I disagree with their statement that individual developers do not pay for tools. I have paid for tools out of my own pocket on many occasions. However, being able to deliver code 18% faster isn't enough to fork out $9.99 a month. First of all it is relatively expensive. For that amount I can get a personal license for PyCharm. Secondly coding speed never tends to be a bottle neck for delivering a feature or a product on time. I can see why Engineering Managers are not willing to pay for this.
I do wish the Kite team all the best, and I hope they can re-use their skills in products that are commercially viable.
Most importantly, coding is the fun part of the job. This seems like trying to sell a DALL-E-esq product to a visual artist promising 18% faster deliverables. Even if it is true, who is going to be in a rush to give way in that aspect of the job and sell their manager on it to spend more time doing the less fun things?
On the other hand, create an AI that can stand in during pointless meetings and the blank checks will shower down.
This metric seems silly on its face. 10 bucks to get 18% more productivity out of a $10k per month developer? If this was indeed the case, everyone who employs software engineers would instantly pay this. Maybe they should have marketed more? Or maybe there are other problems with the technology (e.g., fears over copyright infringement?).
Yeah the problem is the "if" part. It may well be true but productivity is notoriously hard to measure and anyone making any claims about exact productivity increases is clearly pulling a number out of the air. People know this.
We have plenty of techniques that we know improve productivity (e.g. static types) but some people still don't believe it because it's really hard to prove productivity increases.
> I disagree with their statement that individual developers do not pay for tools.
They were a VC backed start-up and it was indeed go big or go home for them.
As they seem to have identified, enterprise sales is one way to go big. Timing is also crucial. Right now, by iterating relentlessly over a decade on just the models, OpenAI and Cohere have commoditized access to the AI itself via APIs: Perhaps a better go-to-market than Kite's which had to build both the AI (ex: OpenAI Codex) and the end-product (ex: GitHub Copilot).
Even though they had 8 years to execute, they had zero leverage on the kind of network effects and developer mindshare that GitHub has or access to bottomless funding like OpenAI. Hindsight is 20:20.
I do wish the Kite team all the best, and I hope they can re-use their skills in products that are commercially viable.