[nikisweeting]

Having tried Kite a few years ago, and then TabNine, I ended up sticking with TabNine.

The thing that convinced me in the end was that Kite had a super heavy editor integration UX that needing a constantly-running Electron "copilot" app, even uploading some of my code without clearly asking for consent first. This has maybe changed now, but at the time that was my impression.

Meanwhile, TabNine has almost no UI, it's just the tab button and nothing else, and somehow the autocomplete "just worked" amazingly well with any language I wrote, including English prose. The ratio of "fuss" to "gain" was just so different between the two. One I barely remembered I had even installed anything, my editor just suddenly became a pair programmer overnight, and the other felt like I was running a whole electron app just to get occasional library headers autocompleted and docstrings on hover (in only a few supported languages).

I wish the Kite team all the best though, and I hope to see their solution grow and improve. There is definitely room for more players in this space, and I know they've learned many lessons from their past issues with code uploading UX, so I hope people give them a break over that past PR gaffe.

[adamsmith]

Thanks for the thoughtful message!

We hope you'll give Kite another shot. We're always improving it and have covered a lot of ground in the last few years.

In particular, a common complaint about TabNine on Twitter is that it's heavyweight. Based on our comparisons of today's Kite versus today's TabNine, we believe Kite uses less CPU/battery, and far less memory. (My teammate dhung posted a longer comment about TabNine.)

[nikisweeting]

To clarify, my complaints about Kite being heavyweight are 90% about the UX flow being heavy, not the CPU/RAM usage.

Kite seems to require a background daemon, Electron copilot app, and editor plugin, with a multi-step setup to customize what things are shown on hover vs ctrl+space vs tab. By comparison, Tab Nine was a single command to install in SublimeText, and I have never had to interact with it since other than pressing "tab". It seems to be completely language-agnostic with no additional setup as well.

FWIW, here are a few pain points from trying Kite today:

- Kite is a 1GB download vs TabNine's 64mb

- Kite Engine is using 300MB of RAM on my machine right now, and I don't have a single editor open, and there's no way to stop the daemon in the UI

- "sending usage metrics" is on by default in the preferences :/ this is really scary to someone who remembers Kite's issues with code exfiltration and telemetry in the past, haven't ya'll learned that lesson? I had hoped all of that stuff was disabled these days but I guess not.

- there is no uninstall option provided, and you cannot delete the .app on macOS because "the application is in use", yet there is no UI to stop or diasble the daemon anywhere, do I really have to manually `pkill kite; rm -RF /Applications/Kite.app` to remove it?

- Your "Start free trial" link on the homepage appears to redirect to forms filled with real user email addresses? Who do those addresses belong to, are you leaking your users emails? [screenshot link redacted]

[nikisweeting]

Response from Kite about the emails leaked:

> Thank you very much for calling this out. A test version of that webpage was temporarily deployed by mistake. The issue was fixed immediately and we’re in the process of notifying the specific users who were affected.

Welp, those were real user emails being leaked.