this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 125 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 81 points 10 months ago (1 children)

"Alright, now that I'm logged in to my cloud terminal account, let me enter my root password for sudo."

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I would definitely like an AI to remember some complex commands for me. But something small and specifically trained that runs locally

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago

I use fuck, it's not ai but gets the job done.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hushable 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I agree with this 100%!

[–] [email protected] 97 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My thoughts are you can fuck the fuck off.

[–] BOFH666 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago (1 children)

AI that can auto generate all those command line arguments I keep forgetting? Sure.

Closed source terminal that requires account? No way.

[–] MashedTech 8 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 10 months ago

Absolutely not. And they can fuck right off with that whole needing an account to use a terminal thing.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I dunno. Maybe an orange dog? Give it big brown ears.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

Also animate it at ~10fps, making it visibly sad when it can't retrieve the files you ask for.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Throw in a little whimsical wizard while you're at it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Purple monkey or bust

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

You are onto something here...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I prefer a glowing red dot

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago

I have zero interest in having AI in my terminal. And needing an account to even use warp is a non starter for me.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] jelloeater85 12 points 10 months ago

AI can be neat, but this is a solution looking for a problem, like most AI things.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres 33 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.)

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago

Big fat N-O

[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago

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.)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

Maybe if you can use it with a locally running LLM server like ollama, but otherwise fuck no

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

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

[–] MashedTech 14 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] MashedTech 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] MashedTech 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Kitty terminal with my zsh plugins are far better than asking me for an account on your terminal.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago
[–] gmhh 11 points 10 months ago

DO NOT WANT!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Local AI.

To complete complex commands.

Make ne feel like taking to a Star Trek ship computer.

[–] Ozy 10 points 10 months ago

I don't like generative AI in my tools. The little prompt that explains a command and arguments that can be passed as you type is nice, I will give it that, but AI should not be any part of it. Fuck right off with it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Well that's a new way to rm -rf /

No thx

[–] Saracha 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So I took some time to look around and as far as my perspective as a non dev regular user. While this does seem like a useful tool that could be useful for someone who interacts with the command line on a infrequent basis, the drawbacks on it seem pretty big.

  1. Everywhere on their website seems clear that they don't store your data, but I have trouble believing that? Why on earth they would need for you to create a account that you must log in to use the terminal if they don't have a need to monitor your data?
  2. While they claim that they are intending to monetize this by charging enterprise users and letting small teams use it for free, they limit free requests to 20 per dday which seems less than useless.
  3. Maybe this is just some confusion since I don't have any experience as an enterprise but it seems like it would be an unacceptable security risk having a program that it telling you that it sends telemetry back home that users are interacting with using sudo and elevated privileges. Especially when it is a closed box.

Ignoring all the reasons to be cautious and skeptical about AI in general I struggle to see the use case for this particular tool.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

There are lots of fish shell extensions, zsh stuff and loads of things that make suggestions, autocomplete, remember your shell history and remember frequently executed commands and visited directories. All of that works WAY better than the AI suff. (And sometimes also has nice pop-up menus.)

So compared to plain bash without autocomplete and Ctrl+R it may be useful. It is probably a step back for everyone else. Especially if they roughly know what they're doing.

But I didn't try this specific software. Maybe I would if it were free software and connected to a local LLM.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Shouldn't be too hard to make that run locally. Although I'm not sure what I'd use it for at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Although I’m not sure what I’d use it for at the moment.

How do I find all instances of "blarg" in the second column of this CSV file?

I could see it being useful - but I wouldn't want it integrated to my terminal. I'm fine with it being a separate thing I can use.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I think AI exposes how little trust people have in Capitalist organizations.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Hell no! I absolutely do not want AI in anything if it's not running entirely locally.

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