10 ms·

Kite launches line-of-code completions, goes cloudless, secures $17M in funding

173 points by adamsmith 8y ago

adamsmith 8y ago
Adam for Kite here. We learned a lot over the past year and have worked hard to build several new features to Kite based on detailed user feedback (much of which came from the HN community). We're excited to release two new features of special importance today: * Line-of-Code Completions - Kite's completions engine can now predict several tokens of code at a time, powered by the most sophisticated AI code models available. * Cloudless Processing - Kite now performs all processing locally on users' computers, instead of in the cloud. No need to upload your code to our servers. You don't even have to sign up for a Kite account. We know privacy is a big concern for users, so that's why we decided to bring Kite off the cloud. You can learn more about this decision as well as the full Kite release on our blog post, linked here. Our core belief is programmers spend too much time on repetitive work like copying and pasting from StackOverflow, fixing simple errors, and writing boilerplate code. That's why Kite uses AI to make writing code less repetitive and more fun. Speaking of fun, we've set up a playground for you to try our Line-of-Code Completions out in your browser. We hope you enjoy it! As always, Kite is free to download and use. And we no longer require user accounts now that we've moved off the cloud. If you already use Kite (thank you for your support!), you now have these features via auto-update. We're really looking forward to your feedback. The detailed feedback we've received in the past has been immensely helpful in getting us to this point. We'll be here all day to answer questions, too.
- drcongo 8y ago
  Quick question: Is it doing much differently from TabNine[1]? For me TabNine has been incredibly accurate at guessing what I'm wanting to type. [1] https://tabnine.com https://tabnine.com
  - adamsmith 8y ago
    Great question! TabNine is a different approach that uses far less semantic information than Kite. It really shines when you're talking about syntactic repetition, e.g. if you check out the screenshots on their homepage. They have a page about semantic completions, but the semantics are very shallow -- basically what attributes are on the instance you're accessing. In contrast, we've spent ~50 eng-years semantically indexing all the code on Github, building statistical type inference, and rich statistical models that use this semantic information in a very deep way. The result is that Kite can help more often, in ways that reflect a deep understanding of the semantics of the code you're writing.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - shittyadmin 8y ago
      Not to mention by pushing malware to people via IDE addons, pretty good strategy for training those datasets.
    - Drdrdrq 8y ago
      Interesting - is the model that learns from (semantically indexed) code bound by its license? One could argue it is derivative work.
      - adamsmith 8y ago
        Interesting question. I’m not a lawyer, but I presume it’s derivative enough not to be copyrighted. For example, one could argue Google’s giant n-gram corpus is derived from many copyrighted webpages.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Curious how much better your approach is versus fairly vanilla "most popular ngrams".
  - adamsmith 8y ago
    N-grams is the first thing you try when you want to statistically model code. We tried it in 2014 and the results are disappointing, if you want to do anything beyond identifying low level syntactic patterns. The intuition here is that in natural language, context is defined locally. If you want to know whether a 'they' refers to a male or female, for example, you look at the nearby text. In contrast, the flow of data and control through code is highly non-local, which is a lot of why techniques like N-grams don't work. This has been a very active area of research in academia since we started Kite in 2014. (Suggested google searches: [big code], [ml on code], etc.) All that said I don't have data on how our approach would compare to N-grams, but I'm guessing if you look at some of the academic research, you'll find that NLP techniques were abandoned, despite the early papers' focus on them.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      Thoughtful answer, thank you. People complain about HN having gone downhill...but answers like this one still pop up fairly frequently.
- hasperdi 8y ago
  Could you explain to us in details what kind of analytics data are you collecting? Also for which purposes are these collected? I am interested (and I bet more people here) in getting a comprehensive list minus the marketing BS.
  - dhung 8y ago
    Great question. We're in the midst of updating our privacy policy, but I'll give a full explanation here. It may be useful to differentiate between what data we collect and what data we don't collect in order to clear up any confusion. 1. What we collect We collect a variety of usage analytics that help us understand how you use Kite and how we can improve the product. These include: * Which editors you are using Kite with * Number of requests that the Kite Engine has handled for you * How often you use specific Kite features e.g. how many completions from Kite did you use * Size (in number of files) of codebases that you work with * Names of 3rd party Python packages that you use * Kite application resource usage (CPU and RAM) You can opt-out of sending these analytics by changing a Kite setting (https://help.kite.com/article/79-opting-out-of-usage-metrics https://help.kite.com/article/79-opting-out-of-usage-metrics). Additionally, we collect anonymized "heartbeats" that are used to make sure the Kite app is functioning properly and not crashing unexpectedly. These analytics are just simple pings with no metadata, and as mentioned, they're anonymized so that there's no way for us to trace which users they came from. We also use third party libraries (Rollbar and Crashlytics) to report errors or bugs that occur during the usage of the product. 2. What we don't collect * Contents (partial or full) of any source code file that resides on your hard drive * Information (i.e. file paths) about your file system hierarchy * Any indices of your code produced by the Kite Engine to power our features - these all stay local to your hard drive
    - save_ferris 8y ago
      How do you guys plan on monetizing this? This list of analytics seems fine at a quick glance, but I'm concerned that there's not a transparent path to profitability here. Just like any other service, there's no guarantee that you won't start collecting snippets of source code or other metadata to start selling once the VC's start applying pressure to generate income. What's your strategy?
- projectramo 8y ago
  Thanks for moving it off the cloud and making it local. That is a huge step towards making us comfortable with the potential privacy aspects. Do you collect any information? And how will you make money? (I want you to be around, pay staff, do well etc)
- mattnewport 8y ago
  > Our core belief is programmers spend too much time on repetitive work like copying and pasting from StackOverflow, fixing simple errors, and writing boilerplate code. Do you have data backing this core belief up or is it just an intuition? I don't feel any of these things are problems I need a solution for. Maybe this depends on the type of programming someone does or the language they use but as a working programmer this is not a compelling sales pitch to me. You're offering solutions to problems I don't have. They're also not problems that I see to any great extent in junior programmers who report to me.
  - adamsmith 8y ago
    On an intuitive level, I would guess there are many, many developers debugging a "you forgot to cast your int to a string" error message as I'm writing this. More concretely, the StackOverflow thread for "Parsing values from a JSON file?" has almost 3 million views. We take this as evidence that programming is repetitive. (We should probably clarify that when we say 'repetitive' we mean on a global scale, not an individual scale.)
    - mattnewport 8y ago
      > I would guess there are many, many developers debugging a "you forgot to cast your int to a string" error message as I'm writing this. I've always avoided dynamically typed languages because of these types of issues so I guess this seems like a solved problem to me - just use a statically typed language. Clearly there are many people who are using dynamically typed languages for whatever reason though so I can see how better tooling might be useful to them. > More concretely, the StackOverflow thread for "Parsing values from a JSON file?" has almost 3 million views. I certainly make use of Stack Overflow, I was taking issue with the idea that significant time is spent copying and pasting code from the site though. I often refer to it to answer a programming related question but I almost never then copy and paste code. I'm looking for a pointer to a library or API, to understand some confusing or poorly documented behavior or for a workaround to a bug etc. and getting an answer to my question rarely leads to copying and pasting code in my experience.
- cjhanks 8y ago
  "Our core belief is programmers spend too much time on repetitive work like copying and pasting from StackOverflow, fixing simple errors, and writing boilerplate code." Sounds like you will likely be introducing bugs into people's code. Or at the very least, regressing code quality towards the mean.
  - adamsmith 8y ago
    Kite aside, I think both of these things will happen as developers adopt these technologies. We're seeing similar effects with autocorrect on your phone and self driving cars (i.e. there will still be accidents, and they tend to drive more slowly), but on balance these technologies are positive.
    - thecatspaw 8y ago
      For me autocompletion is the second thing I turn off on a phone (right after vibrate on touch). There is nothing more annoying than writing a word correctly, and autocomplete "fixing" it, just because it was slang word, or a word in another language because I forgot the english word in that moment.
      - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
        A lot of that is because the minimal phone keyboard doesn't give you a good UI to accept or decline a suggested autocompletion. With a keyboard and mouse and large monitor, you can display the completion prompt and let the user select or ignore from the various options with Ctrl-Space or similar. When "Select the first autocomplete over what I typed" is the default behavior, yeah, that sucks. I often end up using the "key combo" Space,Backspace,Space to accept the autocomplete on my phone. But I definitely see utility in offering a correction for, eg. 'DateTime.Format("yyyy-mm-dd" -> yyyy-MM-dd' or any of the million other idioms that we have to remember or look up. What I don't understand is how Kite can offer useful local-only suggestions - Is the default dictionary that comes with it preloaded with a million lines of open source, or is it literally just my code being suggested?
  - 8y ago
- sneak 8y ago
  Here’s some feedback: pretending you’re grateful for users screaming at you for breaching their trust is not a good way to regain that trust. > If you're already a user, Kite has been auto-updated and is now working locally without sending code to the cloud. If you previously uploaded code to our servers, you can remove your data via our web portal. > We're grateful to our users for helping us reach this point. Why aren’t you scrubbing all surreptitiously uploaded data proactively? Why are you pretending you are glad you got caught doing sketchy things? You’re going to have to do a lot better than that to convince us that your company suddenly operates with integrity now simply because you got caught.
- bitL 8y ago
  This is excellent! Thanks for allowing me to play with it! Did you publish any papers on how you approach intelligent code completion at Kite (the parts you can make public or just rough areas I should look into? I understand you have many emerging competitors). Thanks!
  - adamsmith 8y ago
    Yes, this may be a good starting point — https://github.com/src-d/awesome-machine-learning-on-source-code https://github.com/src-d/awesome-machine-learning-on-source-... Thanks for checking it out!
aliswe 8y ago
How come its only for Python?
- tyingq 8y ago
  Looks like the plan is to support more than Python: https://kite.com/letmeknow https://kite.com/letmeknow
  - adamsmith 8y ago
    Yes, because we use deeply semantic information about code there is some engineering work to build support for other languages. So we took the approach of focusing on one demographic (Python developers) and making them really happy. We think we've reached that point, so we're excited to begin looking at how we can expand our reach. Stay tuned!
    - erichurkman 8y ago
      Does "really happy" include injecting your ads into our editors by hijacking open source projects? Because that makes me really unhappy.
      - AlexMoffat 8y ago
        Ah yes, now I remember where I'd heard about kite.
        aliswe 8y ago
        Dunno if I should enter this seemingly infected argument, but I only now read up a bit on it: https://qz.com/1043614/this-startup-learned-the-hard-way-that-you-do-not-piss-off-open-source-programmers/ https://qz.com/1043614/this-startup-learned-the-hard-way-tha... While I agree with your sentiment that the changes were intrusive, from the article they weren't actually ads in the strict sense. No Ugg Boots or Rolex Replicas. They were helpful links to knowledge articles or documentation, from what I gather. Could be wrong though. That's gotta be a tough position to be in, having raised ~ a lot of money and having the pressure to do a suboptimal move to please the investors.
bfirsh 8y ago
To those thinking of using this service, you might want to read this first: https://theoutline.com/post/1953/how-a-vc-funded-company-is-undermining-the-open-source-community?zd=1&zi=kieikhri https://theoutline.com/post/1953/how-a-vc-funded-company-is-... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653
- ehsankia 8y ago
  From what I remember the biggest criticism was that they uploaded your code to the cloud, but if you read this, they say that it's now done entirely locally. So honest question, what would the risks be at this point?
  - jchw 8y ago
    What should compel anyone to trust them in the first place? Seems like the balls in their court to figure out how to regain trust. edit: >When we started Kite, we were excited about the possible benefits of internet-connected programming. We were also well aware of the privacy and security concerns some people would have. So their approach is going to continue being to ignore what they did and pretend they're cool now. Alright, well you can download the maybe-malware if you want, I'll stay as far away as I can from this company myself.
    - neurobashing 8y ago
      I feel like the answer to your question is implicitly that there is nothing they can do. they're "cancelled". Even a personal apology (with supporting documentation) would be ignored, since you don't care about the product anyway. Is this true? I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with you, they have to regain trust, but at some point you have to be open to it. Trust but verify.
      - Drdrdrq 8y ago
        >...but at some point you have to be open to it. Well no, we don't. Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose, and almost impossible to regain. If the concept is sound then there will be others.
kozikow 8y ago
How come JetBrains didn't raise bazillion VC dollars, while their code completion and tools like refactoring are the best option for most popular programming languages?
- flipp3r 8y ago
  They've even put Jetbrains' IDE at the bottom of the "Staircase of intelligence" in their little infographic... I'm not sure if developers familiar with those tools can take this company seriously (especially given what they've done previously.) I wonder what their look on say, IntelliJ, is.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago
    My primary experience is with Intellij, though most of their IDE's behave similarly. Im not sure what advantage I'd get with kite. Often I'd start using a class in the code, and then ask intelliJ to import it, rather than going to the top, and use the autocomplete tool. It can do patterns as well, even custom defined ones, with default values (https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-live-templates.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-live-templates.htm...)
- adamsmith 8y ago
  Jetbrains has put a lot of engineering effort into building really great tools. They're really wonderful! They took more of the Atlassian path of no/low-VC and slower organic growth starting in the early 2000's, so they've had a lot of time to build the "snowball" effect.
- scotu 8y ago
  maybe they don't want it. VC money comes with strings attached
- petra 8y ago
  JetBrains are from Russia. It's harder for them to raise VC because of that.
  - 8y ago
FlyingLawnmower 8y ago
Can I ask what your business model or pathway to monetization is? Thanks for making it run locally, I can finally give it a real try now.
- adamsmith 8y ago
  We'll monetize through the enterprises. We've had lots of conversations with larger companies and it's clear that engineering time is really precious to them, as is shipping faster. We're not really sure how to mechanize charging enterprises yet. When we had a freemium offering we didn't like that e.g. students didn't get all the features. Github had an elegant approach with their approach of charging for private repos. Maybe Kite is paid if you're working in a repo that's not open source and has lots of active contributors. Would love any ideas!
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    You've raised millions and you're spitballing monetization ideas on an internet forum? Look, I'm all for second chances here. The past behavior of this company doesn't concern me as much as the pretty clear lack of strategy around how you plan to make money. So this is what I've gathered so far (and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this): - free product (based on the website) - no serious mention of enterprise pricing or support (based again on the website) - a promise in your TOS not to collect sensitive data (which almost all companies tend to modify, let's be honest) - solicitation of monetization ideas on an internet forum by the CEO, having raised millions from VCs This sounds like a product I'd stay away from if I cared about data collection. Can you quantify how much money you're saving developers or companies who use this?
orliesaurus 8y ago
Can you also add a feature where my code is analyzed by a community/individuals for $/month if I wish to submit it? Sometimes as a dev, you get stuck or need to do refactoring & need help. Glitch has a community feature like that - but it would be amazing to build a team of experts paid to unstuck fellow devs - on top of a tool like kite; esp because you can then use that data for building a better suggestion engine.
- projectramo 8y ago
  What a great idea. That could be a tool/app in its own right compatible with whatever IDE. Codementor meets github. Edit: Totally forgot to mention, exercism is a bit like this but not with your own custom code. Maybe codementor meets exercism meets github.
  - orliesaurus 8y ago
    Yep, I hope someone can make it a reality!
- csteubs 8y ago
  I've used a tool similar to what you've described here called https://www.pullrequest.com/ https://www.pullrequest.com/ for code review, though it's fairly new IIRC and not cheap.
  - orliesaurus 8y ago
    AFAIK that's pretty enterprisey
  - make3 8y ago
    200$/h for the cheapest option O.o
sandGorgon 8y ago
> Kite doesn't support Linux yet, but coming very soon. Quick suggestion - can you support a Docker based install ? Vscode now support remote debugging through docker, etc. I'm not sure about your architecture, but im wondering if this isnt something that you can do
- rootlocus 8y ago
  How would that work? Docker is based on container technology inside the linux kernel. Docker on mac and windows uses virtual machines to provide a linux kernel. If Kite doesn't support linux, how would their technlogy work inside a container, which is an isolated linux environment?
  - sandGorgon 8y ago
    well Kite's server side is presumably linux (most people's are). Pretty sure that they had to re-engineer specifically for Windows and OSX on their native APIs. Instead, only engineer for Linux and make it available through Docker on all platforms. Since VSCode exposes hooks to interact with Docker anyway, this might make more long term sense.
foobiekr 8y ago
I acknowledge that this will be unpopular, but ... Those of us who are fossil grumpuses already think IDEs often allow people to write code they don’t think enough about with the idea that issues will be caught by someone else in code review. This, at least, is what I’ve observed over the last few years. Something that writes the code for people and people basically “code” by doing a series of micro-code-reviews seems really crazy to me for any application that isn’t just fluff. Just look at what autocorrect has done to average incorrect-words-per-sentence. One of the problems with predictive text generation in general is that in isolation the output can seem very sensible even if it’s gibberish. So as an IDE skeptic in general, I’d be very curious to try this tool out, if only to see how they deal with that. [I spent years and years using VC++ and other tools and it was actually this feeling of not really knowing anything that drove me away from it. Etags/Cscope/Grey/actually-reading-code was what I replaced it with..]
- yorwba 8y ago
  > Just look at what autocorrect has done to average incorrect-words-per-sentence. The problem with autocorrect is that it changes what you've written after the fact, without user input. This on the other hand is autocomplete, so if it suggests gibberish, you still need to explicitly accept it. If you do that, chances are you would've written gibberish in the first place.
- imglorp 8y ago
  What's Grey?
  - foobiekr 8y ago
    Autocorrected grep.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  As pointed above by the other comment, autocorrect's issue is that it sometimes forces a correction on you (unless you disable that). On the other hand, there are many words I could never dream of spelling correctly without looking up, but that I know get perfectly. Sadly, you don't notice those, but only notice it when it goes wrong. Similarly, imagine going to type a common piece of code such as `if __name__ == '__main__':` or `def __init__(self):` at the start of a class, and have it automatically suggested. Obviously you can manually create snippets for each one of these, but that's much more effort. I can see an interface similar to Gmail's new smart completion, or fish shell, that just shows you a suggestion in the background. https://asciinema.org/a/37390 https://asciinema.org/a/37390
romeisendcoming 8y ago
Seemed lackluster to me. Adding code in a literally defined data structure failed to complete anything. with open() as f: ll = [f.(no help from here on out)]
blunte 8y ago
No way. I already spend nearly as much time double checking code completion as I save being able to tab my way thru a line of new code. Also, anyone pasting most of their code from SO is doomed already, and smart code completion isn't going to make them successful. Is this Grammarly for "programmers"?
bretpiatt 8y ago
If anyone from Kite here readying your site fails to load with Brave browser (on Windows 10) with Shields Up. Both the homepage and the blog post. "Huh... that's weird Something unexpected occurred. We'll investigate what happened"
mesozoic 8y ago
So very impressive if you want to type exactly what they recommend in the demo app. And what's the copyright on that auto completed code?
cwkoss 8y ago
Demo doesn't seem to work.
hyperpallium 8y ago
> Line-of-Code Completions - Kite's completions engine can now predict several tokens of code at a time I can predict several weeks of stock prices... not very well. Shannon had an estimation method: ask people to guess the next letter in text, to find its information content. (Assuming people have a perfect model of text - probably, today, with billions of samples, machines might be better?). Could do this with program text, to bound the benefit. loc completion is a great idea, might work well with idioms, especially if it can figure out the likely parameterization (e.g. in a for(;;) loop). I reckon this approach will no where near realize its promise... but will serendipitiously reveal unexpected adjacent benefits. Also reminds me of that joke tool that automatically finds and pastes Stackoverflow code.
hartator 8y ago
How is that different than tab9? From what I remember it’s one guy and it’s already working for VSCode and Sublime.
ken 8y ago
In all my years programming, there's been only one feature that I've seen that I consider The Killer Feature of Autocomplete, and I've only seen it in one editor: Emacs. I don't want to complete with all the other code everybody else in the world has written. I want to complete with the words I wrote in a comment 3 lines ago. Or my README I've got open in another window. Or the JSON config file I was editing. That's my litmus test: can it autocomplete from all my other text? Kite can't. I played with this online demo, and I actually found it pretty frustrating. It kept trying to replace what I was writing with snippets that other people, apparently, had written. I guess that could be useful when trying out a new library, but the rest of the time, it's just going to get in my way.
jakecopp 8y ago
Is there any way of using Kite in Sublime Text with Vintage mode, so that Kite doesn't capture the Esc keypress? It makes Vintage mode unusable.

173 points by adamsmith 8y ago

Adam for Kite here. We learned a lot over the past year and have worked hard to build several new features to Kite based on detailed user feedback (much of which came from the HN community). We're excited to release two new features of special importance today: * Line-of-Code Completions - Kite's completions engine can now predict several tokens of code at a time, powered by the most sophisticated AI code models available. * Cloudless Processing - Kite now performs all processing locally on users' computers, instead of in the cloud. No need to upload your code to our servers. You don't even have to sign up for a Kite account. We know privacy is a big concern for users, so that's why we decided to bring Kite off the cloud. You can learn more about this decision as well as the full Kite release on our blog post, linked here. Our core belief is programmers spend too much time on repetitive work like copying and pasting from StackOverflow, fixing simple errors, and writing boilerplate code. That's why Kite uses AI to make writing code less repetitive and more fun. Speaking of fun, we've set up a playground for you to try our Line-of-Code Completions out in your browser. We hope you enjoy it! As always, Kite is free to download and use. And we no longer require user accounts now that we've moved off the cloud. If you already use Kite (thank you for your support!), you now have these features via auto-update. We're really looking forward to your feedback. The detailed feedback we've received in the past has been immensely helpful in getting us to this point. We'll be here all day to answer questions, too.

drcongo 8y ago
Quick question: Is it doing much differently from TabNine[1]? For me TabNine has been incredibly accurate at guessing what I'm wanting to type. [1] https://tabnine.com https://tabnine.com
- adamsmith 8y ago
  Great question! TabNine is a different approach that uses far less semantic information than Kite. It really shines when you're talking about syntactic repetition, e.g. if you check out the screenshots on their homepage. They have a page about semantic completions, but the semantics are very shallow -- basically what attributes are on the instance you're accessing. In contrast, we've spent ~50 eng-years semantically indexing all the code on Github, building statistical type inference, and rich statistical models that use this semantic information in a very deep way. The result is that Kite can help more often, in ways that reflect a deep understanding of the semantics of the code you're writing.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    Not to mention by pushing malware to people via IDE addons, pretty good strategy for training those datasets.
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    Interesting - is the model that learns from (semantically indexed) code bound by its license? One could argue it is derivative work.
    - adamsmith 8y ago
      Interesting question. I’m not a lawyer, but I presume it’s derivative enough not to be copyrighted. For example, one could argue Google’s giant n-gram corpus is derived from many copyrighted webpages.
tyingq 8y ago
Curious how much better your approach is versus fairly vanilla "most popular ngrams".
- adamsmith 8y ago
  N-grams is the first thing you try when you want to statistically model code. We tried it in 2014 and the results are disappointing, if you want to do anything beyond identifying low level syntactic patterns. The intuition here is that in natural language, context is defined locally. If you want to know whether a 'they' refers to a male or female, for example, you look at the nearby text. In contrast, the flow of data and control through code is highly non-local, which is a lot of why techniques like N-grams don't work. This has been a very active area of research in academia since we started Kite in 2014. (Suggested google searches: [big code], [ml on code], etc.) All that said I don't have data on how our approach would compare to N-grams, but I'm guessing if you look at some of the academic research, you'll find that NLP techniques were abandoned, despite the early papers' focus on them.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Thoughtful answer, thank you. People complain about HN having gone downhill...but answers like this one still pop up fairly frequently.
hasperdi 8y ago
Could you explain to us in details what kind of analytics data are you collecting? Also for which purposes are these collected? I am interested (and I bet more people here) in getting a comprehensive list minus the marketing BS.
- dhung 8y ago
  Great question. We're in the midst of updating our privacy policy, but I'll give a full explanation here. It may be useful to differentiate between what data we collect and what data we don't collect in order to clear up any confusion. 1. What we collect We collect a variety of usage analytics that help us understand how you use Kite and how we can improve the product. These include: * Which editors you are using Kite with * Number of requests that the Kite Engine has handled for you * How often you use specific Kite features e.g. how many completions from Kite did you use * Size (in number of files) of codebases that you work with * Names of 3rd party Python packages that you use * Kite application resource usage (CPU and RAM) You can opt-out of sending these analytics by changing a Kite setting (https://help.kite.com/article/79-opting-out-of-usage-metrics https://help.kite.com/article/79-opting-out-of-usage-metrics). Additionally, we collect anonymized "heartbeats" that are used to make sure the Kite app is functioning properly and not crashing unexpectedly. These analytics are just simple pings with no metadata, and as mentioned, they're anonymized so that there's no way for us to trace which users they came from. We also use third party libraries (Rollbar and Crashlytics) to report errors or bugs that occur during the usage of the product. 2. What we don't collect * Contents (partial or full) of any source code file that resides on your hard drive * Information (i.e. file paths) about your file system hierarchy * Any indices of your code produced by the Kite Engine to power our features - these all stay local to your hard drive
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    How do you guys plan on monetizing this? This list of analytics seems fine at a quick glance, but I'm concerned that there's not a transparent path to profitability here. Just like any other service, there's no guarantee that you won't start collecting snippets of source code or other metadata to start selling once the VC's start applying pressure to generate income. What's your strategy?
projectramo 8y ago
Thanks for moving it off the cloud and making it local. That is a huge step towards making us comfortable with the potential privacy aspects. Do you collect any information? And how will you make money? (I want you to be around, pay staff, do well etc)
mattnewport 8y ago
> Our core belief is programmers spend too much time on repetitive work like copying and pasting from StackOverflow, fixing simple errors, and writing boilerplate code. Do you have data backing this core belief up or is it just an intuition? I don't feel any of these things are problems I need a solution for. Maybe this depends on the type of programming someone does or the language they use but as a working programmer this is not a compelling sales pitch to me. You're offering solutions to problems I don't have. They're also not problems that I see to any great extent in junior programmers who report to me.
- adamsmith 8y ago
  On an intuitive level, I would guess there are many, many developers debugging a "you forgot to cast your int to a string" error message as I'm writing this. More concretely, the StackOverflow thread for "Parsing values from a JSON file?" has almost 3 million views. We take this as evidence that programming is repetitive. (We should probably clarify that when we say 'repetitive' we mean on a global scale, not an individual scale.)
  - mattnewport 8y ago
    > I would guess there are many, many developers debugging a "you forgot to cast your int to a string" error message as I'm writing this. I've always avoided dynamically typed languages because of these types of issues so I guess this seems like a solved problem to me - just use a statically typed language. Clearly there are many people who are using dynamically typed languages for whatever reason though so I can see how better tooling might be useful to them. > More concretely, the StackOverflow thread for "Parsing values from a JSON file?" has almost 3 million views. I certainly make use of Stack Overflow, I was taking issue with the idea that significant time is spent copying and pasting code from the site though. I often refer to it to answer a programming related question but I almost never then copy and paste code. I'm looking for a pointer to a library or API, to understand some confusing or poorly documented behavior or for a workaround to a bug etc. and getting an answer to my question rarely leads to copying and pasting code in my experience.
cjhanks 8y ago
"Our core belief is programmers spend too much time on repetitive work like copying and pasting from StackOverflow, fixing simple errors, and writing boilerplate code." Sounds like you will likely be introducing bugs into people's code. Or at the very least, regressing code quality towards the mean.
- adamsmith 8y ago
  Kite aside, I think both of these things will happen as developers adopt these technologies. We're seeing similar effects with autocorrect on your phone and self driving cars (i.e. there will still be accidents, and they tend to drive more slowly), but on balance these technologies are positive.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago
    For me autocompletion is the second thing I turn off on a phone (right after vibrate on touch). There is nothing more annoying than writing a word correctly, and autocomplete "fixing" it, just because it was slang word, or a word in another language because I forgot the english word in that moment.
    - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
      A lot of that is because the minimal phone keyboard doesn't give you a good UI to accept or decline a suggested autocompletion. With a keyboard and mouse and large monitor, you can display the completion prompt and let the user select or ignore from the various options with Ctrl-Space or similar. When "Select the first autocomplete over what I typed" is the default behavior, yeah, that sucks. I often end up using the "key combo" Space,Backspace,Space to accept the autocomplete on my phone. But I definitely see utility in offering a correction for, eg. 'DateTime.Format("yyyy-mm-dd" -> yyyy-MM-dd' or any of the million other idioms that we have to remember or look up. What I don't understand is how Kite can offer useful local-only suggestions - Is the default dictionary that comes with it preloaded with a million lines of open source, or is it literally just my code being suggested?
- 8y ago
sneak 8y ago
Here’s some feedback: pretending you’re grateful for users screaming at you for breaching their trust is not a good way to regain that trust. > If you're already a user, Kite has been auto-updated and is now working locally without sending code to the cloud. If you previously uploaded code to our servers, you can remove your data via our web portal. > We're grateful to our users for helping us reach this point. Why aren’t you scrubbing all surreptitiously uploaded data proactively? Why are you pretending you are glad you got caught doing sketchy things? You’re going to have to do a lot better than that to convince us that your company suddenly operates with integrity now simply because you got caught.
bitL 8y ago
This is excellent! Thanks for allowing me to play with it! Did you publish any papers on how you approach intelligent code completion at Kite (the parts you can make public or just rough areas I should look into? I understand you have many emerging competitors). Thanks!
- adamsmith 8y ago
  Yes, this may be a good starting point — https://github.com/src-d/awesome-machine-learning-on-source-code https://github.com/src-d/awesome-machine-learning-on-source-... Thanks for checking it out!

aliswe 8y ago

How come its only for Python?

tyingq 8y ago
Looks like the plan is to support more than Python: https://kite.com/letmeknow https://kite.com/letmeknow
- adamsmith 8y ago
  Yes, because we use deeply semantic information about code there is some engineering work to build support for other languages. So we took the approach of focusing on one demographic (Python developers) and making them really happy. We think we've reached that point, so we're excited to begin looking at how we can expand our reach. Stay tuned!
  - erichurkman 8y ago
    Does "really happy" include injecting your ads into our editors by hijacking open source projects? Because that makes me really unhappy.
    - AlexMoffat 8y ago
      Ah yes, now I remember where I'd heard about kite.
      - aliswe 8y ago
        Dunno if I should enter this seemingly infected argument, but I only now read up a bit on it: https://qz.com/1043614/this-startup-learned-the-hard-way-that-you-do-not-piss-off-open-source-programmers/ https://qz.com/1043614/this-startup-learned-the-hard-way-tha... While I agree with your sentiment that the changes were intrusive, from the article they weren't actually ads in the strict sense. No Ugg Boots or Rolex Replicas. They were helpful links to knowledge articles or documentation, from what I gather. Could be wrong though. That's gotta be a tough position to be in, having raised ~ a lot of money and having the pressure to do a suboptimal move to please the investors.

bfirsh 8y ago

To those thinking of using this service, you might want to read this first: https://theoutline.com/post/1953/how-a-vc-funded-company-is-undermining-the-open-source-community?zd=1&zi=kieikhri https://theoutline.com/post/1953/how-a-vc-funded-company-is-... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653

ehsankia 8y ago
From what I remember the biggest criticism was that they uploaded your code to the cloud, but if you read this, they say that it's now done entirely locally. So honest question, what would the risks be at this point?
- jchw 8y ago
  What should compel anyone to trust them in the first place? Seems like the balls in their court to figure out how to regain trust. edit: >When we started Kite, we were excited about the possible benefits of internet-connected programming. We were also well aware of the privacy and security concerns some people would have. So their approach is going to continue being to ignore what they did and pretend they're cool now. Alright, well you can download the maybe-malware if you want, I'll stay as far away as I can from this company myself.
  - neurobashing 8y ago
    I feel like the answer to your question is implicitly that there is nothing they can do. they're "cancelled". Even a personal apology (with supporting documentation) would be ignored, since you don't care about the product anyway. Is this true? I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with you, they have to regain trust, but at some point you have to be open to it. Trust but verify.
    - Drdrdrq 8y ago
      >...but at some point you have to be open to it. Well no, we don't. Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose, and almost impossible to regain. If the concept is sound then there will be others.

kozikow 8y ago

How come JetBrains didn't raise bazillion VC dollars, while their code completion and tools like refactoring are the best option for most popular programming languages?

flipp3r 8y ago
They've even put Jetbrains' IDE at the bottom of the "Staircase of intelligence" in their little infographic... I'm not sure if developers familiar with those tools can take this company seriously (especially given what they've done previously.) I wonder what their look on say, IntelliJ, is.
- thecatspaw 8y ago
  My primary experience is with Intellij, though most of their IDE's behave similarly. Im not sure what advantage I'd get with kite. Often I'd start using a class in the code, and then ask intelliJ to import it, rather than going to the top, and use the autocomplete tool. It can do patterns as well, even custom defined ones, with default values (https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-live-templates.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-live-templates.htm...)
adamsmith 8y ago
Jetbrains has put a lot of engineering effort into building really great tools. They're really wonderful! They took more of the Atlassian path of no/low-VC and slower organic growth starting in the early 2000's, so they've had a lot of time to build the "snowball" effect.
scotu 8y ago
maybe they don't want it. VC money comes with strings attached
petra 8y ago
JetBrains are from Russia. It's harder for them to raise VC because of that.
- 8y ago

FlyingLawnmower 8y ago

Can I ask what your business model or pathway to monetization is? Thanks for making it run locally, I can finally give it a real try now.

adamsmith 8y ago
We'll monetize through the enterprises. We've had lots of conversations with larger companies and it's clear that engineering time is really precious to them, as is shipping faster. We're not really sure how to mechanize charging enterprises yet. When we had a freemium offering we didn't like that e.g. students didn't get all the features. Github had an elegant approach with their approach of charging for private repos. Maybe Kite is paid if you're working in a repo that's not open source and has lots of active contributors. Would love any ideas!
- save_ferris 8y ago
  You've raised millions and you're spitballing monetization ideas on an internet forum? Look, I'm all for second chances here. The past behavior of this company doesn't concern me as much as the pretty clear lack of strategy around how you plan to make money. So this is what I've gathered so far (and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this): - free product (based on the website) - no serious mention of enterprise pricing or support (based again on the website) - a promise in your TOS not to collect sensitive data (which almost all companies tend to modify, let's be honest) - solicitation of monetization ideas on an internet forum by the CEO, having raised millions from VCs This sounds like a product I'd stay away from if I cared about data collection. Can you quantify how much money you're saving developers or companies who use this?

orliesaurus 8y ago

Can you also add a feature where my code is analyzed by a community/individuals for $/month if I wish to submit it? Sometimes as a dev, you get stuck or need to do refactoring & need help. Glitch has a community feature like that - but it would be amazing to build a team of experts paid to unstuck fellow devs - on top of a tool like kite; esp because you can then use that data for building a better suggestion engine.

projectramo 8y ago
What a great idea. That could be a tool/app in its own right compatible with whatever IDE. Codementor meets github. Edit: Totally forgot to mention, exercism is a bit like this but not with your own custom code. Maybe codementor meets exercism meets github.
- orliesaurus 8y ago
  Yep, I hope someone can make it a reality!
csteubs 8y ago
I've used a tool similar to what you've described here called https://www.pullrequest.com/ https://www.pullrequest.com/ for code review, though it's fairly new IIRC and not cheap.
- orliesaurus 8y ago
  AFAIK that's pretty enterprisey
- make3 8y ago
  200$/h for the cheapest option O.o

sandGorgon 8y ago

> Kite doesn't support Linux yet, but coming very soon. Quick suggestion - can you support a Docker based install ? Vscode now support remote debugging through docker, etc. I'm not sure about your architecture, but im wondering if this isnt something that you can do

rootlocus 8y ago
How would that work? Docker is based on container technology inside the linux kernel. Docker on mac and windows uses virtual machines to provide a linux kernel. If Kite doesn't support linux, how would their technlogy work inside a container, which is an isolated linux environment?
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  well Kite's server side is presumably linux (most people's are). Pretty sure that they had to re-engineer specifically for Windows and OSX on their native APIs. Instead, only engineer for Linux and make it available through Docker on all platforms. Since VSCode exposes hooks to interact with Docker anyway, this might make more long term sense.

foobiekr 8y ago

I acknowledge that this will be unpopular, but ... Those of us who are fossil grumpuses already think IDEs often allow people to write code they don’t think enough about with the idea that issues will be caught by someone else in code review. This, at least, is what I’ve observed over the last few years. Something that writes the code for people and people basically “code” by doing a series of micro-code-reviews seems really crazy to me for any application that isn’t just fluff. Just look at what autocorrect has done to average incorrect-words-per-sentence. One of the problems with predictive text generation in general is that in isolation the output can seem very sensible even if it’s gibberish. So as an IDE skeptic in general, I’d be very curious to try this tool out, if only to see how they deal with that. [I spent years and years using VC++ and other tools and it was actually this feeling of not really knowing anything that drove me away from it. Etags/Cscope/Grey/actually-reading-code was what I replaced it with..]

yorwba 8y ago
> Just look at what autocorrect has done to average incorrect-words-per-sentence. The problem with autocorrect is that it changes what you've written after the fact, without user input. This on the other hand is autocomplete, so if it suggests gibberish, you still need to explicitly accept it. If you do that, chances are you would've written gibberish in the first place.
imglorp 8y ago
What's Grey?
- foobiekr 8y ago
  Autocorrected grep.
ehsankia 8y ago
As pointed above by the other comment, autocorrect's issue is that it sometimes forces a correction on you (unless you disable that). On the other hand, there are many words I could never dream of spelling correctly without looking up, but that I know get perfectly. Sadly, you don't notice those, but only notice it when it goes wrong. Similarly, imagine going to type a common piece of code such as `if __name__ == '__main__':` or `def __init__(self):` at the start of a class, and have it automatically suggested. Obviously you can manually create snippets for each one of these, but that's much more effort. I can see an interface similar to Gmail's new smart completion, or fish shell, that just shows you a suggestion in the background. https://asciinema.org/a/37390 https://asciinema.org/a/37390

romeisendcoming 8y ago

Seemed lackluster to me. Adding code in a literally defined data structure failed to complete anything. with open() as f: ll = [f.(no help from here on out)]

blunte 8y ago

No way. I already spend nearly as much time double checking code completion as I save being able to tab my way thru a line of new code. Also, anyone pasting most of their code from SO is doomed already, and smart code completion isn't going to make them successful. Is this Grammarly for "programmers"?

bretpiatt 8y ago

If anyone from Kite here readying your site fails to load with Brave browser (on Windows 10) with Shields Up. Both the homepage and the blog post. "Huh... that's weird Something unexpected occurred. We'll investigate what happened"

mesozoic 8y ago

So very impressive if you want to type exactly what they recommend in the demo app. And what's the copyright on that auto completed code?

cwkoss 8y ago

Demo doesn't seem to work.

hyperpallium 8y ago

> Line-of-Code Completions - Kite's completions engine can now predict several tokens of code at a time I can predict several weeks of stock prices... not very well. Shannon had an estimation method: ask people to guess the next letter in text, to find its information content. (Assuming people have a perfect model of text - probably, today, with billions of samples, machines might be better?). Could do this with program text, to bound the benefit. loc completion is a great idea, might work well with idioms, especially if it can figure out the likely parameterization (e.g. in a for(;;) loop). I reckon this approach will no where near realize its promise... but will serendipitiously reveal unexpected adjacent benefits. Also reminds me of that joke tool that automatically finds and pastes Stackoverflow code.

hartator 8y ago

How is that different than tab9? From what I remember it’s one guy and it’s already working for VSCode and Sublime.

ken 8y ago

In all my years programming, there's been only one feature that I've seen that I consider The Killer Feature of Autocomplete, and I've only seen it in one editor: Emacs. I don't want to complete with all the other code everybody else in the world has written. I want to complete with the words I wrote in a comment 3 lines ago. Or my README I've got open in another window. Or the JSON config file I was editing. That's my litmus test: can it autocomplete from all my other text? Kite can't. I played with this online demo, and I actually found it pretty frustrating. It kept trying to replace what I was writing with snippets that other people, apparently, had written. I guess that could be useful when trying out a new library, but the rest of the time, it's just going to get in my way.

jakecopp 8y ago

Is there any way of using Kite in Sublime Text with Vintage mode, so that Kite doesn't capture the Esc keypress? It makes Vintage mode unusable.