
Kite – Programming Copilot - wodow
https://kite.com
======
dangoor
First of all, this is a cool looking tool. Useful, well-organized, easily-
accessed information is always a wonderful thing.

I think a model like Dash would work a lot better: Rather than opting in my
code to be sent up to Kite's servers, I opt in to the packages I'm interested
in having indexes for. In some cases, as with node, there are ways to see what
packages my project depends on and then those bits of indexed data could be
sent to me.

My computer has a 512GB SSD. I could devote 10GB to indexes of libraries and
my own code without blinking. The argument that it's too much data and
therefore belongs in the cloud doesn't seem to hold up.

Also, there are cases where I'm not online... this is one of the great things
about Dash. I have fast access to library docs anywhere I happen to be.

~~~
alexflint
Yes but how much CPU and memory are you willing to spare? Parsing is quite
CPU-intensive, hence the CPU drag you often see when IDEs start indexing, and
type inference involves a lot of unpredictable lookups all over the index, so
much of it needs to be in memory to get reasonable performance (yes this is
still true if we're talking SSD).

To see why: when you type "x.foo()" we need run type inference on the complete
data flow chain that produced the value "x", so that we know which particular
"foo" you're using. Throughout this analysis we may also need to know a lot
about the python libraries you're using, since you may be passing values into
and out of arbitrary third party libraries. If each of the steps in this chain
triggered an SSD read then you'd often have a multi-second lag between hitting
a key and seeing the result.

~~~
greggman
My editor had no problem indexing all of Chromium (fairly large project). It
also indexed external libraries. It indexes new code as you write it so type a
foo function, next time you type foo you get help immediately. It added
standard libraries by default and you can add any other library (like I have
it indexing Unity3D's mono libraries).

I didn't notice more than a 100-200ms delay in seeing the result (which
happened in other threads so no effect on my editing). About the same I'd
expect with a round trip over the the internet. It shows both help at the
cursor as well as definitions and references in another pane in that time.

It doesn't look as slick as Kite but it also seems to suggest it's possible to
do this all locally. If nothing else you at least have some context (the
language) so you don't have to search all data, only data relevant to that
language. You even know where in the language I am so you know when to search
ids and which subset of ids to search.

On top of that you're basically going to have me sending a gig of source to
you to index something like Chromium which will take hours on my crappy
connection.

Let me be clear, I think kite looks amazing and I'd be happy to pay for it if
it was local. Maybe you download the DB to my machine. I'm not nearly as
comfortable with you reading my terminal though. I'm sure you can turn that
feature off but that's a feature I liked. Turing features off = less
interesting

~~~
tbrock
What editor?

~~~
kbart
I'm not an OP, but Eclipse does quite well indexing fairly large projects.

------
falcolas
Privacy question - what will Kite do with the source code stored in its
databases when/if Kite shuts down or is acquired? How will you respect the
licenses of the files you upload?

(paraphrased) "You trust Github/Slack, why not also trust us?" Perhaps because
Github and Slack's monitization models are well known, and Kite's are not.

It's a great concept for a tool, but I could never get it to fly at work. I
couldn't even begin to imagine trying to convince a technically savvy
cofounder (let alone their lawyer) with "let me use this tool which uploads
all of our code to their server."

~~~
alexflint
Alex from kite here. Re privacy: we totally agree that it's a legit concern.
when we started working on this we realized if we wanted to index tens of
thousands of libraries, we wouldn't be able to ship the entire index along
with the client. Hence the cloud-based architecture. We've thought a lot about
privacy and written up our thoughts here: www.kite.com/privacy. The short
answer is: we don't index anything on your computer that you don't explicitly
ask us to, and our plan is to earn trust the hard (i.e. only) way:
transparency, published policies, and a track record of good decision making.

~~~
falcolas
I did read the privacy document, which does not address the
acquisition/shutdown aspect, which is fairly important; Oracle (for example)
may not have the same views on the privacy of the acquired data as you do.

Also, do you have plans to support deletion of indexed data?

~~~
methehack
I think this is a great point. Does anyone know if it's possible to
bulletproof against what an acquirer might want to do with the data? Is there
a way, for instance, to shift the ownership away from the company gathering
the data such that if ownerhship of the company changes, ownership of the data
does not?

~~~
nkw
Lawyer here. Not my area of speciality but off the top of my head (and after
thinking about it for all of 30 seconds) that strikes me as a surprisingly
hard thing to do. Bankruptcy courts have extremely broad powers to administer
the assets of debtors including disavowing contracts. There may be some way to
do a structure where the data is escrowed with a 3rd party and the subject
company is just holding the data as some sort of fiduciary, but I'm not sure
anything like that has been tested. I would want to consult a bankruptcy
expert to really figure something like this out.

~~~
avivo
What if Kite can't legally use the data for alternative purposes? I don't
think disavowing a contract via a bankruptcy would let a company _sell assets
they don 't own_.

So Kite should be able to avoid this fear by _asking only for limited
license_. For example, a license can expire after 1 year, or be untransferable
(or perhaps expire at bankruptcy?).

Facebook does this to some extent: "This IP License ends when you delete your
IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others,
and they have not deleted it."

Here's what Heroku does: "Heroku claims no ownership or control over any
Content or Application. You retain copyright and any other rights you already
hold in the Content and/or Application, and you are responsible for protecting
those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content
on or through the Heroku Services you give Heroku a worldwide, royalty-free,
and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish,
publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Content for the sole
purpose of enabling Heroku to provide you with the Heroku Services. [...]"

(IANAL)

------
baby
First, this is amazing. I want.

Second, I do a lot of code readings that include not shareable code, I would
imagine a lot of developers from a lot of companies would be in the same
position. From [https://kite.com/privacy/](https://kite.com/privacy/):

* all the python files in your authorized directories are sent over the network

* everything you type in these files are sent as well

* all the terminal commands you are going to type (ouch ouch)

> Q: How does Kite secure this network traffic?

> A: As you would expect, all traffic goes over https.

Yeah unfortunately that is not enough, a MITM can also use https. How do you
authenticate the server? Do you have certificate pinning?

> What information does Kite keep around on its servers?

Pretty much all the info I previously talked about, that you are now worrying
about, is kept there, in clear (correct me if I'm wrong).

This is a big no-no at this point.

> Many developers have already chosen to trust their code to services such as
> Github and Bitbucket

Many developers also do not trust Github/Bitbucket with there code (and they
should not) and do not store secrets there. And who would want github to have
access all the terminal commands they type? This sounds like a nightmare.

At this point I don't see why anyone would use that, if not in a VM, with
extreme care on what commands are typed in the terminal and what code is used
with Kite.

------
Lewisham
I was really excited, then very disappointed to see the code I type is sent to
your servers. This immediately prevents it from being used by many businesses,
including my employers.

Super bummer :(

Please get the on-prem sorted out pronto!

~~~
hathym
seriously, I don't think anyone is after your code.

~~~
xanderstrike
I'm not concerned about people stealing my code. I'm concerned about losing my
job, which is the consequence of transmitting proprietary code over the
network to an unknown 3rd party.

~~~
gutnor
Also plain legal implication. Our code could contain some protected
information (transient debugging code mostly) and it is illegal to transmit it
to a third party first because of DNA our company has signed, and then with
regards to data protection act (credit card information, name, address).

At the very least, the service would need to be validated quite extensively.

------
adamsmith
Hi everyone, we couldn't be more excited to tell you about Kite and get your
feedback!

We think connecting programming environments to a smart backend will improve
programming in a lot of ways, and this is just the first step. We'd love to
hear your thoughts on where we should go from here!

~~~
jobvandervoort
This looks great! Loved the left-pad joke in there.

Could you elaborate on when it'll be available? Will you make it or parts open
source?

~~~
adamcanady
Also the hostname of "TayandYou".

~~~
ipince
And the Batman v Superman. lol

------
lawl
While I really like the idea, there's a couple of no gos here:

    
    
        * Only supports python (as of now, I know you said you'll do others)
        * No Linux support (yet)
        * Uploads code to your servers
        * Wants me to sign up to a crappy newsletter
    

Really liked all the jokes in the video though. But I'm not convinced (yet),
sorry.

And there's the issue that's I'd want to test it before recommending buying it
to my employer. But I don't do enterprise Java for fun, so there's completely
different languages and libraries between the open source projects where I
could upload the code (but don't want to because fuck everything cloud, also I
won't pay for it, because I'm not making any money) and the for work projects
(where I personally don't give a shit, but all the libraries/frameworks the
we/the customer bought are proprietary). And maybe even the customer wouldn't
like his code being uploaded somewhere, but they usually don't really care
about the code.

------
bluetidepro
I don't want undermine the value of this product, but this seems like
something that I've (and many others) sort of already solved by using products
like Dash [1] and Alfred [2] together. You can easily and quickly find all
info on docs while working right in Sublime Text, or while also using an IDE
to read into functions throughout your project. And maybe I'm missing more
what this product does, but that's just what I noticed based on the video.

[1] [https://kapeli.com/dash](https://kapeli.com/dash) [2]
[https://www.alfredapp.com/](https://www.alfredapp.com/)

~~~
dustinmr
Interesting. How are you connecting Dash and Alfred to arrive at something
similar?

~~~
Dangeranger
I have used both the Alfred workflow [https://github.com/Kapeli/Dash-Alfred-
Workflow](https://github.com/Kapeli/Dash-Alfred-Workflow) and the Vim
connection
[https://github.com/rizzatti/dash.vim](https://github.com/rizzatti/dash.vim)
in the past. They are useful and provide very fast symbol lookup.

~~~
n13
Or, if you use SublimeText then DashDoc comes really handy.

[1]
[https://github.com/farcaller/DashDoc](https://github.com/farcaller/DashDoc)

------
cdnsteve
So if there was an open source version of this, I'd use it. I would never
trust it otherwise. Large corps will never trust it either, IT sec policies
would roast you for using this. Instead I see an opportunity for IDE's to step
up this space and provide this built in, without copying and _keeping_ your
source code.

"What information does Kite keep around on its servers? Usage information
about which results you click on in the sidebar. Contents of all Python files
in enabled directories."

~~~
lelandbatey
Exactly, I really don't want to have to tie myself to a single company for my
tools, and I definitely don't want to be handing over all the code I type to
that same company. Having a company sponsored key logger just to remove
googling for documentation/basic autocomplete is not something I'm interested
in doing.

------
nodesocket
How does Kite protect against accidental API keys and passwords in source code
(copy/paste) being shipped to them?

------
bbrks
I was about to ask some questions about exactly what gets sent to Kite and
what you do with it. Your privacy page[0] answered my thoughts and concerns
quite nicely.

[0] [https://kite.com/privacy](https://kite.com/privacy)

------
_ZeD_
I was exited until:

    
    
        What platforms does Kite run on?
    
        For now, Kite only works on OS X, but we'll support Linux and Windows soon, too.
    

bummer :(

~~~
adamsmith
I started slinging code in Visual Basic 5 back in the day, and ran Windows
until recently. I hope to be able to jump into building the Windows client
soon : )

Fortunately all of our UI is html and javascript, so no windows controls
needed : )

~~~
Vekz
+1 for Electron sounds like you have a knowledge gap and are missing an easy
cross platform opportunity.

------
eridius
This looks very slick. However, as others have said, uploading all source code
to your servers is a pretty serious issue when working on anything other than
open source projects.

Also, when asking about editors while signing up, you listed "XCode". That's
not the correct spelling, it should be "Xcode" (lowercase c). Also, you should
allow for selecting multiple languages/editors. I selected Swift/Xcode because
that's my day job, but I also use Swift/Vim in some cases, and I use Vim for
languages other than Swift/Obj-C. In fact, I'm guessing Kite won't be nearly
as useful for Swift/Xcode as it would be for other languages, because Xcode
already provides a lot of this functionality (e.g. intelligent code completion
and quick help for any API).

~~~
azinman2
I wouldn't say Xcode is providing this... kite looks to be going much further
in providing examples, alternatives, etc with a diff screen real estate
philosophy. I welcome it.

~~~
eridius
Yeah Xcode doesn't do everything Kite does, but it does enough that Kite isn't
nearly so compelling there. And Xcode has the benefit of being 100% accurate
with its code completion and quick help, whereas it remains to be seen how
accurate Kite will be on that front.

------
rckrd
This is a great idea. I particularly think the trade-off between a separate
tile vs. a traditional overlay is interesting.

While we lose things like auto complete, it might be less intrusive for the
times when we don't need help. It will be interesting to see if we see a new
generation of smart IDEs.

------
shade23
While I realise that this could be helpful with editors.I do not see much use
with IDEs.and when it comes to languages like Android/iOS/WebApps ?People tend
to use IDEs.(I am not making my opinion the general opinion here). And when
people google things,Documentations are often the last resort.You tend to
google the exception or the specific condition and end up on StackOverflow
where some one facing a similar problem solved it by using something which was
mentioned somewhere deep in the documentation. Also if documentation and a few
examples could work in most real world apps,then we really wouldn't need sites
like Stack Overflow.

Simple use case: the `man` and `help` command are useful when you have not
been able to solve for your particular use case.Else I would still prefer
doing a google search which would tell me how to scp a file with the syntax
and placeholders instead of reading the documentation.

The examples would help in this regard.But then again I am not sure how
much.Normally documentation list pretty straight forward examples which any
editor/IDE with intellisense (even Sublime provides a bit of prediction with
plugins) ,should be able to provide.

This also goes against the tendency of comparing.Normally while trying to
solve a problem,I tend to open 2~3 similar 'answers' which help me drill down
to my particular problem.Whereas here I would be restricted to only a single
solution.I love the idea for the technology involved.But I am not completely
convinced with the help that it could provide.

------
Cyph0n
This looks really interesting. One question I have is how will you handle
hotkeys? If I'm focused in my editor, I don't really want to have to move my
mouse to select options suggested by Kite.

Excellent demo. Concise, simple overview of features but with enough little
details (loved that rm -rf warning!) to keep me interested, and really well-
edited.

~~~
mrkgnao
I certainly hope there is a way to use Kite comfortably with minimal/no mouse
usage.

~~~
jayhpatel
Hi, Jay from Kite here. Agreed. We are definitely heading in the direction of
keyboard shortcuts to access key features in Kite. For example, we have Cmd+;
for switching between your editor and Kite. And more are coming up. We want
you to get the most relevant info without leaving your keyboard!

------
fizzbatter
This looks really cool. Bothers me having my code sent over, because i can't
use it for a variety of use cases, but for my personal work i may give it a
try. I've got two main desires though:

1\. In editor pane. I use Vim in a full screen term, and really want want to
deal with managing OS windows to allow a Kite window side by side with iTerm2.
Perhaps an overlay would be solve this? That way it works for bash/etc?

2\. Rust support. I'm learning rust lately, and this sort of tool could
_really_ benefit me with a learner-error-prone language like Rust. Based on
the signup form though, Rust does not appear available.

~~~
alexflint
1\. Yeah, I agree. It's hard, and it's something we continue to iterate on.
How would you feel about a global keyboard shortcut that would show/hide the
overlay that was a separate application?

2\. I love Rust. We _will_ get to it even though it's (sadly) not at the top
of our list right now.

------
melling
Probably not the problem you're trying to solve but I'd like a better typing
assistant as well as a co-pilot. For example, on the first line, I'd like to
type "r" then be prompted for "import requests" Anywhere where the video had
to be sped up is ripe for an advanced typing assistant. Typing entire lines
like this seem unnecessary:

"from left_pad import left_pad"

I guess a super autosense along with Copilot would make for more exact coding.

~~~
alexflint
Absolutely. We're going to be working on this for many years, and this is the
kind of thing we're aiming at.

------
quantum_nerd
All "my BigTech Co won't let me use this at work" and other privacy concerns
aside, this is an amazing tool for budding programmers or experienced ones
using an unfamiliar language. Can't wait to try it out!

------
andretti1977
Well, definitely this is a great project but at the moment, for what i was
able to see in the demo video, the main features are very similar to code
completion and API exploring as i can currently perform with my ide (i develop
mainly java based app so IntellijIdea or Eclipse give me quite the same help).

Don't want to be rude but it doesn't seem like this tool may currently enhance
my productivity.

~~~
alexflint
The main difference versus IDEs is that everything we show is informed by all
the public code we've collected from the web. So e.g. there are a ton of
arguments to matplotlib.plot and IDEs can show you them all ranked
alphabetically, whereas we can show you common patterns of how people actually
use matplotlib.plot in practice, which is often far more useful. (We'll show
you the docs, too.)

Another example is if you type "load('abc.json')" without having imported
json: there are hundreds of python packages that define a function called
"load", but "json" and "simplejson" are by _far_ the most widely used, so we
can suggest that you "from json import load". That's something you can't do
unless you have a good model of a lot of real-world code.

~~~
nhaliday
Any comments on how your product and plans compare to
[https://sourcegraph.com/](https://sourcegraph.com/)?

They seem to have a similar offering with an on-premise version, though
lacking the smooth editor integration.

------
mwagstaff
Agreed that this looks awesome. Seeing code completion and context sensitive
help for running terminal commands (e.g. netstat), not just programming
languages, was what made me hit the sign up button.

~~~
djsumdog
You might want to check out the Fish shell. I've been using it for about a
year and it supports completion for most commands by parsing their man pages.
It's pretty nice.

~~~
mwagstaff
I tried Fish a while back, and liked it very much. Trouble is, I can't roll
Fish out across a work server estate.

Well, I could. But then I probably wouldn't be at work much longer. ;-)

------
SanPilot
> Left padding is so complicated that I've pulled it out into its own file, as
> you can see here.

Am I just really ignorant, or is this satire?

~~~
rckrd
Its satire directed towards the recent npm package fiasco (there was a
'leftpad' library by the original author who pulled his packages)[0].

The authors make a few other witty jokes in the video as well.

[0][http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-
npm](http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm)

------
Dangeranger
Often I work in a full screen editor environment like terminal Vim with Tmux.
Are you considering support for a command line client that could run in a
split pane or window alongside my terminal editor?

If you implemented such functionality the suggestion experience could be more
seamless for myself and those with similar workflows.

~~~
adamsmith
Supporting the variety of dev setups will definitely be one of our challenges.
We've tried to start addressing this with 2 column mode (not shown in the demo
video, but happens when Kite is in landscape mode; good for multimon),
snapping to the side of your screen, and left/right-handed orientations.

This will be a long term effort. We have a lot more work to do here, along the
lines of assisting with Z-index management, attaching to windows, etc.

Overall there's a lot to do! We will get there and are signed up for the long
term.

------
zuck9
This is similar to the Developer Assistant plugin for Visual Studio made by
Microsoft:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/onecode/p/devassistant/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/onecode/p/devassistant/)

------
sneak
(scribbles with mouse, clicks on things)

"When I open my terminal...."

I am evidently not the target market.

Do professionals actually identify with this stuff? Am I really that out of
touch when I think that that much mousing around is CRAZY slow? And who
switches back and forth from GUI editors to a terminal?

~~~
noahlt
Noah from Kite here. We're prototyping various keyboard shortcut schemes;
we're excited to ship whatever we settle on.

------
irq11
The title is a bit misleading. This only works for Python and OSX.

~~~
jayhpatel
Jay from Kite here. We're on our way to supporting more languages and
operating systems. Stay tuned! Pro tip: when you sign up on our website, you
can also specify which language you use so we can keep you in the loop when we
get to it!

~~~
irq11
You folks have a big team, and have been working on this for two years now.
Promising another language in the future doesn't mean the title is right.

~~~
eXpl0it3r
It can't be used right now anyways, so if it currently doesn't support your
favorite language, what does it matter? Who knows what it will support once we
get an alpha/beta/release version?

Do you also tell the people that show you a prototype of their product that
they are misleading you, because they claim to build an extended product out
of that prototype?

------
llamataboot
Hmmm. Regarding one member of their team: "Prior to Kite, he was a tech lead
at Homejoy, driving customer acquisition and retention." Not to spread tooooo
much guilt by association, but didn't Homejoy just get roasted around here not
too long ago for what thy did with the data on their servers? [1] Doesn't
really make me feel the warm fuzzies for what they might do with all that data
if they shut down.

[1] [https://medium.com/@johnsalzarulo/didn-t-homejoy-shut-
down-e...](https://medium.com/@johnsalzarulo/didn-t-homejoy-shut-
down-e8d7a2dfb485#.97zeolsll)

------
noonespecial
So it's watching my bash terminal? Does it send my passwords on over to your
servers when I ssh somewhere without keys?

~~~
alexflint
No! If you can't see it (as visible chars) on your terminal then Kite is not
seeing it.

~~~
noonespecial
It sees all the visible chars? Not just what I type? So every time I ls all of
my filenames and dirs get sent?

That might be worse.

------
canistr
Is it really a launch if very few people have access to it in a private beta?

All this noise on Twitter/FB/HN/etc. doesn't help when we don't get a chance
to play around with it. Just saying.

------
wuliwong
I thought I was signing up for Kite not for Kite's email list. Pretty
misleading copy. Nowhere does it say "Coming soon" or anything to that effect.

Also, there seems to be no confirmation email.

~~~
alexflint
Sorry if there was any confusion, but just FYI we're sending out the first
invites today, so we're definitely "in motion".

------
p01926
I dream about a tool like this every time I need to look something up, which
only happens about a hundred times every day. I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE.

But reading the kite.com/privacy doc is absolutely gutting. They copy and keep
all your code, permanently. That's fine for an open-source project, but it's a
deal breaker for anything else. So thanks for the brilliant idea, but I'll
wait for it to be implemented in a way compatible with my everyday workflow.

------
neil_s
This is awesome! I was going to build something similar, just for the
terminal, but extending it to code editors as well makes total sense. And what
an all-star team!

------
chinathrow
Nice tool, very nice demo video.

Unusable since I won't let my code be indexed by a third party. Also unusable
since I won't let a third party have access to my shell. Imagine having your
bash history stored centrally - a prime target for LEO/security services/black
hats/data mining.

However - the code assistant is nice and I would love to have it running
locally with a shared intelligent index - OSS based.

------
Dangeranger
Do you support code linting or code smells in addition to completions?

------
lincolnq
Wow, this looks pretty amazing - well done with the demo. I'm super excited to
try it out, how soon will it be ready?

~~~
adamsmith
We have some folks outside of the company using Kite already, and will be
scaling that up as quickly as we can!

------
sulam
So, this looks pretty damn awesome, and I want to try it out yesterday! Seems
like a lot of people are worried about privacy, and I guess I understand that.
But I want this for when I'm learning a new language, and I honestly don't
much care what happens with that code.

Also I think people are way too worried about their code. It's vanishingly
rare that _the code_ is where the value in a business is. "But if I had
Google's source code, I could run my own search engine and put them out of
business!" Really? Could you? Because last I checked, Google has more
engineers working on search than any other company on the planet. The stuff
they do next week is probably going to improve their code more than what you
would do by yourself for the entire year. And that's just the code, there's
far more to search than algorithms.

~~~
0xffff2
>Also I think people are way too worried about their code.

I don't think anyone in this thread is worried about _their_ code. The problem
is that most of us work somewhere where we write code that isn't _ours_ , and
as such continued employment is contingent on us following the policies of the
company. This generally include not sharing proprietary code.

~~~
sulam
I don't know everyone in the thread, so I can't comment specifically to them.
You're right that getting fired over using this thing would be suboptimal. :)

I'm still eager to try it out!

------
ausjke
I have long wished nodejs provides such helpful info, e.g. when I use the
nodejs APIs I can get hints on the syntax and even some concise demo for
usage, instead of opening a webpage and read online each time. Both python and
PHP provide man pages for all their APIs etc, but no such thing for nodejs
yet.

------
aeorgnoieang
This looks fantastic. It would be great to get this working in Light Table.

Another commenter asked about hotkeys and I'd like to pile on to that
sentiment – I've recently started using Vim (and Vimium) and it's really
disappointing not being able to navigate by keyboard.

------
aub3bhat
I think this looks great, but it reminded me of Lightable. Also rather than
using Sublime text as a comparison, isn't PyCharm a better comparison. In my
opinion Pycharm already provides a subset of functionality, in addition to
several other features.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
[https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues/2188](https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues/2188)

------
educar
Great video :-) Loved the left pad joke and duly noted down your panama
account information.

------
groundCode
Autocomplete on steroids. This looks very cool and the demo vid was very well
done!

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jiiam
Ok, this convinced me. At first I was skeptical, but looking at how it works
compared to existing methods that need a ton of configuration, I believe it is
at least worth a try.

More importantly, I believe it appeals to newcomers. We are getting into a
world where learning the proper way of coding requires a lot more than the
famous 10.000 hours, mostly because there are hundreds of standards. This tool
might become a much nicer introduction for newbies, compared to digging
through pages of documentations in search for the one example that satisfy
your use-case (I'm talking to you, Python requests).

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martinni
Looks great!

The only thing is I don't like the thought of having to share my screen real
estate. Would it be possible to have some kind of navigable popup box within
the editor?

~~~
alexflint
Yeah this is something we're still iterating on. Though it wasn't in the demo
video, there is actually a global keyboard shortcut to show/hide the sidebar
without defocussing your editor. We're going to be experimenting more.

------
vinitagr
Looks like an amazing tool. Have to use it before i can tell more. Showing the
documentation and example is cool and all, a very useful feature would be the
search and analysis of the error messages upon program compilation/run. Most
likely from stackOverflow.

This will make things so much easier. Reminds me of how2
[https://github.com/santinic/how2](https://github.com/santinic/how2)

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febed
Great idea! But doesn't it work by intercepting keystrokes? What prevents Kite
from reading keystrokes in other applications like a browser?

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antiffan
Super cool concept. One thought: when I'm using my laptop I have limited
screen space. It would be awesome to be able to use Kite on my phone's screen,
with my phone clipped to my laptop using something like this:
[https://tenonedesign.com/mountie.php](https://tenonedesign.com/mountie.php)

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megacity
I don't understand why this needs to store all the typed code on their server.

Couldn't this data just be deleted once the lookup has run?

~~~
aeorgnoieang
I imagine they're using all the code they get to update their 'what is
popular' examples for all the subsequent lookups; or that's what they want to
be able to do.

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BIackSwan
left_pad.py - lol

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e0m
This is amazing. Documentation pages that list methods alphabetically, or by
some other random order, drive me crazy! Just being able to show me function
calls by frequency and relevance would make Kite worth it. And there's so much
more! Very excited about this.

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giulianob
This is really cool. It reminds me of OmniSharp which provides Intellisense to
any IDE. It just runs as a background process listening on HTTP so adding
intelligent autocompletion to a text editor is fairly easy. I like this
approach a lot.

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asimuvPR
This is nice. Could we get a general description of what tech it is built on
top of?

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werber
For the early sign up it be cool if you could specify that you write in
multiple languages and across multiple platforms to get invites as soon as
possible. This looks like an amazing tool for a more hands off teaching style.

------
mkelley82
What about support for VS Code?

~~~
alexkavon
Yes hopefully there will be integration for VS Code and Visual Studio. Though
Microsoft already has a similar plugin, but this is purdier.

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jackcosgrove
Many organizations already upload their source code to GitHub. I could get
behind a tool like this that could scan GitHub repositories and build an on-
premise index.

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drcongo
Could I suggest some kind of per directory .kiteignore file?

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heinrichf
Who wants to build an open-source cross-platform clone ?

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odbol_
The juxtaposition between seeing this on the frontpage today, and the VIM 8.0
announcement on the frontpage yesterday, is hilarious.

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tomphoolery
What's with the invite? Is this a service or something? What about this
requires it to be proprietary and hosted elsewhere?

------
mkoble11
Justin kan mentioned the upcoming launch of this on snapchat the other day and
I was intrigued. This does look awesome!

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cmiller1
Maybe I'm behind the curve, but I still use TextMate, is there any chance a
plug-in is in the works for it?

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d0m
That's great, very exciting to have it internet based and to have it become
smarter and smarter over time.

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mkagenius
Does it search Stack overflow along?

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pknerd
Hopefully there will be _a bit_ less traffic on Stackoverflow after using
that. :-)

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fareesh
This looks great - can't wait to try it. Can I beg for an invite here?

------
stcredzero
_No nerds were harmed in the making of this product._

So no questions asked on IRC?

------
clio
At age 13, I completed my PhD at Google while having an internship at MIT,
Stanford, and Berkeley. By age 15 I won the Nobel Prize while working at my
tenth SV startup. My name is Franklin, and I drink wine on the weekends.

------
ElijahLynn
Very interesting. But closed. Not open.

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plaidturtle
Loved the humor in the intro video :D

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libeclipse
This isn't that big a deal IMO. For a start, any non-trivial complex problem
will probably not be included in kite, and the trivial stuff is generally
memorised or easily googled.

This is really only spoon feeding.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
I guess it depends on what a 'big deal' is exactly, but if it saves me all the
Googling I do now then it'll be _really useful_ (to me).

I don't expect them to really provide an _intelligent_ artificial pair
programmer, so you're right that this won't help with "any non-trivial complex
problem", but that's okay with me.

I don't mind being spoon fed stuff I'm not interested in acquiring 'the hard
way'. Do you also disdain autocompletion in your code editors?

~~~
libeclipse
Funnily enough, I've never used auto-completion. I've even gone through the
trouble of deactivating it in Atom, but disdain is a strong word.

Also, it just occurred to me that Kite is basically a keylogger. Every
keystroke is sent to their servers. That requires a lot of trust.

~~~
fokinsean
> Funnily enough, I've never used auto-completion. I've even gone through the
> trouble of deactivating it in Atom,

Super 1337 bro

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slantaclaus
I hope it supports TextMate...

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hathym
I'm very impressed!

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sandman83
awesome. intellisense on steroids.

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saltycraig
He should've put left_pad.py in a folder with an __init__.py to make it a
proper package ;)

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notliketherest
This is really cool, and I wish you luck. It has great potential for
educational purposes as well! I'd like to download it and try it when it's
launched for my personal projects; however, I won't be able to use this at
work (no way I'd get buy in to upload our source code lol). It'd be great to
see local indexing on the roadmap for the future.

------
kevindeasis
This would be even more amazing if it was free or cheap.

It would be cool if they also open sourced it

~~~
melling
What we be really cool is if you wrote an open source version. I'm sure if you
started it, you'd find people to help once you reach minimal functionality.

------
DanteVertigo
This kind of tool destroys ones ability to program long sustainable production
code. For a novice programmer this has tremendous negative effect on the
learning curve. For an experienced programmer this tool is useless, because an
experienced programmer will __NEVER __rely on "popularity" of some code-
snippet out there in the wild. Programming is a very intense and deep practice
and it is certainly not crafted using this kind of tools. This tool helps
people write poor quality code for customers. Makes me wonder, what Knuth
would say on this?

~~~
rootlocus
IntelliJ already has most of what this tool offers (but for java as opposed to
python). It has auto-complete, quick access to documentation, quick fix
suggestions (such as missing imports, etc.) and many many others not available
in Kite at the moment. You wouldn't say IntelliJ "destroys ones ability to
program long sustainable production code" would you? Because if you would,
you'd be absolutely wrong.

~~~
DanteVertigo
IntelliJ certainly doesn't do this. IntelliJ and Kite have functionalities in
common, which are fine. The other parts of Kite that IntelliJ hasn't, are
problematic.

