the family to work on your car, the accountant to do
| your taxes, the plumber to replace your toilet.
|
| And even with mechanics, some like to work on specific
| cars as a hobby, much like an engineer might want to play
| around with ML and work on a CRUD app for pay.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| "hey can you look at my computer? "
|
| Think about having a friend who is doctor. We might often
| just ask them hey I have this pain in the neck what do
| you think could it be? It is not seen as asking them to
| work for you but merely asking for advise, like you might
| ask any friend. Advise is free right? And the person
| asking you for advise is happy to give their advise to
| you if you ask them. Reciprocity!
|
| The problem with the computer MIGHT be very easy to fix
| if you know how to fix it.
|
| But if you accept their invitation to help them then you
| don't want to just give up after 10 minutes. It would
| make you look not smart if you could not help with the
| problem after all. You have been hood-winked into working
| hard to look good.
|
| The worst part is if you do something to their computer
| and some new problems appear later, you will be
| responsible.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Simple. I told my parents if they buy either a Windows
| computer or an Android device, I couldn't and wouldn't
| help them (yes they can afford Apple devices). During the
| height of Covid, my dad had emergency surgery and I
| didn't want to go see him when he was already weak (he's
| better now). I sent them an iPad because it was much
| easier to use with FaceTime than figure out which badly
| integrated video calling solution that Google was pushing
| this week.
| beachtaxidriver wrote:
| I think family mechanics and accountants do get asked for
| help. Plumbers maybe a little less.
|
| I think there's an accurate perception that IT work is
| generally air-conditioned and doesn't involve physical
| danger or sewage, so it's not as big of a deal to ask for
| help.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I have absolutely no desire to hack my own tools. Hacking
| my own tools doesn't put any money in my pocket nor is
| that what I have ever been hired for.
| jmiserez wrote:
| I don't often hack my own tools either, but it's great to
| have the possibility to do so.
|
| When you really need that bug fixed for your edge case or
| platform, it's much easier to submit a patch rather than
| wait around for someone else to fix it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Good god no, I just want it to work. I _used_ to be that
| way, but you can be too in love with customizing your
| tools to the point that it gets in the way of doing your
| own projects. I do not want to spend all my time carving
| better knife handles.
|
| I think about writing my own IDE sometimes, but then I
| think how all-consuming such a project would be, and
| having to support a userbase made up of developers.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > I do not want to spend all my time carving better knife
| handles.
|
| I do not either, but i do want to be able to fix a knife
| handle that is annoying me instead of being at the mercy
| of the knife manufacturer.
| adql wrote:
| Graphics designers don't have much choice because even if
| they decide they are entirely fine with free program, the
| graphics design world runs on Adobe file formats. Not the
| case for programming
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > It is strange how reluctant programmers are to spend on
| tools even though they are, as a rule, quite willing to
| let themselves be paid handsomely for their services.
|
| Ability to find someone willing to pay XYZ for foobar
| does not imply that I am willing to pay the same amount
| of money for something similar.
|
| In fact, by doing this exact transactions it means that I
| find such transaction advantageous for me.
|
| Also, I had enough stories of lock-in and losing access
| to proprietary systems that I prefer vastly inferior open
| source.
|
| Also, I am not aware of paid systems worth paying for.
|
| I use primarily Linux (Lubuntu), git, Codium, Python,
| Kotlin, pgsql, Android Studio, LibreOffice, Firefox,
| uBlock Origin, Leechblock, sqlite.
|
| For what I can pay that makes it worth it? For
| contributing back, I prefer working on code over
| donations (due to geoeconomical situation and ability too
| direct my effort precisely where I care about things over
| donations often being wasted)
| [deleted]
| mythz wrote:
| JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I
| personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a
| no-brainer purchase given its instant ROI from time saved.
| Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few
| $'s.
| BMorearty wrote:
| Agreed. JetBrains and GitHub Copilot are the two exceptions
| for me as an individual programmer.
| bombolo wrote:
| > 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 :)
| BMorearty wrote:
| 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.
| bombolo wrote:
| 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.
| BMorearty wrote:
| Disagree. The comment I replied to was about personally
| paying for tools. My read was that they meant for
| personal use. And you started the snark, not me.
| [deleted]
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Same. That and Sublime. JB for the unrivaled power; Sublime
| for unrivaled responsiveness.
| jve wrote:
| Few times I tried JetBrains rider trial because was fed up
| with Visual Studio performance issues and occasional
| crashes. But rider won't even compile my solution OOTB.
| Meh.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I personally pay for Intellij but lately I've found it
| harder to motivate when vscode provides a very similar
| experience and especially since Python is supported out of
| the box for vscode.
| xvector wrote:
| I personally find JetBrains IDEs' capabilities exceed
| that of VSCode. The IDE just feels better thought out to
| me. However, the convenience of VSCode Web/GitHub
| Codespaces far exceeds that of JetBrains IDEs', so that's
| where I'm at now - on-demand web-based IDEs and a thin
| client.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| It's completely worth it to me to pay for the entire
| jetbrains suite annually. I'd say I use DataGrip, Webstorm,
| and Pycharm on a daily basis.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the
| product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably
| humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if
| they were selling it for twice the price.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual
| user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the
| several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| And the price goes down every year you renew for like
| four years I think? By year 4 you're getting the all
| products pack for like $150/ year
| lgas wrote:
| > I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they
| were selling it for twice the price.
|
| To be fair, that's true of almost everything.
| hbn wrote:
| I'd pay for it if I did enough programming in my day-to-
| day life that it would justify the cost. But I only
| occasionally get into the swing of doing a project, and
| even then I've never made money off of any of them.
|
| I still have my university email (graduated in 2020) so
| I've been renewing my student license that gets me a free
| license for the occasional times I use them.
|
| I kinda wish they'd just go for the Winrar or Docker
| business model, where it's free for individuals but
| businesses have to pay up.
| bombolo wrote:
| > Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a
| few $'s.
|
| I feel that's not my problem as an employee. I work the
| same amount of time regardless.
| julianeon wrote:
| Yes, but the work you do has commercial value to you
| also, based on its merits alone.
|
| Example: without Intellij, you deploy some back end code
| interacting with an OCR solution.
|
| Example: with Intellij, you can build the whole OCR
| solution yourself.
|
| Doing the latter translates long term into higher
| salaries and more money in your pocket. You have to talk
| about what you did in interviews and your answers will be
| reflected in the offers you get.
|
| The only way this would not apply would be if you can say
| "I am absolutely sure I will never move on from, or be
| laid off by, my company," which is not a recommended
| strategy in this economy.
| bombolo wrote:
| So you are saying that Intellij and IDE/completion make
| people smarter and more capable rather than a bit faster?
|
| Do you have any source for this very surprising claim?
| bravura wrote:
| You need supporting data that using high quality tools to
| ship next-level product will, in fact, upskill you as a
| developer?
|
| Can you list any alternate ways that one upskills?
| bombolo wrote:
| He said I will become able to implement an OCR. I'm
| arguing that installing an IDE won't teach me all the
| theory of image processing.
|
| And yes to convince me of that I need supporting data.
|
| > Can you list any alternate ways that one upskills?
|
| Studying, not installing stuff.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Most of the productivity increases in the past 50 years
| landed in the pockets of the employers, not the
| employees.
| adql wrote:
| It will save you time, not allow to magically be better
| at coding...
|
| >Example: without Intellij, you deploy some back end code
| interacting with an OCR solution.
|
| > Example: with Intellij, you can build the whole OCR
| solution yourself.
|
| How did IntelliJ taught you how to make OCR ? Or the
| example is completely out of your wild imagination ?
| batushka3 wrote:
| piokoch wrote:
| From what I know this is Czech company, not Russian.
| thirdvect0r wrote:
| Further to what others have said, JetBrains literally
| stopped sales and R&D in Russia after the conflict
| started.
|
| https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-
| stateme...
| icemelt8 wrote:
| Should I stop using US made products because they funded
| the genocide in Iraq?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| If you think what the US did in the middle east was bad,
| you ABSOLUTELY should stop helping america profit. Just
| because nobody has the balls to actually punish america
| for the horseshit we have pulled, doesn't mean it's not
| the correct thing to do.
| krageon wrote:
| This sort of fundamentalism isn't what stimulates
| societies to make peace, which you ostensibly want. The
| way to peace is tolerance and getting Russia to see that
| too, not drawing lines in the sand and beating your
| chest. That leads to more war. It is easy to see examples
| of this, as the US has been doing this for as long as
| it's existed (at least, when it wasn't at war with itself
| - and even then).
| lycopodiopsida wrote:
| JetBrains is a czech company. And always was, as in
| "founded in Prague". Stop spreading FUD.
| somethingreen wrote:
| Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs
| talking at Czech conferences in Czech?
|
| Asking seriously. Because I was a russian speaking
| Ukrainian until recently and used to listen to tech
| podcasts and talks in russian all the time, for years,
| starting back when JB products just started gaining
| popularity. Not once was the company or it's products
| regarded as Czech by russians. It was always talked about
| as russian, all the podcast guests from JB were russian,
| all the conf speakers were russian.
|
| Now, it wouldn't be the first time russians appropriated
| something that wasn't theirs. Which is why I'm asking if
| there are actually any signs of JB operating in Czechia
| outside of company being registered there. All I can find
| is JetbrainsCZ youtube channel with whopping 44 views on
| its single office walk video.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs
| talking at Czech conferences in Czech?_
|
| Do you have examples of them not talking Czech at Czech
| conferences? Not talking a particular local language at
| an international conference is not a significant metric
| IMO. A great many companies from all over the world send
| people out to speak English (or at least American!) at
| conferences. As a linguistically ignorant Englishman this
| is rather useful to me, but it doesn't make those
| companies not French, not German, not Indian, not
| Chinese, etc.
|
| Heck, if (caveat: speculation, I've not looked into this
| at all) Russian is a common enough second language in the
| country (or at least amongst local+visiting delegates for
| conferences about these subjects) then some talks at a
| conference in the Czech Republic being in Russian would
| not be surprising, much like you see many talks in
| English/American countries where English is not an
| official language (and similar for other languages that
| are significantly more common if you count people with
| them as second+ languages as well as native speakers).
|
| _> used to listen to tech podcasts_
|
| The issue is more acute with podcasts than conferences:
| the audience is international, so they might not have the
| luxury of using their native language while serving a
| large enough target audience.
|
| _> Because I was a russian speaking ... listen to tech
| podcasts and talks in russian all the time_
|
| I see much room for confirmation bias here. What reason
| would they have, beyond national pride which is valid of
| course, to make a point of explaining "we aren't Russian
| BTW" on a Russian language podcast? Especially give that
| could be seen as a bit of a down-play of the Russian
| audience if national pride works the other way against
| them.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| They say they had three R&D offices (out of 6) in Russia
| and closed them in March 2022.[1] 131 out of 161 open
| positions on their career page list Prague as one of the
| possible locations.[2]
|
| [1]: Slide 35: https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/pr
| oducts/jetbrains/d...
|
| [2]: https://www.jetbrains.com/careers/jobs/
| lycopodiopsida wrote:
| Why should an multinational IT company aiming at
| developers talk in a local language? How does a heritage
| of founders matters? Google is half a russian company by
| that metric, as in "Sergey Brin".
|
| JetBrains is a Czech company because it was created in
| Czech Republic and is operated from Czech Republic.
| They've had significant development resources in pre-war
| Russia, like _many_ big companies, because it was a cheap
| and good. As the war started, they 've rescued whoever
| they could and closed their russian offices.
| somethingreen wrote:
| Well, there we go. The grandparent comment argued that JB
| is a russian company (as in employing mostly russians)
| and it may not be a right thing to do continuing to pay
| pretty salaries to people responsible at the very least
| for letting their country slip into genocidal fascism,
| while they enjoy their new life in Europe and the regime
| they helped raise continues murdering Ukrainians and
| kidnapping their children.
| Yizahi wrote:
| The war started in Feb 2014, just saying. JB closed
| offices only when they become afraid of getting squashed
| by new USA secondary sanctions, not because they opposed
| war.
| marviio wrote:
| JetBrains where silent when the war started. I was a bit
| worried what would happen. Then they announced the
| closing of the dev offices in Russia. They said that they
| needed to extract some people before announcing. It's not
| an easy task relocating hundreds of people.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> started in Feb 2014, just saying_
|
| Depending on what you count you could give a number of
| other dates, some significantly earlier than 2014. The
| current massive offensive, which is significant enough
| that pointing out they reacted then and not in 2014 or
| some other date is at best being facetious &
| disingenuous, started in force in Feb 2022.
|
| Just saying.
| chirau wrote:
| Firstly, JetBrains is not a Russian company.
|
| Secondly, not everything and everyone from Russia is bad.
| But if you subscribe to that narrative, good for you and
| good luck finding a tool that comes close to JetBrains.
| dopamean wrote:
| JetBrains IDEs are the only dev tool I pay for as well. I
| write kotlin professionally and for fun and the Intellij +
| Kotlin experience is the most I've enjoyed writing code
| since my early days learning Ruby.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Kotlin is such a lovely language, and I really like that
| it was made by JetBrains because that means I can count
| on a top notch IDE/development experience.
| jareds wrote:
| The fact that Kotlin was created by JetBrains and appears
| to require their IDE to be productive is the reason I
| have no interest in it. I'm totally blind and while
| JetBrains IDE's are technically accessible with my screen
| reading software they are difficult to use unlike VSCode
| which makes an effort to be plesent to use with screen
| reader software not just technically possible to use.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Disagree on this example though.
| arcticfox wrote:
| Me too - I would, on the other hand, pay to use VS Code
| instead of Intellij if I had to.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| As a C dev I pay for CLion out of my own pocket. Partially
| because it's a great quality tool, and partially because
| there's not enough good quality tools for working in C on the
| market so I like to support the ones that do
| adql wrote:
| One big refactor paid for mine in saved time...
|
| Would be silly for corpo to not buy it for developers
| number6 wrote:
| I am in charge of the Software Team and do have financial
| support from the company e.g. if I deem a tool necessary it
| will be purchased - no, or little questions asked. It was
| insanly hard for met to justify, untill I saw the stuff
| marketing buys. Best decision to get the tool for our team
| cfn wrote:
| I have been paying for Resharper (and now Rider and DataGrip)
| for over fifteen years. Some companies where I worked paid
| for it other didn't but it didn't matter. It improves the
| quality of my code and I believe it gives me a competitive
| edge. It also helps keeping me sane as I work with a lot of
| legacy code.
|
| I see it like a construction worker that uses his own tools
| instead of the broken down ones of the site. It makes good
| business sense that I can work faster and better when I use
| better tools. I also pay for other tools such as dbForge and
| SmartSvn/Git but Jetbrains' tools have been the longest
| running ones (I hope this does not sound like I am a fanboy
| or something).
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Resharper is really great for VS, and I would probably be
| willing to pay for it if the performance were a bit better.
| Some of this is probably VS' fault. I'm excited to try
| CLion again once my project supports it, but from what I
| remember the debugging experience is not so good.
| vjust wrote:
| Call me biased because I hate java. Oddly if a person hates
| Java, they should love intelliJ. I hated PyCharm because of
| its Java-centric heritage. I am a CLI guy. The closest I've
| come to loving an IDE is VSCode.
| jasmer wrote:
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| As a software developer with my own business, Jetbrains was
| the only piece of software that I paid for. Everything else
| was open source.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| It is very cheap compared to what developers usually earns.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| Depends on your country
| lefstathiou wrote:
| We are in the market for an on prem OCR tool. Would you mind
| making a referral to your buddy? Email in my profile.
| vl wrote:
| Be it as it may, everyone I know who tried Copilot trial is now
| paying for it. While my company expenses it, I started paying
| with my own money before that.
| Maxburn wrote:
| OCR and document scanning companies is a big deal. I have a
| family member that used to do sales in this area and indeed
| companies with a lot of records and paper are paying big to get
| that digitized.
| nikanj wrote:
| If my employee would rather not pay for a tool, why would I
| spend my own money to help them save money?
|
| The blog post was quite clear on the "the tech doesn't work"
| part, which seems like a more likely reason for their demise.
| Selling developer tools is hard, but selling non-functional
| tools is exponentially harder
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I pay for tools, even though I'm kinda broke and would prefer
| to save a few hundred a year - my IDE delivers a lot of value
| and the support is excellent (thanks Jetbrains). I installed
| Kite briefly but it seemed so resource hungry I switched it off
| soon after without ever really trying to use it. That's not a
| judgement on Kite, I just didn't have the time or resources to
| spend at the time I encountered it.
|
| I'm sorry it hasn't worked out for them, but they get my
| respect for this unusually frank self-assessment, real
| humility, and following through on the fine words with the
| actions of sharing their tools they built. They achieved a lot
| and I hope their future endeavors are wildly successful.
| jwmoz wrote:
| Not strictly true e.g. I pay for Pycharm.
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for
| tools
|
| I believe this is incorrect. I pay for many tools, but I would
| not pay for Kite. The problem is not that developers don't pay
| for tools, but that Kite, or AI-assisted code, does not address
| a pain point. It's a slight improvement, but I don't feel pain
| when I need to write code without it.
|
| That's different from something like CI tools that I pay for.
| When I need to wait long for CI to finish I get annoyed. That's
| when I pay.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| >> 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 do pay for developer
| tools.
|
| Now, maybe some of the startups have unrealistic expectations.
| A Python documentation reader probably wont turn into a billion
| dollar revenue company no matter how smart it is.
|
| But I'm pretty sure there is a market for dev tools. Maybe the
| market is smaller, or harder to crack than you thought, but
| saying "there is no way" isn't going to help anyone.
| origin_path wrote:
| 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.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I don't want to talk about it in detail, because I am
| trying to stay anonymous on HN.
|
| It's a Mac app, pricing model is perpetual license with
| paid upgrades for major new versions (every 3-5 years).
| Customers are roughly 50% individual devs and 50% companies
| who buy for their employees, and a bunch of educational
| licenses, but I don't earn much from them.
|
| I got initial traction by being mentioned by some popular
| bloggers and twitterers, but I only started making a full
| time income after two or three years. I think marketing is
| mostly word of mouth, and lots of people using the trial
| version who eventually buy a license, but for the most part
| I have no idea how people find my app.
|
| As for whether it's worth it -- it's a cushy job, I can
| take care of my kids and don't need to worry about putting
| in enough hours, because nobody cares how much I work.
|
| On the other hand it does get somewhat boring after 10
| years. I've been hearing the same feature requests and
| ideas for improvements for 10 years. My customers are all
| the same average tech dudes like myself. Sometimes an
| interesting bug shows up, and when I track it down that's
| the highlight of my week.
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| >> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for
| tools.
|
| Hijacking the quote...
|
| I can't count the number of times I see well-paid developers
| using the Sublime Text trial.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Sublime is too expensive. $99 is too much. They should make a
| special christmas offer %90 off and many (of those who will
| never pay otherwise) will pay.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| They should also off a PS8/mo plan to use a custom icon and
| let people realize how good they've got it for a one off
| PS90.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Sublime is too expensive. $99 is too much.
|
| On the other hand I have 437 games in my Steam account and
| countless gadgets I don't use. I guess I can skip a couple
| of games and a gadget or two to pay for software I use.
| dvdkon wrote:
| That's somewhat true for me as well, but I generally pay
| under 5 EUR for a game. Deciding between 20 games and a
| text editor doesn't look so good. Though as long as
| Sublime Text's developer is happy with the market share
| and revenue it has, I wouldn't change the price.
| Ennea wrote:
| I've paid $60 or so once, and then another $60 or so for
| the upgrade to version 4. I've used Sublime Text for almost
| 10 years, essentially every single day. A hundred bucks for
| a tool I use every day is not too expensive. And Sublime
| Text is extremely good at what it does.
| dento wrote:
| Do that once, and nobody will pay the full price again.
| They'll just be waiting for the next discount.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| But would that be worse than the same people just using
| the trial indefinitely?
| carlmr wrote:
| The question is how many people pay the $99 now and how
| many pay the $10 then. If you can't convert 10x the
| people you have paying now, you will be losing money.
| [deleted]
| fastball wrote:
| Anecdote for me:
|
| I tried Kite a few years ago but didn't feel like I was getting
| much value out of it and never payed for it.
|
| In contrast, I started paying for Github Copilot as soon as it
| was no longer free.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| analognoise wrote:
| 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.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| >> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for
| tools.
|
| That was a really shocking insight for me. We do not own our
| means of production. And suffer all the textbook consequences
| that follow.
|
| Maybe unions could help with that. Imagine using union-funded
| licenses, compute, storage etc. to experiment with your side
| projects, build your prototypes without risk of losing IP to
| your current employer.
| codeisawesome wrote:
| What's the best book/material on how to build a business like
| your friend's? Discovering the niche, and expanding the client
| base are the main questions.
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| I've paid for jetbrains multiple times, even though it's quite
| expensive for someone making money in a a third world currency.
| I pay for copilot.
|
| However, I would never pay for stuff that I can get free. I
| could talk to my company to buy it, but I would settle for
| something close and free if it come to that.
| a-bashtannik wrote:
| People in 3rd countries use pirate copies / cracks very
| often. In my country (Moldova) that's absolutely OK having
| everything pirated even in government structures. AFAIK all
| JetBrains products are available cracked.
|
| I am an individual developer and I pay for my PHPStorm and
| GitHub CoPilot - it saves me so much time, I could never
| imagine. This software is completely worthy to be paid for,
| even considering "free" copies are available.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I pay for tools independently if they are affordable and I can
| use them commercially (even at work, even if my employer does
| not pay for it). I pay for JetBrains yearly and am at the
| lowest renew cost as a result, so theres no incentive for me to
| stop paying them yearly. I also saw that you can get Visual
| Studio Pro for $45 a month, which is really decent considering
| you get a professional grade IDE all to yourself.
|
| The other thing is they have to be tools I want to use. I am an
| outlier I am sure. I hear often "let your employer pay for it"
| but they don't always necessarily pay for the tools I need to
| use. Having my own JetBrains license grants me strong freedom.
| cerved wrote:
| sebazzz wrote:
| I (=as the employee of the company) often don't want to bother
| to pay, because a business case, then getting the invoice right
| (if that is even possible and the seller allows paying by PO),
| then getting it paid in time, is often not worth it. Often free
| alternatives exist, which makes it even more a no-brainer.
| Never mind that as a whole we are an enormous company but
| software dev is not core business so really we are a small part
| of a whole, yet some sellers only want to sell the most
| expensive enterprise tier.
| mirzap wrote:
| They do pay, but they can not pay same amount as some
| corporation can. If you target individuals you need to find
| good pricing model for them. The best model - at least for me,
| that always attract me is pay for a year of subscription to
| updates. After 1y passes you can pay at lower rate to continue
| receiving updates for new features and bug fixes or you can
| continue to use the latest version before your support has
| expired. I'm hooked instantly to this since it brings me value
| without constant commitment. One year I may decide to extend
| one tool, the other I pay extension for other tool.
|
| Jetbrains' pricing model is also good, they reduce price each
| year (until 3rd), so you get rewarded for having a long term
| subscription. If you break commitment you get the regular
| pricing and you start over.
|
| I remember trying Kite, but I removed it once I saw the
| pricing. It was more expensive than Jetbrains IDEs (which are
| less than 2$ a month for individuals when you pay in a bundle -
| 149$ at the time) which bring much more value for the money.
| For me it didn't make sense to pay 20$ for just incremental
| improvement (if even that) over Jetbrains Intelisense.
| narag wrote:
| _The challenge is that when you 're building software for
| developers, they already know how it must work._
|
| Do you mean that what you built didn't worked as it should? I
| don't understand, I've paid multiple times for tools that I
| find useful, even if they weren't perfect.
|
| This misconception has been promoted by companies with an
| interest in promoting their platforms, using the expeditive
| procedure of subsidizing (often inferior) tools, with the
| collateral effect of making impossible for tools vendors to
| compete.
|
| But by no means it's a law of physics. Make something
| programmers want. It's weird how little have the tools improved
| in twenty years.
| spi wrote:
| > towards non-technical folks trying to get their feet wet in
| software. Eg: Data scientists or business.
|
| A bit tangential to the original post, but where does this
| belief that data scientists are non-technical folks? I am a
| data scientist myself, and in my view it's way more technical
| than most software development. Albeit I wouldn't still call
| neither data scientists nor software engineers "smarter" than
| the average.
|
| Sure, if you want to train your bread and butter text
| classifier it just takes 10 lines of boilerplate code. But you
| don't need an AI-assisted tool for that - you just go to
| hugging face, copy paste those 10 lines, done, it's certainly
| faster than getting some AI-assisted code editor work for you.
|
| For everything that is a bit more complicated, you need endless
| adjustments to your code, and it's quite unlikely more than a
| handful of people before you ever wrote the same code. It is,
| indeed, a somewhat painful and slow process (because just
| "testing" your code often takes minutes, if not hours, so
| finding out bugs becomes annoying). And a somewhat simple, AI-
| based, error highlight tool might be useful to weed out the
| most stupid ones and save some time.
|
| But I will never trust something like copilot (or Kite, I
| guess, which I never tried) to write my code for me, as the
| challenging parts of the work involve long-term connection
| between different pieces of code (data loader, loss function,
| model function) that are written independently but must
| "cooperate" in a very non-trivial way. It is not at all
| uncommon that I make hours-long screen sharing calls with a
| colleague, discussing non-trivial mathematical computations,
| only to end up changing one or two lines of code that don't
| have an immediate link with the problem we are trying to solve.
|
| This kind of things are notoriously hard for AI to grasp, so
| they can't do any decent job in writing that for me. Add on top
| that a lot of the code you find freely online is just
| ridiculously bad or broken, and you might only get unusable
| models generated by AI engines trained on those.
|
| So, what kind of work are you referring to when talking about
| "data scientists or business" in your comment?
| ogarten wrote:
| I found that "being technical" means different things to
| different people.
|
| In the software world people seem to be referred to as
| technical when they write software systems not as much as
| singular scripts.
|
| Data science is definitely technical but a lot of code work
| tends to happen in Jupyter notebooks or something similar.
| The main challenge is in understanding the ML/AI algorithms,
| the possible choices for your analyses that actually make
| sense for the problem, ... .
|
| Besides that, due to the AI hype, there are so many people in
| data science who don't know much about coding or software
| engineering. Therefore, helping these people might be
| profitable (or not).
| rch wrote:
| > 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.
| progx wrote:
| 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.
| ElKrist wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > 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.
| jll29 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nnurmanov wrote:
| 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.
| dsign wrote:
| Oh well Kite team, may your members find well-paying jobs and
| exciting adventures elsewhere, you deserve it well.
| qiller wrote:
| > 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
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| > 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| brandelune wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| danenania wrote:
| The Google Maps smudging point is an interesting one and
| definitely worth considering, but the incentives at play are
| very different. While I'm sure they want to be seen as making
| an effort, Google isn't rewarded in any way for achieving
| high accuracy in their smudging. It just has to be "good
| enough" to the point that they aren't getting in trouble for
| deliberately neglecting it. For this reason, I'd imagine the
| resources they devote to it are quite limited. It's not
| having billions poured into it like self-driving AI is--while
| I have no inside knowledge, I'd guess the budget is orders of
| magnitude less.
| tommica wrote:
| I'm sorry that it did not pan out, but thanks for sharing the
| code!
|
| Hopefully the next project goes well!
| enos_feedler wrote:
| 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.
| ilija139 wrote:
| Great post, such a clear writing style. Farewell Kite!
| KAUSHIL wrote:
| 748339844739202926633947590432974849302
| dibt wrote:
| 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?!
| sqs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you Quinn! It's been both cool and instructive to see
| Sourcegraph take off. Godspeed!
| jrpt wrote:
| "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.
| glenngillen wrote:
| I'd recommend anybody thinking about building a devtool to read
| Neil Davidson's "Don't roll the dice". It's a pretty old book,
| but Neil has also made it available for free now and the
| general lessons still hold true today.
|
| Some IC developers will pay for tools, it's very hard to have
| that happen at a price point that supports the scale required.
| So feature discriminate on the things their boss needs, and
| charge for that. And then the next set of features for their
| bosses' boss, and so on until you're selling into the C-suite.
| deforciant wrote:
| Paying for copilot :) at least in go it's great to write tests
| and sometimes some smaller functions :) totally worth paying
| for it, even from your own pocket if the company wouldn't allow
| expensing it
| janoc wrote:
| If the company wouldn't pay for it then better think twice
| because you could get in hot water with legal. That's not a
| tool one's job or even company's business is worth risking
| over.
|
| Copilot has a ton of still unresolved legal and compliance
| issues (copyright violation problems, sending proprietary
| code to Microsoft as you are writing it, etc.) and most
| larger businesses won't touch it with a 10 foot pole for that
| reason. There is even a class action lawsuit against
| Microsoft over Copilot already.
| Myrmornis wrote:
| With Copilot it's important to configure your editor so that it
| only generates completions when you ask for them. Then it can
| be very useful at times, especially when you're doing something
| you know is routine but you don't recall off-hand how to do
| (e.g. opening and writing to a file in append mode in a
| language you only use occasionally) Having it suggesting stuff
| every time you hit enter quickly gets annoying.
|
| https://github.com/community/community/discussions/7553#disc...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/vscode/comments/qromfk/is_there_a_w...
| importantbrian wrote:
| I tried Kite and didn't even keep using the free trial or
| whatever the free tier was at the time. I don't think the issue
| is that developers won't pay for tools. Companies like
| Jetbrains are incredibly successful selling tools to
| developers. The issue for Kite is that Kite wasn't worth paying
| for.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| That last line really feels like a "I guess nobody wants to
| enjoy the great new taste of Pepsi Glass" kind of slant.
|
| Maybe the product is poor. Maybe people didn't believe the
| claim. But nobody said, "nah I don't want my devs to be 18%
| faster."
| joshvm wrote:
| "Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for
| tools."
|
| I think this is probably true. If you need a tool for your day
| job, your company ought to be paying for it. Some companies
| have slush funds for small purchases like books, but
| subscription costs for services would normally need to be
| approved. If you're a solo consultant then perhaps you'd pay
| for tools that make you more productive. But for personal
| projects the value-add would have to be pretty high to be
| paying another O($10-20) a month on top of other subscriptions.
|
| The big group of "hobbyist" coders are students, and they get
| copilot for free via Github's very generous edu package (and so
| does anyone with an edu email address I think). The bigger
| problem is that this is a very expensive project. It's better
| suited to a big company with money to burn and deep pockets to
| give it away to junior devs who will evanglise for it at their
| new companies (e.g. students) for nothing. See Matlab.
| dijit wrote:
| If you'll allow me to go on a tangent here;
|
| The sheer volume of subscription services I've signed up for
| as the CTO for a startup is mind-boggling. $8 here, $19
| there, $49 for something important, $99 for something
| essential.
|
| Some tools are easily worth it, especially when you see what
| is charged for other (less valuable) tools.
|
| Gitlab, Confluence, Jira, Asana, 1Password, co-pilot,
| codepen, sentry, jetbrains, gitlab plugins for jetbrains,
| Visual Studio, Docker Desktop, Perforce, Slack,
| etc;etc;etc;etc
|
| Then there's things like Spacelift ($250!)!
|
| The most frustrating thing is that:
|
| 1) I need to justify these expenses each for what value they
| bring, some things are nice to have but bring so little value
| on paper.
|
| 2) You can't just enable tools for _some_ people, there 's
| huge overlap and that overlap gets greater
|
| I get that people need to be paid, but these things very
| quickly add up. I'm paying about 7-13% of peoples salaries
| already in these subscriptions, and I feel like a total dick
| for saying no to people or trying to consolidate these.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The weird thing is that 13% seems high. It is hard to
| imagine they are less than 13% more efficient with those
| tools.
|
| It is weird that software engineers are the only engineer-
| types that are supposed to be able to do their job with
| just a computer and a built-in editor.
| NateEag wrote:
| > It is weird that software engineers are the only
| engineer-types that are supposed to be able to do their
| job with just a computer and a built-in editor.
|
| Not really. We aren't actually engineers. Someone
| appropriated the title and misused it, and now there's no
| putting that genie back in the bottle.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Even then, software engineers tend to have more control
| over the work process than other roles.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Some tools are easily worth it, especially when you see
| what is charged for other (less valuable) tools.
|
| Maybe, but most of the tools you listed are not in that
| category IMNSHO.
| dijit wrote:
| Which category?
|
| Ones I excluded for bring "not worth it" are Lens
| ($20/user/mo), Snyk ($139/user/month) and Postman
| ($36/user/month) - contrast those with Gitlabs pricing to
| understand the value trade-off.
| LtWorf wrote:
| What's the point of using snyk AND copilot?
|
| You either care about licenses of dependencies or just
| decide copyright doesn't apply to you :D Seems that using
| both is a contradiction.
| dijit wrote:
| Snyk is not just for licenses, it's for security
| scanning.
|
| They have a bunch of rules for IaC that prevent default
| behaviour from biting you in the butt.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| When I tried kite over a year ago I was relatively unimpressed
| with it. Even though it ran as a plug-in to jet brains IDE it
| required a windows installed service and two separate
| executables running in the background (kite.exe, kited.exe),
| and that stuff continue to run after exiting my IDE which was
| unacceptable for me.
|
| Kite may have been the first to market but copilot blew them
| out of the water in terms of overall functionality.
| password4321 wrote:
| So they wanted to run forever in the background and they'd
| already gotten in trouble for silently collecting telemetry?
|
| Sounds like everyone has dodged a bullet!
| stevage wrote:
| 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.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I think the real reason is that developers are maybe some of
| the hardest to fool customers on the planet.
|
| Since we literally build all of this our B.S. detection meter
| is really high.
|
| Kite thought it can go after the up and coming new developers
| by doing slightly shady things.
|
| However, developers also have an incredible allergy to such
| tactics and it forever taints your brand.
|
| So overall, developers do pay for tools, just not useless ones
| with shady growth tactics.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| I'd say it's the opposite.
|
| Developers easily fool themselves thinking they'll save $9
| p/m by building something from scratch in 3 weeks.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Since we literally build all of this our B.S. detection
| meter is really high.
|
| Oh no. The only thing that's high is our conviction that our
| BS meter is high. We fall prey to, come up with and promote
| as much BS as the next person.
| esperent wrote:
| > Kite thought it can go after the up and coming new
| developers by doing slightly shady things
|
| I briefly tried Kite a few years ago. I didn't notice
| anything shady although maybe I just didn't stick around long
| enough.
|
| What shady tactics are you referring to?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| > I fell for this. I enabled it because I was curious about
| trying new development tools, only to find out later it
| uploaded all of the source code on my computer to their
| service. What the hell.
|
| An old comment from another user.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14837253
| valenceelectron wrote:
| Essentially, they bought the Atom Minimap plugin and added
| kite-specific code/offers. This blew up a lot in the
| respective GitHub repo and also on HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857944
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653
| _alex_ wrote:
| I pay out of pocket for a JetBrains license because it makes me
| a LOT more productive. I don't spend money on a lot of dev
| tools, but if it saves me non-trivial time, it's a no-brainer.
| stanislavb wrote:
| On the contrary, I find Github Copilot extremely helpful and
| saving me heaps of time. Yes, it's not writing the logic
| instead of me, but it acts like the best companion I could have
| in most of the cases.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I pay for copilot. It saves me a modest number of minutes of
| time per week. That's worth a small fee.
|
| And before someone jumps in: I and my other co-founder who also
| uses copilot (We are the only two in the company who do, I
| think, without checking) _are_ the compliance team. We 're both
| very senior and use copilot basically a line or three at a time
| as a smart autocomplete. It's still worth it.
| jacurtis wrote:
| > [we] use copilot basically a line or three at a time as a
| smart autocomplete.
|
| I think this is the best way to think of CoPilot. GitHub is
| selling it like its going to write all your code for you, but
| in reality it is just next-generation auto-complete.
|
| That's not a bad thing. In some ways I'd argue its actually
| better. GitHub needs to change its marketing because even
| most developers seem to think that its out there to take away
| our jobs. Its not and can not. But it provides the smartest
| auto-complete you've ever seen and that can be useful,
| especially when wading through mundane parts of your
| codebase.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I found copilot to be less useful than autocomplete.
| Typical autocomplete suggests things that actually exist
| and work in the codebase. While Copilot would suggest
| things that look superficially like names that exist or
| ways I might have named it, but very often just wrong.
|
| I find typed languages like Rust or Typescript make VS Code
| super powered and provides much more value than copilot.
| telotortium wrote:
| Not surprisingly (Google's internal code analysis tooling
| is quite sophisticated), Google has added a post-
| processing filter to remove results that don't compile,
| but that's not publicly available:
| https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/07/ml-enhanced-code-
| completio...
| hanselot wrote:
| It's really just perfect for remembering obscure things and
| can easily be prompted to generate the boilerplate. If you
| surround it with your style you will see it try to use the
| same techniques, however if you work on large code bases it
| gets annoying when it starts copying the bad habits you are
| trying to get rid of. In those cases it's actually kind of
| good for bringing to your attention that the building next
| door is still on fire.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| Tabnine, in emacs, with lsp mode gives you single line
| completions and predicts and fills out word by word in a very
| effective manner. It's an actual timesaver and worth the money
| (in emacs). The vscode experience is more problematic, but
| that's vscode's completions guis fault, not the tabnine
| server's.
| yarg wrote:
| I paid for intellij - damned near the entire architecture team
| where I worked had a copy, and the company sure as shit wasn't
| the one paying for it.
|
| (I eventually stopped subscribing, in part because they were
| too slow distancing themselves from Russia, in part because of
| their movement away from open source with their newer tooling.)
|
| Developers will pay for software, if the value proposition is
| there.
| lolinder wrote:
| > in part because they were too slow distancing themselves
| from Russia
|
| I'd cut them some slack here. They had to get their team out
| of there first--with the way Putin is running things, they
| sure as hell couldn't announce they were leaving Russia until
| everyone who was going to follow them was out of there.
|
| On the day of the invasion they tweeted a statement
| condemning the attack, and within two weeks announced they
| were leaving Russia.
|
| https://twitter.com/jetbrains/status/1496786254494670851?lan.
| ..
|
| https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-
| stateme...
| yarg wrote:
| I cancelled the subscription long before the full on
| invasion.
|
| Two weeks was impressive, just not impressive enough to get
| me to renew.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| > 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
| eloff wrote:
| 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.
| bachmitre wrote:
| I second that
| jrsj wrote:
| Kite has been around for a lot longer, if anything Copilot
| was Github copying them
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Interestingly checking previous submissions going back to
| 2016 the project had subtitle "programming copilot."
| esperent wrote:
| I don't think it's reasonable to say either was copying. AI
| assisted tooling is obvious and people have been waiting
| decades for the tech to reach a point where they can build
| these tools. Kite tried to get in early - too early
| probably - but even if they were the very first they didn't
| invent the idea.
| morelisp wrote:
| How are you validating the quality of its tests? Are you
| trying any mutations, checking branch coverage, etc.?
| simsla wrote:
| I'd assume you still read the generated code, as if you're
| reviewing a PR
| lolinder wrote:
| > Just the time saved writing tests alone pays for it.
|
| This, so much. My code since using Copilot is easily ten
| times better tested than it was before, and I wasn't
| especially lazy when it comes to testing.
|
| Given 1-2 hand-written unit tests, Copilot can start filling
| in test bodies that correctly test what's described in the
| function name. When I can't think of any more edge cases,
| I'll go prompt it with one more @Test annotation (or
| equivalent in another language) and it will frequently come
| up with edge cases that I didn't even think of and write a
| test that tests that edge case.
|
| (One great part about this use case for those who are a
| little antsy about the copyright question is that you can be
| pretty darn confident that you're not running a risk of
| accidental copyright violation. I write the actual business
| logic by hand, which means copilot is generating tests that
| only interact with an API that _I_ wrote.)
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > which means copilot is generating tests that only
| interact with an API that I wrote
|
| It bases this generated test cases on other similar test
| cases in other software, including GPL licensed
| [deleted]
| madsbuch wrote:
| APIs are not copyrightable (Oracle vs Google). However, the
| code that interacts with an API might be.
|
| Regardless, it is interesting to think about what domains
| are easier to generate effective models for. I would expect
| it to be easier to generate a supervised model <test
| description> => <test code>. My intuition is also, that it
| is easier to generate React component code, and harder to
| generate feature code.
| jascination wrote:
| Out of interest, how are you using it to write tests? Do you
| just write "make a test for functionX" or something?
|
| (Don't have much experience with it)
| mattwad wrote:
| The best part about it for me is just the Intellisense (in
| Typescript). I'm using it on probably 3/5 lines that I
| write as a smarter version, but I rarely use it to do more
| than finish the current line I am writing.
| simonw wrote:
| I wrote up some notes on a recent experience I had writing
| tests with Copilot here:
| https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/writing-test-with-
| copilot
|
| Once you get the hang of how to prompt it (mainly through
| clever use of comments) it can be a HUGE time saver.
| [deleted]
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yes, if you show an example, or even have the test file
| open, it will make the other tests for you.
| dboreham wrote:
| I wonder if this says something about the nature of test
| code?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Tests often have tons and tons of boilerplate
| jacurtis wrote:
| Test are always mostly boilerplate and rarely include
| anything crafty.
|
| 95% of tests are: instantiating a class, running a
| method, and then asserting that the result. Tests do not
| or should not be crafty creative code snippets. They are
| boring functional code blocks by design and most are very
| similar, only changing out inputs and assertions between
| tests.
| paledot wrote:
| I'd go so far as to say if your test is doing something
| crafty, you're doing tests wrong. Maybe in a mock or
| fixture, but that's a write-once sort of affair.
|
| I also don't apply DRY (don't repeat yourself) to tests.
| Tests should be independently readable beginning to end,
| no context needed. After all, the true value of a unit
| test is to take a block of code too complicated to easily
| fit in your mind, and break it down into a series of
| examples simple enough to fit.
| djbusby wrote:
| Sure, it's been loads of boilerplate since forever.
| premun wrote:
| It is amazing for typing out mock data. Say you're testing
| parsing of XML - it can easily suggest the the assertions
| over the data parsed from the XML. Example test that was
| 95% coming out of Copilot:
| https://github.com/dotnet/arcade-
| services/blob/61babf31dc63c...
|
| It also predicts comments and logging messages amazingly
| well (you type "logger." add 7/10 times get what you want,
| sometimes even better), incorporating variables from the
| context around. This speeds up the tedious parts of
| programming when you are finalizing the code (adding docs +
| tracing).
|
| Honestly, Copilot saves me so much time every week while
| turning chores into a really fun time.
| trip-zip wrote:
| I honestly thought I'd never use copilot, but when I need
| to write something to interface with XML via a SOAP API,
| boy copilot is my best friend...
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| That code is wretched... Why have serializer logic
| embedded in a data object, especially when .NET provides
| generic discrete serializers?
| [deleted]
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| Yeah, tabnine kills it at the data entry parts of test
| dev as well for sure.
| omnicognate wrote:
| > If my company didn't pay for it, I would
|
| Testimonials of this form are near worthless to a company.
| Maybe it's true for you. Statistically, it's highly likely to
| be misleading.
|
| People overestimate their willingness to pay for something
| for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is that they
| incorrectly visualise what the choice to pay or not looks
| like. They often imagine a moment of abstract choice after
| which everything remains exactly the same but some small
| amount of money magically vanishes from their bank account.
| In reality, paying for something is a tedious inconvenience,
| and not paying for it more often takes the form of never
| getting round to putting your card details in than
| consciously deciding "this isn't worth it".
|
| It can be taken to questionable extremes, but there's truth
| in the idea that the only real evidence as to what customers
| will do is what they actually do, not what they say they will
| do. I don't know if their interpretation is correct, but it
| sounds like Kite at least has evidence of the former sort.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| ^ 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.
| vjust wrote:
| I like CoPilot and paid for it out of pocket. I think its
| worth it. Its sometimes like having a smart programmer
| pairing with you.
| didibus wrote:
| 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?
| grepLeigh wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear about services/tools developers _do_ pay
| for. The diagnosis that developers do not pay for tools seems
| off to me.
|
| A few tools that I put on the company card when I worked at a
| Big Tech Co as an IC:
|
| * DataGrip (Jet brains)
|
| * Colab Pro (Google)
|
| * Postman Pro
|
| These were all small $ enough where I didn't need to justify
| the expense. It was just assumed that if I thought the tool was
| worth the $, it was.
|
| For more expensive purchasing decisions, there was a longer
| purchasing/approval process. But the expense would have to be
| 5-6 figures per year before hitting this barrier.
| sanjayio wrote:
| I think "company card" is the differentiating point here. I'm
| not sure how many IC devs have access to that. Which makes me
| think you don't fall into the group that they've defined as
| IC.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| I started getting purchasing authority around the senior
| level, when I also had some amount of hiring authority.
| Even if you don't have a company card, there's typically a
| process where you can get reimbursed for expenses.
|
| If you are an IC reading this and have never tried to
| expense a tool you find valuable, give it a shot. You might
| end up surprised at how much management appreciates the
| ability to trade money for business value.
| jacurtis wrote:
| Yeah I called BS when I read that line too. I pay for plenty
| of dev tools. Similar list to you.
|
| * JetBrains (PyCharm professional, DataGrip, and Goland)
| ~$250/yr
|
| * Lucidchart (Diagramming) ~100 /yr
|
| * Paw (HTTP Client) ~$50 /yr
|
| * Docker Pro ~$60 /yr
|
| I think there's probably more, but I'm not at my work laptop
| to look, but those are the big ones. Those are only
| individual subscriptions. There's also huge costs when
| associated with things like Gitlab Premium ($20 - $100
| /user/month), CI/CD, Code coverage tools, security scanners,
| etc. Companies pay A LOT for development tools.
|
| If Kite thinks that the problem why no one will pay $9/mo for
| their service is because developers or their company's are
| cheap, they need to re-assess. The reason they couldn't sell
| their service is because it wasn't providing enough value to
| justify it. But companies are paying hundreds of dollars a
| month per developer in most cases for various tools. The
| extra $9 for Kite isn't the dealbreaker if there was enough
| value from it.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Yea.. i happily pay for several JetBrains tools and i'd _love_
| to pay for even more. I 've got several problems that i don't
| want to spend time solving myself.
|
| Frankly as a developer i've got more problems than i can count
| and if it involves a GUI i tend to prefer to pay for it. I love
| FOSS but UX is just not often a focus. I have better experience
| with paid products. Assuming the licensing isn't punishing.
| meowmeowmoo wrote:
| What problems would you pay to have solved for you that don't
| already have a solution?
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Biggest one off the top of my head is in the category of
| developer productivity (which i pay a lot for already), and
| specifically it lets me use my editor of choice
| (Helix/Kakoune currently) while getting powerful new
| features.
|
| Huge hurdle, obviously, but my thought was an expanded set
| of LSP features from JetBrains, disconnected from their
| IDEs. They spend quite a bit of time and money on
| developing DX but it's all inaccessible to those of us who
| prefer different editors.
|
| I'd pay a lot for these sorts of features that go above the
| existing FOSS LSP, while retaining more integration to the
| FOSS tooling we've come to know and love (like editors or
| choice).
|
| There's more i'm positive, but i just woke up :)
| make3 wrote:
| Copilot is really great. Kite is garbage, & they have
| absolutely zero consumer trust from all the bullshit they did
| luckylion wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Especially when you don't market to developers in general, but
| freelancers/contractors specifically. It might be hard to sell
| to salaried developers (they'll buy because it's nicer to work
| with good tools), but it's easy to sell tooling to anyone who
| makes more money when they get more done.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| 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.
| smohare wrote:
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Until Microsoft grants Copilot users blanket protection over
| copyright claims from Copilot generated code, I wouldn't even
| think of touching it.
| epolanski wrote:
| Same.
|
| Never ever I'm risking breaking copyright, and I also don't
| like Microsoft not including their own code in the model.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > I also don't like Microsoft not including their own
| code in the model
|
| From allegations I have read across the Internet,
| Microsoft might be doing those who use Copilot a favor.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| ML text and image generators have a habit of
| regurgitating training data, especially if you happen to
| use certain inputs or prompts that also match said data
| even superficially. For example, type in "fast inverse
| square root"[0] and get out a bunch of Quake source code.
|
| If you use code or art generated by an AI that was
| regurgitating training data, you can be sued for
| copyright infringement.
|
| The way that AI gets training data these days is...
| questionably ethical. It's all scraped off the web,
| because the people who make these AIs saw court precedent
| for things like Google Books being fair use and assumed
| it would apply to data mining[1]. Problem is, that does
| nothing for the people actually _using_ the AI to
| generate what they thought were novel code sequences or
| images, because fair use is not transitive.
|
| [0] This won't work in current Copilot because a) I'm
| misremembering the comment phrasing and b) they
| explicitly banned that input from generating that output.
|
| [1] In the EU, this practice is explicitly legal
| Jenk wrote:
| We may well find out the answer to that when this
| lawsuit[0] concludes.
|
| [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-
| openai...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| If Copilot generates the exact same code as the source, I
| don't see how that process could be exempt, it's like
| using the clipboard on your PC with extra steps.
| nl wrote:
| It _can_ generate the same code, but generally won 't.
| drekipus wrote:
| So Microsoft should provide blanket protections to the
| developers that use it?
| nl wrote:
| No, for a number of reasons:
|
| 1) It's the code license that matters, and the depends on
| what license the code the developer is building is using
|
| 2) License compatibility is undecided (see eg the
| different views of Apache Foundation and FSF on the
| compatibility of ASF 2.0 and GPL)
|
| 3) It's easy for someone to deliberately produce code
| that violates a license. MS is a big target and you can
| bet license trolls would chase it on that.
|
| Probably more reasons, but there's a good start.
| Jenk wrote:
| 3) is not a good reason. "Big fish" is not an excuse to
| not provide protection. The burden to protect others from
| harm as a direct result of a feature of a product is on
| the owner of that product.
| nl wrote:
| Not if it opens them up to false claims.
| LtWorf wrote:
| But when it _does_ generate the same code, you 're
| unaware of infringing :)
| spookie wrote:
| Copilot is extremely shady, and everyone should refrain from
| paying for it until proven otherwise.
|
| Others have already pointed out the case as a reply.
| urthor wrote:
| 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.
| hanselot wrote:
| The Internet blocks your ability to learn...
| wokwokwok wrote:
| I've spoken to no one who hasn't agreed that copilot aids
| in discovery when:
|
| - learning a new code base
|
| - learning a new (popular) library
|
| - learning a new language
|
| You could compare it to, say, eslint but for other
| languages .
|
| What is an idiomatic way of X with Y?
|
| Well, copilot will give you the answer in 10-30 seconds
| less time than opening a browser and searching.
|
| Im not going to argue it's legal merits, but as a learning
| tool, it's very much like having a smart linter.
|
| The larger scale code generation is less obviously useful
| and usually wrong, I agree.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| It doesn't block your ability to learn any more than any
| auto suggestion systems. But I guess it depends on what you
| value in terms of learning, for me, copilot allows me to
| focus on the larger architectural problems while not having
| to worry about the exact syntax of certain things (DSL
| query language, middleware express, typescript def
| annotations, etc).
|
| Every time I don't have to context switch to look up some
| technical errata in my browser is a complete win for me.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I observed one guy become very resistant to reading the
| docs as they believed copilot obsoleted them. Programming
| in Ruby, the copilot suggestions will run but since you
| didn't read the docs you won't know that the output
| doesn't actually work or doesn't do what you think it
| does since it was intended for a different situation.
| selcuka wrote:
| > "GitHub Copilot blocks your ability to learn." Is a
| common refrain.
|
| On the contrary, it frequently suggests code that adhere to
| better practices.
| ge96 wrote:
| A coworker of mine uses it, it almost seems like an unfair
| advantage but I can also use it too if I want to.
| Specifically writing hard to decipher code eg. functional
| composition but Copilot will spit it out.
|
| I haven't wanted to use it personally. I'm also not a
| senior dev or anything so my opinion is not worth much.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I use it. It's good for boilerplate code or basically
| anything where you can avoid looking at the docs. For
| example, I was writing an ML training loop and it correctly
| filled in the rest of the function after I wrote the first
| few lines. The code is basically what's in the pytorch
| docs, just fit to my model and scenario.
| nl wrote:
| Everyone I've spoken to _who has actually used it_ thinks
| it works extremely well. This includes pretty experienced
| developers.
|
| I've never heard anyone claim it blocks the ability to
| learn - if anything it's the opposite. Many people like how
| it shows you APIs you weren't aware of.
| perrylaj wrote:
| I used it for about two weeks total, over two different
| periods. Mostly Kotlin, Java, Typescript, small amounts
| of Groovy. I ended up turning it off. In my experience,
| it has moments of utility, but most of time it felt like
| it was getting in the way. The kinds of things it
| completed well were not the kinds of things that cost a
| lot of time or mental energy. I found wasting more time
| trying to fix things that when it got close but not quite
| there, than it saved in spitting out boilerplate.
| phire wrote:
| I think copilot works very well.
|
| But I did find that I need to turn it off at certain
| stages when learning (or re-learning) a programming
| language. It's seemed counterproductive until you have a
| good grasp on the basic syntax of the language. But the
| "showing you new APIs" does seem to be a thing that
| actually helps.
|
| In general, you should not be accepting code completions
| that you don't understand. I'm usually stricter, in that
| I only typically accept completions that line up with
| what I was planning to type anyway.
| urthor wrote:
| That's been my experience.
|
| It's good for learning new packages in Python.
|
| It's quite poor for learning a totally new set of
| programming language grammar.
|
| If you're a Javascript developer of 5+ years of
| experience, it's probably absolutely fantastic. Not so
| great if you're learning a new programming language.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Some well-known devs like Guido van Rossum and Andrej
| Karpathy are big fans as well [1].
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/cdiD-9MMpb0?t=8723
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Please remember that Guido van Rossum is now employed by
| Microsoft. Yes, I am a fan of Guido van Rossum and his
| work, but I am always suspicious when famous people
| recommend their own company's products. It feels like
| excellent marketing/PR that is hard to resist.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| What about Karpathy, nobody pays him in principle.
| dreamyfigment wrote:
| I _love_ Copilot but the only reason I use it is because I
| qualify under their open source developers program, I just
| can't justify paying $10/month for it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| How much do you love it, then? What would you pay, if it's
| less than $10/mo?
| didibus wrote:
| It saves a bit of time, but doesn't seem to make a
| difference on time to market of features, products,
| improvements or bug fixes.
|
| In my experience, it's a quality of life improvement, but
| the things that dictate actual time to market is
| bottlenecked by things that aren't solved by copilot,
| such as overall design, decision making, requirements
| gathering, code structure/architecture, solution
| ideation, user acceptance, infrastructure setup, etc.
|
| I think if it eventually could help with those other
| tasks, you'd see time to market gains, and that would
| start to make it really valuable.
| [deleted]
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Your anecdote is trivially rebutted with another. I tried
| Github Copilot _more than twice_ (gasp), and now pay 10$/month
| for it. Happily.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| How does your workplace/compliance officer feel about you
| using it?
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Workplace? I think I remember those...
| jrpt wrote:
| 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.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| 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.
| wittycardio wrote:
| The difference between other Dev tools and GitHub is the
| probability of getting things wrong. Like when intellij
| types out boilerplate or a compiler generates code it's
| 100 percent correct and if it fails, it fails
| predictably. Copilot is impressive sometimes but there's
| no guarantee of correctness or failure mode. I cannot
| trust such tools for anything serious. If you're in the
| habit of copy / pasting code from the internet then I can
| see why it might help speed that up. But imo that too is
| dangerous and I avoid it unless absolutely necessary
| epolanski wrote:
| Risking breaking copyright and not supporting a model of
| code laundering isn't exactly looking for reasons.
| johnfn wrote:
| I feel the problem with discussions about Copilot is that they
| consist of roughly two groups of people talking past each
| other. The first group believes that Copilot should be able to
| write code for whatever you tell it to write code for. The
| second group thinks Copilot is a fairly overpowered
| autocomplete.
|
| The first group gets annoyed all the time because Copilot fails
| to write most code when prompted with comments, or writes
| inaccurate code at best. They get upset when they see that
| Copilot can reproduce GPL code when prompted in a specific way.
|
| The second group most prompt Copilot by allowing it to tab a
| complete a line or two at a time, and they are actually super
| happy because Copilot is way better than any other existing
| autocomplete; it's basically in a class of its own. To them,
| the GPL issue seems a bit more abstract, because they would
| never use Copilot to do that anyways.
|
| I fall pretty firmly into the second camp (can you tell?).
| Allow me to soliloquize for a moment. Copilot is an incredibly
| powerful tool, probably the most powerful one I have, but, just
| like any tool, you need to really learn your way around it, and
| understand what it can and cannot do, before you start making
| judgments. I'm not surprised that you turned it off after using
| it twice. Imagine saying you stopped using React after making
| two components!
|
| Maybe I should write up a bit more about how I use Copilot, but
| in a nutshell I feel that it falls somewhere between a
| 2x-better autocomplete and (and this bit is even more
| interesting) a tool similar to google search, but more tightly
| integrated with the coding environment. The second bit is why
| it's so good. Imagine if I were to continuously google search
| everything I was doing while coding, while I was coding it.
| Sure, most of the time it'd just confirm you were doing the
| right thing, but... every now and then, Google might turn up a
| better strategy than the one I was currently trying. That's how
| I feel Copilot works all the time; it's continuously "google
| searching" for alternate approaches, and every now and then
| it'll be like, "aha, did you think of [this thing]" and really
| take me aback, because I wouldn't have even _thought_ to Google
| for that particular bit of code / problem / strategy.
|
| Of course, you _could_ continuously google search everything
| you did as you did it, but it would be a massive waste of time.
| Just imagine Copilot is doing it for you, and returning what it
| found. Most of the time I know what I 'm doing, but every now
| and then, the result is remarkable.
| loosescrews wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that even small
| snippets of licensed code can be problematic. I don't know
| exactly what the cutoff is, but when I tried Copilot it often
| suggested to auto complete snippets of code that were long
| enough that if I was intentionally coping them from a
| licensed codebase, I would handle the license. I'm not
| talking about whole giant functions, but small functions or
| large chunks of a function.
|
| It is true that more commonly it suggested at most a few
| lines of obvious code which could really only be written the
| way it suggested, but a number of people in the comments on
| this article mentioned using Copilot to come up with test
| cases, so I think people are actually using it to suggest
| larger snippets of code.
| serjester wrote:
| Copilot had 400k paying customers within it's first month [1].
| I'm not a fan of mass generalization about large cohorts of
| people. Will everyone use a tool? Of course not. You just need
| dedicated early adopters that see the value add.
|
| Without having tried it I'm assuming either their product was
| not good enough or their marketing department isn't strong.
| Developer really tend to neglect the latter.
|
| [1] https://www.ciodive.com/news/github-copilot-microsoft-
| softwa...
| serverlessmania wrote:
| I disagree, Github copilot makes me happy, helps a lot with
| guessing patterns in my own project base code, I just write the
| good function name and he guess what I want to do.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I can see Jetbrains as being the conduit for selling such a
| tool, because their customers are willing and are to some
| extent trained to pay.
| ivalm wrote:
| I pay for github co-pilot. It seems surprisingly bad for
| typescript and excellent for python.
| cowmix wrote:
| I tried it. Ironically, it was pretty good for Powershell and
| so so for Python (in my case at least).
| ivalm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| 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.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Yeah, I was very confused by that paragraph. Copilot is not
| perfect, but it's "good enough" that I'm happily paying $10/mo.
| rkagerer wrote:
| 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!
| didip wrote:
| Docker and Vagrant are the some of the prime examples.
|
| They are clearly useful but people still don't want to pay.
| LtWorf wrote:
| systemd-nspawn is there too
| progx wrote:
| 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.
| nnoitra wrote:
| rockzom wrote:
| > Our 500k developers would not pay to use it.
|
| lol
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| blondin wrote:
| 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.
| dopeboy wrote:
| 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.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| 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.
| dmarlow wrote:
| 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 10x 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.
| [deleted]
| nerdponx wrote:
| Sounds to me like blaming everybody other than themselves.
| However major props for open sourcing it when the company
| failed.
| ehsankia wrote:
| 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.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| They say this:
|
| > making their developers 18% faster
|
| If they're claiming 18%, it was probably more like 5% to 10%
| and it's really hard to sell something that's 5% better
| (especially when the alternative is free/ do nothing).
| dehrmann wrote:
| There are different types of market timing. They're right about
| the tech not being ready, but others are because you found the
| right "moment." Wordle was a success because it got traction in
| a covid winter. The exact same experience was just as viable 10
| years earlier, but people weren't looking for entertainment in
| the same way.
| make3 wrote:
| plus, again, they had zero developer trust because of all the
| ultra shady stuff they did
| chucky123 wrote:
| What shady stuff they did?
| valenceelectron wrote:
| Linking my own comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33686715
| zomglings wrote:
| The only shady thing that I recall is that they quietly
| added telemetry into Atom after they took over maintenance
| of it, without communicating this to Atom users.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| > added telemetry into Atom
|
| Weren't they uploading source code without clear
| communication?
| ApolIllo wrote:
| > 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-
| tha...
| almog wrote:
| I was looking for such comment to understand why the
| GoodByeAds (which I use with NextDNS) contains a record
| for kite.com (which means I'll have to add an exception
| to access kite.com).
| nebulous1 wrote:
| > functionality into open-source apps the company
| previously had no affiliation with
|
| To elaborate, they bought the open source projects and
| put in the content without informing people that they
| were now in control of the project.
| Grothendank wrote:
| The article was a lot of words uttered specifically to avoid
| the words, "ppl didn't use kite because it sucked", while
| conveying the same meaning.
| victorvosk wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| Mad props for facing the truth and unsparingly admitting
| responsibility. So so rare.
|
| Whoever wrote this will go far.
| revskill wrote:
| 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.
| jwmoz wrote:
| > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for
| tools.
|
| * Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for OUR
| tool.
| oofbey wrote:
| 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.
| ACV001 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| correction: sell your product first and then hire another firm
| to build it to your specifications
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| poidos wrote:
| 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.
| inglor wrote:
| > 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!)
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| > 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What category is that? Open source code generation?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| If so, there are others too, like Fauxpilot, and the
| Salesforce one, both are open source I believe.
| solarkraft wrote:
| 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!
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > 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).
| chasing wrote:
| > 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.
| jl2718 wrote:
| 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.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| throwthere wrote:
| > 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.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Most devs don't pay for their tools. Because they are employees
| and they need their bosses to sign off on expenses. I know some
| free lancers that pay for some tools but way more that don't.
| So, it's a small market that sustains a handful of really nice
| tools. Jetbrains is one of the more successful tool vendors in
| this space. But their tools are really essential to many
| developers.
|
| As a CTO, most of my budget goes to paid services that add
| clear value with a clear value proposition. The value
| proposition with developer tools is usually quite murky. It's
| all very subjective and preference based. So, something like
| kite is a hard sell.
|
| It's remarkable that they attracted so much investment. But of
| course that put them under enormous pressure to meet what were
| probably highly unrealistic revenue goals as well. That team
| might have made them a nice acquihire target at best.
| svnt wrote:
| You think copilot is self-sustaining/profitable?
| throwthere wrote:
| > You think copilot is self-sustaining/profitable?
|
| Yes.
| dustingetz wrote:
| copilot hit $40M ARR in the first month: 400k subscribers *
| $100/yr
|
| https://www.ciodive.com/news/github-copilot-microsoft-
| softwa...
| ekleraki wrote:
| I am not sure that 400k subscribers translates to 400k
| paying users. As a student I may use it for free for
| example.
| marcinzm wrote:
| How much of that is paid for by devs and how much is paid for
| by their employers?
| vkou wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| legerdemain wrote:
| 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.
| didip wrote:
| 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.
| kriro wrote:
| """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.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"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!
| rubiquity wrote:
| > 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.
| wentin wrote:
| 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.
| plgonzalezrx8 wrote:
| "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 10x 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.
| dynamicwebpaige wrote:
| "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 10x 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
| 10x'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."
| hemantv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| acyou wrote:
| 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.
| ccbccccbbcccbb wrote:
| 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.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| 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.
| rajnathani wrote:
| Thread from 2017 about Kite using some shady practices:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653
| mistrial9 wrote:
| code repos
|
| https://github.com/orgs/kiteco/repositories
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| > non-local context
|
| Is it easier to build AI for pure functional programming
| languages?
| bredren wrote:
| 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-aftandili...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074393
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/jetsetter/status/1379438096232587265
|
| [3] https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2016/09/share-your-stats-
| to-...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Once it's done, your product manager will push any improvements
| to the bottom of the backlog.
| hsn915 wrote:
| > 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 10x 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?
| lewisl9029 wrote:
| 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, Show HN launch
| thread here: 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 wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lewisl9029 wrote:
| Developers know much more than other professions about how much
| SaaS products cost to run in terms of infra (i.e. very little
| for most products), so are much more likely to anchor on infra
| costs when considering whether a price is reasonable during
| purchasing decision than basically any other group.
|
| Most SaaS are priced completely independently of infra costs
| (or any other costs really), but we are much less likely to
| accept products priced with high margins on top of obviously
| low infra costs, even though that doesn't represent nearly the
| full cost of running a SaaS (which consists mostly of payroll
| due to how high our salaries typically are haha...).
|
| We also like to justify this line of thinking by the argument
| that "well, I can build this myself in an afternoon"
| (significantly underestimating the real ongoing time investment
| required to build and maintain a SaaS product, even seemingly
| trivial ones) or "I can write some bash scripts and put this on
| the VPS that I'm already running anyways" (undervaluing our own
| time).
| zamubafoo wrote:
| I completely agree with you but it's surprising that the
| biggest factors aren't being brought up.
|
| Most people won't pay for a ton of small services since it
| adds up. There is a minimal threshold to pass to make online
| transactions financially reasonable, making the pricing
| models make little sense for most services. Given that most
| cheap services (ie. those at or below $5/mo) don't have large
| infrastructure costs, it's an even harder sell. Not to
| mention that sometimes people rather watch movies or
| television than get tools to make them more productive.
|
| This is doubly compounded when you look at opportunity costs.
| With the amount of software that can be self hosted, the
| costs isn't just the comparison of having the tool or not or
| even other developer focused offerings, but instead having
| this tool (or access to it) versus any other tool that can be
| self-hosted (including those that might not exist yet).
|
| Also, lets say we spend $5/mo, well for that we can host our
| own server which can easily be used for more than one purpose
| (with WireGuard now even the smallest VPS can be used to
| saturate most home links and bypass CGNAT easily). Increasing
| the monthly spending just increases the amount of
| opportunities.
|
| This of course doesn't touch the elephant in the room which
| is privacy.
|
| For the regular user privacy isn't a huge deal for these
| small services. For the average reasonable user that doesn't
| upload sensitive data, at worst it would be something like a
| personal photo being seen.
|
| On the other hand as a software developers using these tools
| is a lot more complicated. Licensing, copyright, and possible
| work contracts start to matter. If the service interfaces
| with code (like Kite or GitHub Co-pilot) then you get into a
| some serious murkiness due to the fact that you don't really
| know what they are doing with it on their end. Even the
| things like telemetry and what type of data is being sent
| back matter in corporate environments.
| lewisl9029 wrote:
| 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...
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| netik wrote:
| Ten years too early? no.
|
| They got wiped out by microsoft, github copilot, and litigation
| issues around AI provided code.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| selimnairb wrote:
| 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?
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