Kite, a startup developing an AI-powered coding assistant, abruptly shut down last month. Despite securing tens of millions of dollars in VC backing, Kite struggled to pay the bills, founder Adam Smith revealed in a postmortem blog post, running into engineering headwinds that made finding a product-market fit essentially impossible.
“We failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e., the tech is not ready yet,” Smith said. “Our product did not monetize, and it took too long to figure that out.”
Kite’s failure doesn’t bode well for the many other companies pursuing — and attempting to commercialize — generative AI for coding. Copilot is perhaps the highest-profile example, a code-generating tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI priced at $10 per month. …