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?
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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.)
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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Bad idea
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.
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.
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Wait. An email just to get a download link AND a cloud account. Fuck that.
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.
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
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.
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.
Absolutely not. And they can fuck right off with that whole needing an account to use a terminal thing.
I have zero interest in having AI in my terminal. And needing an account to even use warp is a non starter for me.
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.
Purple monkey or bust
Also animate it at ~10fps, making it visibly sad when it can’t retrieve the files you ask for.
Throw in a little whimsical wizard while you’re at it.
I prefer a glowing red dot
You are onto something here…
As long as AI is not being forced into the existing terminal standards, it’s good, as you can just choose to not use a terminal with AI.
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.
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.
