People claiming that the negative response to OpenAI integration into iTerm is a knee-jerk reaction by a bunch of AI haters I think are missing the point.
a) Putting an LLM into iTerm introduces almost no benefit that I can think of, other than "shiny new technology", and is a waste of time and resources. I've heard some people suggest that putting an AI prompt into the terminal could be helpful for generating commands for difficult applications like FFMpeg, but you can also do the same thing by just asking ChatGPT in your browser and copying/pasting, which is what we've always done
b) More importantly, I absolutely do not want there to be any code in the terminal that writes commands for me or on my behalf. The command line is intimately connected to the OS and has access to every file, environment variable and socket on my system. iTerm just had to patch a bug where its URL handling and link previews was causing a remote code execution, so I would have expected this "feature" to cause security issues in the same way
Terminals are also just a fundamentally conservative application. Shiny new technology has never been a clean fit into terminals. Imagine if iTerm decided to integrate NFTs and crypto, or optionally link your Meta account so you can use your terminal in Virtual Reality, would probably draw a similar negative response.
> you can also do the same thing by just asking ChatGPT in your browser and copying/pasting, which is what we've always done
The whole point of software to reduce this kind of tedious manual work. You can also do the same when writing code instead of using Copilot, for example, yet the latter significantly improves productivity in practice precisely because it's one hotkey away.
> More importantly, I absolutely do not want there to be any code in the terminal that writes commands for me or on my behalf.
Have you actually tried to use this feature? At no point does it submit commands directly to the terminal. It has to be explicitly enabled, for starters, by setting it up with a valid API key or custom server URL. Then you need to activate a specific command to open a textbox where you type in your input. Then you get the result back, and you have to use yet another shortcut to actually run the resulting command.
There's just no way to trigger this stuff accidentally. You have to very deliberately carry out several steps to get to the point where there's any commands being generated at all, much less actually running on your system.
> Imagine if iTerm decided to integrate NFTs and crypto, or optionally link your Meta account so you can use your terminal in Virtual Reality, would probably draw a similar negative response.
Your examples are fundamentally different in that they don't add any clear utility to the core function of the terminal, which is interacting with the shell.
a) Putting an LLM into iTerm introduces almost no benefit that I can think of, other than "shiny new technology", and is a waste of time and resources. I've heard some people suggest that putting an AI prompt into the terminal could be helpful for generating commands for difficult applications like FFMpeg, but you can also do the same thing by just asking ChatGPT in your browser and copying/pasting, which is what we've always done
b) More importantly, I absolutely do not want there to be any code in the terminal that writes commands for me or on my behalf. The command line is intimately connected to the OS and has access to every file, environment variable and socket on my system. iTerm just had to patch a bug where its URL handling and link previews was causing a remote code execution, so I would have expected this "feature" to cause security issues in the same way
Terminals are also just a fundamentally conservative application. Shiny new technology has never been a clean fit into terminals. Imagine if iTerm decided to integrate NFTs and crypto, or optionally link your Meta account so you can use your terminal in Virtual Reality, would probably draw a similar negative response.