A startup called Kite wants to give programmers their very own digital assistant.

Kite's self-titled product acts as a sidebar that sits next to a your code editor and enables you to search for open source code that they can incorporate into your programs. It attempts to provide relevant documentation and code examples as you type and tries to spot any errors you might have made while staying out of the way, unlike Microsoft's infamous digital assistant "Clippy."

Programmers are increasingly relying on external components when they build software instead of creating every single part of a program from scratch. This is nothing new, but it's becoming more common thanks to the growing popularity of open source software. Kite is an attempt to make the process of working with outside code a little simpler.

The beta version of Kite, which launched today, is only available on Mac OS X and only supports the Python programming language. But CEO and co-founder Adam Smith says Kite will eventually support Windows and Linux, as well as other popular programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, and Go. Kite already supports several different code editors, including SublimeText, Vim, Emacs and Atom. It will also work from the command line.

"That was technically very difficult since terminals don't have built-in support for plugins," Smith says. The Kite team worked around this by taking advantage of an interface built into OS X meant to support screen readers for the blind. This enables them to watch what you type and provide relevant contextual information.

Although Kite will watch what you type locally, it won't send any of your work to its cloud servers unless you specifically authorize it. The more people who agree to share their errors, and how they fixed them, with Kite, however, the better the system will be at spotting mistakes and recommending solutions. The local plugins will be open source, so developers will be able to verify that the nothing untoward is going on, or use the code to make Kite with code editors the software doesn't yet support.

Smith was also the co-founder of Xobni ("inbox" spelled backwards), a company that made plugins for Microsoft Outlook and later Gmail that displayed information about the person who sent you a particular email. Yahoo acquired Xobni in 2013 but shut the company down a year later.

Smith says he's learned a few lessons from Xobni's struggles. For one, while Xobni initially focused only on Outlook, the Kite team is focusing on supporting multiple code editors from day one. He's also trying to make Kite into a more collaborative tool, so Kite users have a reason to encourage their colleagues to use it as well.