Kite
An early AI-powered code completion tool belonging to the category of traditional code completion utilities, based on context-aware autocomplete technology.
Timeline (last 90 days)
In November 2022, the AI coding assistant Kite announced it was shutting down, with roughly 500,000 monthly active users at the time.
Kite founder Adam Smith's farewell letter received over 1,000 points and 528 comments on Hacker News.
Kite was founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Adam Smith, who had previously founded the Outlook plugin Xobni.
It took Kite from 2014 to 2019 to produce a shippable product, which ran locally and was pitched on low latency, security and privacy.
The first reason for failure given in Kite's farewell letter is that the most advanced models do not understand the structure of code, such as non-local context.
The second reason for failure given in Kite's farewell letter is that individual developers do not pay for tools, but engineering managers are willing to pay for discrete new capabilities.
Kite open-sourced most of its code under the BSD-3-Clause license, keeping the kiteco-public repository, which includes a Go parser for Python, type inference and a GPT-2-based completion model, among other things.
All Facts (7)
It took Kite from 2014 to 2019 to produce a shippable product, which ran locally and was pitched on low latency, security and privacy.
50%UnverifiedKite founder Adam Smith's farewell letter received over 1,000 points and 528 comments on Hacker News.
50%UnverifiedKite was founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Adam Smith, who had previously founded the Outlook plugin Xobni.
50%UnverifiedKite open-sourced most of its code under the BSD-3-Clause license, keeping the kiteco-public repository, which includes a Go parser for Python, type inference and a GPT-2-based completion model, among other things.
50%UnverifiedThe first reason for failure given in Kite's farewell letter is that the most advanced models do not understand the structure of code, such as non-local context.
50%UnverifiedThe second reason for failure given in Kite's farewell letter is that individual developers do not pay for tools, but engineering managers are willing to pay for discrete new capabilities.
50%UnverifiedIn November 2022, the AI coding assistant Kite announced it was shutting down, with roughly 500,000 monthly active users at the time.
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