> 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.
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.
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.
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 $45 a month, which is really decent considering you get a professional grade IDE all to yourself.
The other thing is they have to be tools I want to use. I am an outlier I am sure. I hear often "let your employer pay for it" but they don't always necessarily pay for the tools I need to use. Having my own JetBrains license grants me strong freedom.
They do pay, but they can not pay same amount as some corporation can. If you target individuals you need to find good pricing model for them. The best model - at least for me, that always attract me is pay for a year of subscription to updates. After 1y passes you can pay at lower rate to continue receiving updates for new features and bug fixes or you can continue to use the latest version before your support has expired. I'm hooked instantly to this since it brings me value without constant commitment. One year I may decide to extend one tool, the other I pay extension for other tool.
Jetbrains' pricing model is also good, they reduce price each year (until 3rd), so you get rewarded for having a long term subscription. If you break commitment you get the regular pricing and you start over.
I remember trying Kite, but I removed it once I saw the pricing. It was more expensive than Jetbrains IDEs (which are less than 2$ 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.
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.
> 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?
>> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
“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.
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.
"we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet."
"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools."
"We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough."
Sounds like you know why people didn't pay for it. If it truly did make people as productive as you claim, it would have sold like hot cross buns on a cold day.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
"we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet."
"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools."
"We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough."
So basically, everyone's fault but their own. Got it.
Edit: Also I want to say, that WE DO pay for stuff if it brings us value. Out of my pocket I pay for JetBrains, Github, Temius, and the SublimeText 4.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] LASR|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] irrational|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollofricepeas|3 years ago|reply
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 $30 or whatever regardless of their massive incomes and increased productivity that Sublime brought them.
We developers are no more altruistic than anyone else regardless of the lies we fed ourselves in the early days of FOSS, internet, bitcoin, etc.
:(
[+] [-] keyle|3 years ago|reply
Software developers very simply would rather build their own half assed solution to a problem rather than pay for a half assed solution.
Offer quality, we'll pay.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|3 years ago|reply
The other thing is they have to be tools I want to use. I am an outlier I am sure. I hear often "let your employer pay for it" but they don't always necessarily pay for the tools I need to use. Having my own JetBrains license grants me strong freedom.
[+] [-] mirzap|3 years ago|reply
Jetbrains' pricing model is also good, they reduce price each year (until 3rd), so you get rewarded for having a long term subscription. If you break commitment you get the regular pricing and you start over.
I remember trying Kite, but I removed it once I saw the pricing. It was more expensive than Jetbrains IDEs (which are less than 2$ 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.
[+] [-] sebazzz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|3 years ago|reply
Hijacking the quote...
I can't count the number of times I see well-paid developers using the Sublime Text trial.
[+] [-] spi|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] newaccount74|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] mudrockbestgirl|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fastball|3 years ago|reply
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.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[+] [-] edanm|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] analognoise|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] narag|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] codeisawesome|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComodoHacker|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] HeavyStorm|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Maxburn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elzbardico|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sroussey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lefstathiou|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwmoz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikanj|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] canadianfella|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrpt|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eloff|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] malwrar|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vessenes|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dmarlow|3 years ago|reply
"we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet."
"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools."
"We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough."
Sounds like you know why people didn't pay for it. If it truly did make people as productive as you claim, it would have sold like hot cross buns on a cold day.
[+] [-] nikisweeting|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkoubaa|3 years ago|reply
Any developer tooling company must understand this basic fact.
[+] [-] perlgeek|3 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] oxfordmale|3 years ago|reply
I do wish the Kite team all the best, and I hope they can re-use their skills in products that are commercially viable.
[+] [-] HeavyStorm|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] plgonzalezrx8|3 years ago|reply
"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools."
"We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough."
So basically, everyone's fault but their own. Got it.
Edit: Also I want to say, that WE DO pay for stuff if it brings us value. Out of my pocket I pay for JetBrains, Github, Temius, and the SublimeText 4.
[+] [-] throwthere|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fire|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] azhenley|3 years ago|reply
They seemed like a really cool team, I wish them the best.
[+] [-] blondin|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lopkeny12ko|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brandelune|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jll29|3 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] jawns|3 years ago|reply
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.