[adamsmith]

Adam from Kite here. The team and I are thrilled to launch our new deep learning engine for JavaScript completions.

After years of work building our Python product — now to over 250,000 monthly active users — we decided we were ready to expand a new language. JavaScript was a clear choice given how well it pairs with Python, and it was the our most-requested language.

We took what we learned from building our Python product, adjusted it to JavaScript’s nuances, and trained the model on 22 million open-source JavaScript files. We then spent months dogfooding, user testing, and applying advanced model filtering techniques to ensure the UX was ready for everyone to enjoy.

We think the end-result will help you have more fun writing JavaScript, while also helping you ship software faster. We can’t wait to get feedback from you to help us improve our JavaScript completions from here! We'll be online to answer your questions here today as well.

Since a lot of folks ask, Kite continues to work 100% locally and Kite for JavaScript is free. We plan to release support for more languages later this year, and are taking requests at kite.com/letmeknow. Thanks!

[dessant]

Adam, why did you remove your response [1] to the hijacking of Atom packages from the Kite blog?

Kite was collecting usage data without consent through an unrelated and popular Sublime Text package [2], and they've sent the data to an IP address instead of a domain name, presumably to conceal their involvement. Kite has also transferred private package names to that IP address.

When they were discovered, Adam Smith has said that they've forgot that the data collection was taking place [3], after having paid the maintainer of the package to send data to Kite.

This is on top of Kite covertly buying up popular Atom packages to push their service on developers. [4]

I'm surprised their domain wasn't banned from HN, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that Kite can act maliciously whenever it's in their interest.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857944

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902630

[3] https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/rfc-default-package-control-...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653

[lukevp]

Adam,

Intelligent autocomplete is great. Big fan of it. However, Microsoft has already built this out in VS and VS Code as IntelliCode, and it supports Python, Typescript, JS, and Java.

VS Code is the most used JS editor by far and has first party support for this that comes out of the box. What is the reason for Kite for the VS Code users out there?

[adamsmith]

Hi there, thanks for the question.

IntelliCode has a similar vision but uses much simpler models. IntelliCode can essentially give you to the top 5 attributes for a global type.

Kite uses statistical models which are orders of magnitude larger and richer, both in terms of the context they understand and the sophistication of the completions provided.

Here is a good example from the blog post:

  var server = express(); server.

IntelliCode returns:

  use, set, get, listen

Kite's first completion is

  use(bodyParser.json

(bodyParser is defined earlier in the file.)

Finally, IntelliCode only returns completions for attributes (foo.) whereas Kite returns deep learning completions in all the places they are useful.

[lukevp]

Appreciate the reply and the additional explanation, best of luck!

[deweller]

The link has examples of how this is different than VS Code.

[vips7L]

Intellicode is an extension add on from Microsoft. It's not default in VS Code. It doesn't look like they're making a distinction here.

[stevenmays]

It says it right in the blog post. VSCode only does fuzzy matching for javascript. This is an "intelligent" autocomplete, so the suggestions should be better.

[will_raw]

No, IntelliCode is also powered with AI and does not do fuzzy matching. Fuzzy matching happens if you disable intellisense. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/

[TomMarius]

Fuzzy matching is done almost never, even ordinary intellisense is type aware

[mandaputtra]

Hello adam how much memory it will consume? I just use tabnine before, and after 12 hours I uninstall it. Because it is use lot of memory and CPU Usage.

[adamsmith]

Hi there, Kite at most about half of what TabNine uses, often less than that.

[whadar]

Congrats, but it seems that now the free plan has very few features, almost all paid? :(

[dang]

It's abusive to try to manipulate a competitor's thread this way. Please stop now and don't do this on HN again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23160881