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?
My thoughts are you can fuck the fuck off.
AI that can auto generate all those command line arguments I keep forgetting? Sure.
Closed source terminal that requires account? No way.
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.
Absolutely not. And they can fuck right off with that whole needing an account to use a terminal thing.
If I have to use a cloud service or create an account to use the terminal, it’s a no for me dawg.
Did warp ever follow through with allowing folks to use it without signing into your GitHub account?
I have zero interest in having AI in my terminal. And needing an account to even use warp is a non starter for me.
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.
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.)