Kite

» see kite.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I was writing Python in exactly the years Kite was giving Python completion away for free, and I never installed it. That is the honest position here. It sat one click from my working life for most of a decade and I did not reach for it, which turns out to be the same answer roughly five hundred thousand other people gave, except they installed it first.

Kite started in 2014 under Adam Smith, in the period when machine learning meant something narrower than it does now. The pitch was a desktop application that watched your editor and suggested the next piece of code, trained on public repositories rather than on the local file. Editors at the time completed identifiers by string matching. Kite was trying to complete intent.

It worked well enough to become a habit for a lot of people. It also never once worked well enough to feel necessary, which is the difference between a tool and a product, and it took the company eight years and tens of millions in venture money to establish that difference in public.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

The first version was a cloud service, which meant your code left your machine to get completed. Developers reacted to that exactly the way you would expect and Kite moved the models onto the desktop, where they ran locally and ate memory. There was a period where the honest review of Kite was that it was helpful when it was right and expensive when it was not.

Python was the target because Python is where the beginners and the data people were, and both of those groups look up documentation constantly. Kite's better feature was arguably not completion at all but the documentation panel, which pulled the signature and examples for whatever you were typing into a window next to it. Copilot has never really replaced that.

~ why it failed ~

Smith wrote the postmortem himself and it is unusually direct for the genre. He said the technology was not ready and put a number on what ready would have cost. He said the product did not monetize and that it took the company too long to learn this from half a million users who were perfectly happy on the free tier.

The timing is the cruel part. GitHub Copilot went to general availability in June 2022 on a model Kite could not have trained, and Kite announced its own end five months later. The company had built the editor integrations and the developer habit for a category that became real about eighteen months after it ran out of runway. Most of the engine is still on GitHub under an open license, which is a decent grave marker as these go.

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