Kite is a startup company founded in 2014, mainly engaged in the development of artificial intelligence programming assistant of the same name, similar to the familiar GitHub Copilot. Kite initially only supported two programming languages, Python and JavaScript. At the end of 2020, Kite additionally supported programming languages ​​such as TypeScript, Java, Go, C, C#, Kotlin, etc., and the number of supported programming languages ​​rose to 13. Kite also supports 16 editors/IDEs, including VS Code, IntelliJ, Vim, Sublime Text, etc. At this point, the scope of support is higher than GitHub Copilot.

However, the biggest difference between Kite and GitHub Copilot is that Kite only performs all processing on the local machine, which has lower latency, safer, and no privacy concerns.

Recently, Kite announced on its official website that they have stopped the development of Kite and will shut down Kite. Kite founder Adam Smith said:

Thank you to everyone who uses our products, our team members and investors who make this journey possible.

Adam Smith bluntly stated that although Kite has been creating a better development experience for developers, it was mainly the following two factors that led to the final failure:

• First of all, compared to today’s GitHub Copilot, Kite has entered the market as early as 10 years ago, and the technology has no way to support their vision. Even Copilot, a programming assistant developed by Github in partnership with a large company like Open AI, still has a long way to go.
• The company assembled a world-class engineering team, but it took them 5 years from 2014 to 2019 to achieve product-market fit and grow their user base to 500,000 monthly active users with almost 0 marketing spend The size of a developer. However, none of those 500,000 developers were willing to pay to use it, and the Kite product failed to generate revenue.

Although Kite has also done a lot of customer surveys and found the turning point of the business and the new development direction, but after years of intense work and the pressure of early entrepreneurship, Adam Smith said that the team is too tired and no longer pursue this transformation, so do A decision was made to shut down.

One user on HN commented on Kite’s discontinuation: “I’m a web developer and my company pays me for JetBrains IntelliJ and I love it. But if I had to pay for it I’d use VS Code to replace it.”

Adam Smith also stated:

We made a lot of sacrifices to build Kite, we made below-market salaries and worked long hours (especially in the early years of the company). We had team members with top-notch backgrounds, and recruiters called us with offers for higher roles. But we wanted to contribute to the world in a special way and took the risk that the project might not be successful.

We took an opportunity where we could drastically speed up the development of the software, we experimented, and despite everyone’s huge efforts, the experiment didn’t work out.

While I take responsibility and learn from my failures, I have no regrets.

▲ 15 members of the Kite team (including the dog 🐶)

Today, most of Kite’s code has been open sourced on Github, including a data-driven Python type inference engine, a Python public package analyzer, desktop software, plug-ins for various editors, Github crawlers and analyzers, etc.

Project address: https://github.com/kiteco