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Comment by dmarlow | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused.

"we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet."

"Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools."

"We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough."

Sounds like you know why people didn't pay for it. If it truly did make people as productive as you claim, it would have sold like hot cross buns on a cold day.

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Sounds to me like blaming everybody other than themselves. However major props for open sourcing it when the company failed.

Exactly, they started a decade earlier and got outdone despite the massive head start. Then again maybe without the big data they had no hope of succeeding, but they should've mentioned that specifically instead of giving a bunch of contradicting statements.

The article was a lot of words uttered specifically to avoid the words, "ppl didn't use kite because it sucked", while conveying the same meaning.

They say this:

> making their developers 18% faster

If they're claiming 18%, it was probably more like 5% to 10% and it's really hard to sell something that's 5% better (especially when the alternative is free/ do nothing).

There are different types of market timing. They're right about the tech not being ready, but others are because you found the right "moment." Wordle was a success because it got traction in a covid winter. The exact same experience was just as viable 10 years earlier, but people weren't looking for entertainment in the same way.

plus, again, they had zero developer trust because of all the ultra shady stuff they did

What shady stuff they did?

> developers began noticing something: Kite had quietly injected promotional content and data-tracking functionality into open-source apps the company previously had no affiliation with. The discoveries of those injections, and Kite’s initial refusal to roll them back, led to backlash from programmers who felt the company’s actions undermined the open-source community.

https://qz.com/1043614/this-startup-learned-the-hard-way-tha...

I was looking for such comment to understand why the GoodByeAds (which I use with NextDNS) contains a record for kite.com (which means I'll have to add an exception to access kite.com).

> functionality into open-source apps the company previously had no affiliation with

To elaborate, they bought the open source projects and put in the content without informing people that they were now in control of the project.

Linking my own comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33686715

The only shady thing that I recall is that they quietly added telemetry into Atom after they took over maintenance of it, without communicating this to Atom users.

> added telemetry into Atom

Weren't they uploading source code without clear communication?

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