from Hacker News

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

by adamsmith on 1/28/19, 3:18 PM with 86 comments

• by adamsmith on 1/28/19, 3:30 PM

  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.

• by bfirsh on 1/28/19, 5:17 PM

  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-...

  Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653

• by kozikow on 1/28/19, 5:42 PM

  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?

• by foobiekr on 1/28/19, 6:15 PM

  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..]

• by ken on 1/29/19, 6:28 AM

  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.

• by FlyingLawnmower on 1/28/19, 5:43 PM

  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.

• by hyperpallium on 1/29/19, 1:48 AM

  > 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.

• by orliesaurus on 1/28/19, 5:59 PM

  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.

• by blunte on 1/28/19, 8:58 PM

  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"?

• by sandGorgon on 1/28/19, 6:07 PM

  > 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

• by mesozoic on 1/28/19, 9:34 PM

  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?

• by bretpiatt on 1/28/19, 9:16 PM

  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"

• by romeisendcoming on 1/28/19, 8:47 PM

  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)]

• by jakecopp on 1/29/19, 8:25 AM

  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.

• by hartator on 1/29/19, 5:29 AM

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

• by aliswe on 1/28/19, 5:07 PM

  How come its only for Python?

• by cwkoss on 1/29/19, 12:54 AM

  Demo doesn't seem to work.