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?
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.
Not just that, they want an email just to get a download link. Call me when someone forks it with local AI.
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.
fzf does the job
Yeah; & by the way, warp is funding fzf, as there’s a big thank you banner on fzf & fzf-vim’s github pages nowadays. I’m glad fzf is getting support, of course; though it feels odd somehow.
I agree with this 100%!
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.
People using cli are probably more skilled and their knowledge has been fed into these ai models.
I am not skilled at all. I only use it because I hate Microsoft and Apple more.
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.
Absolutely not. And they can fuck right off with that whole needing an account to use a terminal thing.
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.
Throw in a little whimsical wizard while you’re at it.
Purple monkey or bust
You are onto something here…
I prefer a glowing red dot
I have zero interest in having AI in my terminal. And needing an account to even use warp is a non starter for me.
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.
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.
You can thank me later.
Wait, it’s Postman but better?
Thank you, I have tried Insomnia in the past but it doesn’t work for my team as they refuse to implement pre-request scripts properly. I assume insomnium is the same.
I love hopscotch(formerly postwoman) https://hoppscotch.io/ thank me later
Big fat N-O
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.)
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.)
Exactly. I generally like typing out my commands because I’m learning and it helps me remember what I’m doing and what the commands mean/how they work. And if it’s a particularly long one I’ll make an alias for it.
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.
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.
Sounds like a major security risk. All it takes is one “hallucination” (and an overly trusting engineer) from the latest and greatest bullshit generator to compromise an entire network
Yeah. Sometimes a “barrier to entry” on running commands serves as an important forced pause to help prevent people from charging headfirst into dangerous options they don’t understand.
It’s something I often have to consider at work. It’s not too hard to script out ways to make it easier to do certain things, but is the trade off of making it easier to do accidentally or without understanding the full effects worse than the hassle of doing it the “hard way”?
Yes, let’s get a list of all machines in this network segment, then loop through sending shutdown commands so everything is ready for the hardware move!
What do you mean that the switch itself is in the list of machines? And that I just shut it off prematurely, so now we need to shut down everything locally… shit.
(Details fudged to protect the guilty)
Maybe if you can use it with a locally running LLM server like ollama, but otherwise fuck no
Nice idea for fun and diversity (you can’t prohibit people to make such apps after all) but in daily usage? No, no, no and no