Today i was doing the daily ritual of looking at distrowatch. Todays reveiw section was about a termal called warp, it has built in AI for recomendations and correction for commands (like zhs and nushell). You can also as a chatbot for help. I think its a neat conscept however the security is what makes me a bit skittish. They say the dont collect data and you can check it aswell as opt out. But the idea of a terminal being read by an Ai makes me hesitant aswell as a account needed to use warp. What do you guys think?
So,
This is a proprietary and therefore untrustworthy terminal in a space where virtually all the competition is libre/open source.
It’s connected to the cloud, therefore insecure and privacy-invasive as there is no reason for something as basic as a terminal to be connected to the cloud. Who wants their SSH keys leaked? Anyone?
They require an account but don’t collect data? Sketchy to say the least, a unique account is the perfect tool to collect data and there is no reason a terminal, the most basic interface to the underlying OS should require an online account. It should be tied to the system. (After further reading, apparently they do collect data by default).
It has a built-in AI autocomplete, because apparently normal auto complete isn’t good enough (just wait until it tells you to rm -rf /*).
Yeah, no matter how nice it is, I will never accept this terminal.
EDIT: They also forked Alacritty to create a “demo”, they took advantage of a libre/open source project for their proprietary terminal and never did so much as thank the authors of Alacritty. That’s scummy.
AI can be neat, but this is a solution looking for a problem, like most AI things.
IANAL but it looks like they are violating Apache 2, as they are supposed to retain the license and mark any changes.
For me to even consider using AI in my terminal, it’d have to meet a couple of requirements:
- needs to be open source
- needs to be run without network access
- needs to be an extensible utility to any terminal program.
(And that’s off the top of my head.)
Warp lost me at the account requirement. You’re telling me I need to sign in to a terminal? Seriously? Like with an internet connection? Nope. What if I’m opening my terminal to configure my network? Warp seems to be fixing a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t think anyone has looked at a terminal emulator and gone “Yeah, this could use AI and a cloud account”.
“Alright, now that I’m logged in to my cloud terminal account, let me enter my root password for sudo.”
You are not in the sudoers file. This incident has been reported and your account suspended.
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Wait. An email just to get a download link AND a cloud account. Fuck that.
I would definitely like an AI to remember some complex commands for me. But something small and specifically trained that runs locally
I use
fuck
, it’s not ai but gets the job done.You can define a bunch of aliases in any shell environment for that. Or use a history manager (a database client essentially) that groups commands you’ve entered so far based on frequency, return value, working dir. when they were issued etc.
My thoughts are you can fuck the fuck off.
Totally agree. People using cli are probably more skilled and their knowledge has been fed into these ai models.
So we will all end up with some mediocre level of knowledge, because the next input for the LLM 's will be more of the some old stuff. Flattening the curve and less innovation and smart ideas.
These kind of “solutions” are for a non existing problem. Looking at the investors, this is only about making money.
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I’m neutral towards AI, what I can’t wrap my head around is forcing users to sign in / sign up to use offline apps. Fuck you too, Postman.
I love hopscotch(formerly postwoman) https://hoppscotch.io/ thank me later
You can thank me later.
Bad idea
AI that can auto generate all those command line arguments I keep forgetting? Sure.
Closed source terminal that requires account? No way.
And also, like… Data privacy… My terminal commands and command outputs contain sensitive data. Even company sensitive data. I don’t want to be liable.
To help make skittish people feel at ease with the concept, why not give it a friendly on-screen avatar? Perhaps something like a cute little animated paperclip.
I dunno. Maybe an orange dog? Give it big brown ears.
Also animate it at ~10fps, making it visibly sad when it can’t retrieve the files you ask for.
Purple monkey or bust
Throw in a little whimsical wizard while you’re at it.
I prefer a glowing red dot
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tldr, fzf-tab suffices for me. For anything else you may give shellgpt a try. But I love my Alacritty with a zsh and p10k.
I have zero interest in having AI in my terminal. And needing an account to even use warp is a non starter for me.
The terminal seems like the very last place I’d want A.I. I’m usually using it specifically to be precise and don’t just run commands I don’t understand. If you forget some long command, just use history |grep whatever and see what it was. (And then turn it into an alias or function.)
What the terminal needs is better discoverability. Maybe command recommendation if it isn’t going to hallucinate flags and paths that don’t exist. All this bullshit is just some company trying to capitalize on that desire.
optional autocomplete is a nice-to-have, eager autocomplete is a pain in the ass. as long as it only completes when I ask it to, I don’t mind.
This is faily easy to build using offline models. Only problem is GPU whirring away running typically light terminal commands.
What’s my thoughts? My thoughts are FUCK relying on the internet for basic things. So no “AI terminal” for me. This is yet another way to mine data cloaked in futurism.
Here’s my opinion. This terminal app is inefficient as fuck. I feel like it’s too much bloat for what a terminal should be. She’ll Completions have existed since forever, I don’t get what’s bringing new with that. And all these AI’s that just resell chatgpt are getting expensive. "Please pay me 10$ a month to have OpenAI in your " . If I were to activate all the AI subscriptions in all the apps I use it would go over 100$. If I need ChatGPT I will just go on their website and get it from there. It’s even cheaper that way, 20$ for unlimited use.
And also sharing info with your team THROUGH THE TERMINAL? WHAT KINDA SHIT IS THAT. That should be documentation in THE REPOSITORY, IN THE PROJECT. You’re just fragmenting information, and it’s going to make it harder for you to keep it up to date and for people to find it.
And… I don’t want to force on my team “hey you have to use this terminal otherwise you won’t have the info”. I feel like with this I would be encroaching on their personal space and way of using their computer.
Kitty terminal with my zsh plugins are far better than asking me for an account on your terminal.