This article was published on April 14, 2016

New ‘artificial pair programmer’ plugin Kite may revolutionize developer workflows


New ‘artificial pair programmer’ plugin Kite may revolutionize developer workflows

There’s a new tool for developers named Kite, and it could revolutionize your workflow (no, really).

Calling itself an “artificial pair programmer” which offers “examples and documentation for the libraries and terminal commands you use,” Kite helps bridge gaps between what you know and what you have to look up. In a demo video, Kite’s founder details how it all works:

As you can see, Kite is like code completion and library functionality without ever leaving your terminal environment. Currently, Kite supports Sublime Text, emacs, vim, PyCharm and Atom. At launch, Kite only has support for Python, but the team tells me it’s working hard to add more language functionality.

Similarly, Kite only works on OS X — but the team is working on Windows and Linux support.

Kite’s engine is powered by search. As you type, it sends queries through its own servers as a query, which accesses all publicly available source code on the Web. It returns code suggestions based on popularity, not alphabetically, and Kite keeps privacy at the forefront so you never have to worry about what you type finding its way into the world.

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It’s very early days for Kite, but it’s a really interesting product that could have a lot of reach. All of the plugins for the aforementioned IDEs are available on GitHub, so feel free to give Kite a shot.

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