Yeah, iTerm is a labour of love for the author, George Nachman, and people were acting like the ragebait-hateporn-parasocial crowd, swarming onto anything that promises a hearty 2-minute hate.
I have no idea how to solve that problem though, it's just part of our zeitgeist and I hope people get bored with it sooner rather than later.
It's useful to frame the event from the perspective of the users who were angry with the inclusion of the feature. AI is *everywhere* right now and the fatigue is getting to people. Many products are adding AI features that are genuinely useless and are only there for marketing purposes. Many products are putting their AI features front and center at the expense of their core competency etc.
People who responded with anger ("ragebait-hateporn") at this feel pressured on all sides by this AI hype cycle (not saying all AI features are hype, just that we are in a hype cycle where many are useless). It's getting frustrating and tired. For many it feels like the crypto hype cycle again.
It's easy to understand how "great, now even my terminal is putting AI features in?!" is the response, especially with a tool as beloved as iTerm, and as "close to the machine" as a terminal is. It's one thing for Notion to put AI things in, it's another for the interface where I regularly type sudo to do massive operations across my machine.
The correct response to false allegations followed by insults and threats is anything but to admit it. The software in question is a popular free and open source software that has more than a decade of trust. The AI feature fundamentally requires the user to actively engage with in order to use it [1], with no nagging or coercion whatsoever. In fact, the only people reminding us of its existence are the Mastodon mobs, not iTerm.
The feature wasn't added out of pure hype either. It was likely inspired by user feedback [2], and the dev ultimately added it because it was useful for him personally [3].
Despite all of this, people are raging about unprovable nefarious motives and making claims about spyware, as if it's Windows we're talking about. They pretend as if it's maintained by some faceless for-profit entity trying to screw us over instead of a sole developer trying to create good software in his spare time. Some are even openly fantasizing about inflicting physical violence [4].
This kind of behavior should be condemned, not praised.
I have no idea how to solve that problem though, it's just part of our zeitgeist and I hope people get bored with it sooner rather than later.