Kite shut its AI coding assistant after seven years, saying it was a decade too early

An AI-powered coding assistant for developers, free for most users, built over seven years.

AI-assisted programming was ready for a standalone subscription product years before the models could deliver it.

Tens of millions of dollars in venture backing.

Kite spent about seven years developing an AI coding assistant, funded by tens of millions of dollars from venture investors.

In a postmortem blog post, founder Adam Smith said the generative AI did not resonate with enough of the 500,000 developers using the free version to build a sustainable business, and that the product did not monetize and it took too long to find out.

Kite shut down abruptly in November 2022. Smith wrote that it failed because the company was '10+ years too early to market' and the technology was not ready.

The underlying AI was not ready, Smith wrote, so the product could not earn a price that covered its costs.

Kite's free version attracted 500,000 developers, but too few valued the generative features enough to pay.

Smith estimated a production-quality code-generation tool could cost over $100 million to build.

A product with half a million free users can still fail if the technology is not ready to justify a price; Kite's runway ended before the models caught up.

As of 10 December 2022, Kite was shut down. TechCrunch noted that rivals including Tabnine, which had just raised $15.5M, and GitHub Copilot, with 400,000 subscribers, continued to pursue code generation.