Amazon acquires Fig | Hacker News Reader

Amazon acquires Fig

fig.io

380 pointsfatfox184 comments

> New users will not be able to sign up for Fig's products right now while we focus on optimizing them for existing customers and addressing some needs identified to integrate Fig with AWS.

This sounds a lot like the product is dead, and may emerge again at some point as an AWS hosted, Amazon branded product...

I'd never use a subscription + telemetry laden product like this in my core workflow, but sucks for the current users I guess.

To me the whole post read like "we are aquihired, but we cannot admit we are are aquihired". The closing of registration driving it home.

If AWS bought it for the product, what reason would there ever be to stop the current business model entirely rather than leaving it on its current trajectory for a few months, untill said "needs" are addressed?

Of all PR, I think I may hate acquisition PR the most. It is almost entirely just lies. And the same ones every time.

Just tell us if you just wanted the employees, just wanted some rights, wanted to integrate their product for your use, or just wanted to kill something off. I'm sick of reading the same new release for every acquisition knowing it's bullshit.

I read it as “hosted AWS version coming soon, we will email you when it’s time to migrate”.

If it was just acquihire there probably wouldn’t have a big blog post tying it to AWS. Just negative publicity for acquirer when they could shut down quietly.

The blog post doesn't mean anything. HN is full of congratulatory posts of acquihires. They're all the same. "Now that we're part of $BIGCO we'll be working to integrate our technology into $BIGCO."

It never happens.

If $BIGCO had any intent to keep the product along, you'd be reading the post on $BIGCO's blog, not $FAILEDSTARTUP's blog.

Acquirers typically add terms to deal preventing vanity announcements and defining shutdown timeline. They don’t want the overhead of maintaining, or the negative brand hit. Each case is different, but there’s always a plan. They probably have some reason to keep maintaining the current customers/product, we can just guess what it is.

There is absolutely zero reason to believe that there is any plan to maintain this tiny product, let alone in any way to that is compatible with existing customers (if they exist).

Fig is only two, three years old at most.

> If it was just acquihire there probably wouldn’t have a big blog post tying it to AWS. Just negative publicity for acquirer when they could shut down quietly.

That’s a good point.

But what reason is there to disable new registrations?

Terms of the acquisition, most likely. Existing customers are worth $x/yr. New customers with the new product are worth $y/yr. Finance doesn't want $x competing with $y. Something something financial models making the deal worth what they paid, so closing registration is simply part of the deal that was signed.

They want to move the customers to a new AWS service (that will be this product rebranded with AWS) and tie into AWS infrastructure instead of using a special system for sign in.

By preventing sign ups, they fix the number of accounts that will need to be migrated in future.

I was at Cloud9 which was acquired by Amazon. We took most of the existing frontend and tech and rebuilt the backend on AWS, then relaunched it as AWS Cloud9. In the meantime we sunset the existing service.

I'd assume the same thing is going to happen here.

As an aside, can you explain to me why Cloud9 has never worked correctly in Safari? The cursor positioning in text has been messed up for as long as I can remember. AWS has never fixed it, despite having owned it for over a decade.

I worked at AWS from 2010 to 2014 after also getting acqui-hired (AWS SDK for PHP, fka CloudFusion).

How was the exit on your end

> If AWS bought it for the product, what reason would there ever be to stop the current business model entirely rather than leaving it on its current trajectory for a few months, untill said "needs" are addressed?

That’s an easy one: if it’s burning money like crazy on its current hosting, but only because of rents extracted by one of their competitors, not for any inherent OpEx-intensity; and that therefore Amazon expects it to be profitable when moved to live rent-free on their hosting.

Do you know of any product that was acquihire and wasn't decimated?

I think there’s the definition of acquihire.

GitHub?

I don't think anyone believed the GitHub acquisition was just an aquihire.

Reminds me of Slapdash's and Command-E acquisitions. Both still living in a limbo last I checked...

Command-E is now Dropbox Dash and has been receiving fairly heavy promotion.

I would never use a cloud-syncing cloud-connected terminal for simple security and privacy reasons alone, not to mention the fact that if it goes down I become basically disabled as a developer or admin.

Several companies have tried to SaaSify the terminal and failed, so I suspect I am not alone here.

"We've noticed that there's a component of the computing infrastructure that isn't sending everything you do to the cloud and charging monthly rent..."

Yes I'm genuinely shocked at the other comments here saying they use this happily; it should be a cause for concern. That it's now landing in Amazon's lap, doubly so.

> All cloud features are opt-in and your data is encrypted at rest. For autocomplete, all of your keystrokes are processed locally and never leave your device.

Fig is a great product.

If Fig goes down, you fall back to the regular shell that doesn't have autocomplete etc. If Fig gets hacked, that's scary, then again GitHub and others are similarly big targets.

Idk though, this doesn't seem useful enough to me as an individual that I'd bother looking into it. Maybe for a team or company.

As a side note, if your security relies on you typing things into your terminal, you're doing it wrong. AWS even makes you check a box when generating creds that basically says "I understand the way I'm doing this is insecure" when generating creds that will be used that way.

There are degrees of insecurity. Typing secrets into a terminal is not good. Typing secrets into a terminal with telemetry is worse.

I would use this as the way for company's command line tools to be provisioned to me as a team member. This means my tools can be separated from work tools

What’s wrong with a company git repo for that?

do people use git to provision environments? That is not a thing. What is in the repo? A dockerfile?

> Amazon has acquired Fig's technology!

That's a euphemism. These companies "acquire technology" in the same sense that revolutionaries acquired Louis XVI's head.

The telemetry was the exact reason I never tried it. It looked amazing, but wasn't keen on fig getting every one of my inputs

It actually makes sense for Amazon integrating this with the whole browser based shell thing (which is a sensible secure default for a lot of people).

Having something with autocomplete that works seamlessly with their services seems like a better idea than a plain prompt if you're going to use their shell. Hopefully they do something sensible and customer-centric with the telemetry stuff, that seemed to be the big drawback for many.

They give a timeline of a few weeks, so presumably we'll see soon enough.

Yeah, that is my expectation about its future as well. I really enjoyed using Fig for clear CLI introspection for many of my common workflows.

I am fully expecting that I'll have to go back to zsh-autosuggestions once the current iteration is fully wound down.

Isn't Fig open source? Now'd be the time for people to fork it while there's still the opportunity to do so if they find genuine value in the project.

My favorite 'acquihire' story is when Oracle bought out MySQL and the creator forked it and made MariaDB.

IIRC only their autocompletion recipes are. Not the actual application itself.

    when Oracle bought out MySQL and the creator forked it and made MariaDB

Not quite.

Wiki tells me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#History

Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB (the company) in 2008.

Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010.

    The day Oracle announced the purchase of Sun, Michael "Monty" Widenius forked MySQL, launching MariaDB, and took a swath of MySQL developers with him.

Correct, I just kinda lumped it all together, apologies on the mix up. I rather miss when Sun was not owned by Oracle.

Yeah this is cloud9 all over again. Killing new registrations, eventually forcing existing users to migrate to AWS, for a worse product as a service.

Acquisitions are usually great for the shareholders, and usually bad for the employees and the customers.

At a startup, the employees are also shareholders.

These features are nice, but I've never liked the idea of having to use a whole new terminal application to get them.

I may be becoming a dinosaur, but it's not that I'm not willing to try new things. On the contrary, after many years of being rigid about having one true development environment, I've moved away from Emacs to VS Code, and work from more heterogeneous environments instead of being 100% Mac. So these platform-specific thick client apps no longer feel like the way to go.

Sticking to Vim and other very well-established CLIs is partially what enabled flexibility for me. As long as I have access to a *nix machine locally or over SSH, I have a capable dev setup that I'm well-versed in. Same thing for the past 8 jobs I've bounced around in, whether in-office or remote, with whatever security restrictions, with or without a desk, maybe with just a 13" laptop. It's the lowest common denominator. Meanwhile my teammates at my current job are constantly trying to protect their workstation setups so they can use their IDEs locally, and they've also been forced to switch IDEs twice in the past couple of years.

And this isn't coming from some FOSS ideology. I don't personally care about any of that, but the best tools are sometimes FOSS. I've got a Mac and can deal with Linux as needed.

There's no need for a new terminal. Their homepage literally says "IDE-style autocomplete for your existing terminal".

I also thought the wrong thing at first since the big front and center title on the homepage says "The next-generation command line."

To be honest I do think it's time we move on from emulating teletypes, but I also believe that whatever comes next has to be an open standard, with competing implementations.

There's a whole graveyard out there of "next-gen" terminal projects, and none of those still alive seems to be gaining dominance. I don't think writing down a spec would help this, but it would be great if whatever emerged victorious had one.

You may be thinking of Warp (https://www.warp.dev/)

I think the part of this that feels wrong is that it steps into the realm of so many other perfectly good tools, and it seems like it’s there to enshrine crappy local development and deployment practices.

If you need reporting on the scripts your developers are running on their local machines, that probably means they have too much access to live environments. Guardrails and reporting should be in your CI/CD process and your source control.

Shells like fish or shell plug-ins already handle autocomplete nicely, so that feature isn’t that useful.

If you need env/dotfile management you probably need to spend time making a proper development environment rather than shimmying in a tool to make doing the wrong thing easier.

SSH key management is so trivially accomplished by numerous methods like configuration management or built-in solutions offered by cloud providers. Plus, most development teams almost certainly give out too much SSH access as it stands.

If you need to SSH regularly that means your application isn’t shipping logs and your local development tooling isn’t good enough.

Curious to learn more about your switch from Emacs to VSCode?

I'm a super confused soul, and currently I use all of them:

- Emacs (for clojure / lisps / big projects).

- NeoVim (for when I want to work in the shell, smaller scripts/playground, ssh).

- VScode (js / ts / frontend / figma / etc).

I've made both my vim and emacs keybindings / features almost identical, so there is limited context switching there.

I feel very slow in VSCode, I don't even have one of my most common task optimised in VSCode yet: grepping something and quickly moving to that buffer.

It's not a different terminal application, but an overlay that gives you autocomplete-style suggestions in your existing terminal emulator. I don't know all the terminal emulators it works with since it's MacOS only, but it works in both iTerm2 and the VSCode terminal, granted that you're not using a terminal multiplexer like tmux (which makes it useless for my workflow).

Yeah I just stopped paying for Jetbrains to move 100% to VS Code just a few months ago

I was using both before but the upcoming annual payment reminded me that its over

That was fast. Fig's HackerNews launch (May 25, 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27277819

Have seen Brendan talk a lot about it on Twitter.

Interesting - I tried Fig for few days few months ago, it gave me more headaches than relief so uninstalled it. Surprised that it made into a viable product and shocked it actually got acquired.

Same experience. Tried a few times in different machines and it either froze the machine, ate up crazy memory, or other random behavior. I’m shocked this made it anywhere.

Congratulations! I've been using it for about a year or so. Hopefully their product will continue to exist... that's what their blog says now, but that's pretty much what everyone says at first.

> Hopefully their product will continue to exist

They seem to have built a decent community, so I can see it continuing, provided the core/all code for Fig is open source. In the last 6 weeks, 57 new contributors took the time to create 62 issues and 111 new contributors took the time to comment. These are very heathy community metrics, but there hasn't been a lot of code activity, which would make sense if they were focused on the sale to AWS.

Source for my insights from https://devboard.gitsense.com/withfig

Full Disclosure: This is my tool

AFAICT the core of Fig isn't open source. (Why else would there be a waiting list for Linux users if they could just grab the code for Fig and build it themselves?)

What you are looking at seems to be a repository of autocompletion specs and some server to publish them.

I love this product, have contributed several times to it, and I'm a little torn. One thing I am thinking about now, is that the completion specs are MIT-licensed, and it should be possible to use them to re-implement a basic open-source version of the autocompletion product... https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete

Congratulations!? I do hope that means AWS’s ever growing cli commands will be all fig now (or will be)? It’s getting a bit long in the tooth. What about support outside of AWS? Will fig still be as awesome in iTerm2 with what-ever-is-in-%PATH%?

He’s thrilled because it’s good for him, not for the users.

Is it not?

Any venture funded product has a sword of Damocles over its head. After acquisition the company product is much less likely to be shut down in the long run (unless it’s Google).

No, after acquisition usually the existing product is usually shutdown or phased out while its features are absorbed into some <new thing>.

With Google, everything has a huge chance of being shutdown, unless its Gmail or Search, but in both of those cases they will also continue to get worse over time.

or at least become more annoyingly entangled with stuff, like Minecraft + Microsoft

Days since AWS last announced they were killing a devtool service: 4

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37254198)

The blog post reads like an acqui-hire, which almost always means the product gets shut down or open sourced and left for dead.

> Existing users will continue to be able to use Fig and will receive ongoing support. What's more, we are now making all the paid Fig Team features completely free.

This sounds like a win for users.

It means they're abandoning the product IME

If they aren't making money directly off Fig, they're integrating it somehow.

Except people just hearing about Fig now can't sign up.

Yeah this is true. I'm deeply disappointed with my experience with Fig. Despite high anticipation among my friends in the community, the inability to log in has rendered it useless for us, prompting me to uninstall fig. I hope Fig addresses these issues to provide a more satisfying user experience in the future with a proper timeline.

can't blame them. work on what seems to be a obviously needed tool, manage it for 2.5 years, then get "not acquired" by Amazon to take it off your hands, especially since the money was coming from enterprise and larger teams to begin with.

Plugging a project of mine: I've been working on a similar idea for the era of LLMs: https://butterfi.sh.

It's much more bare-bones than Fig but perhaps useful if you're looking for an alternative! Send me feedback!

> Within Butterfish Shell you can send a ChatGPT prompt by just starting a command with a capital letter, for example:

This is a dangerous assumption. Not all commands are lowercase. Interaction with an external service should be a deliberate, discrete action on the user's part.

agree, nothing wrong with something like an `llm` prefix

I like that a lot! It would be awesome if the client running on goal mode had capabilities to request some search engine API + do some crawling. Imagine getting the info out of up to date github issues or directly from AWS docs.

Is this in any way related to the fish shell or is this just a very unfortunate name?

Just curious, do you have any intent on adding local model support?

I've experimented with it, the reason I haven't yet added it is that I want deployment to be seamless, and it's not trivial to ship a binary that would (without extra fuss or configuration) efficiently support Metal and CUDA, plus download the models in a graceful way. This is of course possible, but still hard, and not clear if it's the right place to spend energy. I'm curious how you think about it - is your primary desire to work offline or avoid sending data to OpenAI? Or both?

The latter mostly. It's also free, uncensored, and can never disappear from under me.

FWIW, from my understanding llama.cpp is pretty easy to integrate and is reasonably fast for being API agnostic. Ollama embeds it, for example. No pressure, just pointing it out :)

First time hearing of fig, other than when the name was used for a precursor to Docker Compose.

Is this effectively very similar to Atuin?

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

i never thought fig or warp would ever work. requiring an account and a subscription to use CLI tools sounds ludicrous. but they seem to have found a silver bullet with AWS since having an account is a requirement anyway.

good luck to them on what comes next.

As a regular terminal user, I didn't find Fig particularly useful to begin with, but this just made me remove it entirely

Seems like tough competition in this space. Warp has what's essentially Github Copilot in the CLI, and it's the same price.

Beyond that, actual GH Copilot does a damn good job of crafting any CLI command that you can describe.

Fig works in any terminal though, and its free tier gives me useful enough recommendations and docs. It's very useful to be able to use IDE-like autocomplete inside my IDE, which is the terminal I use 99% of the time. As far as I'm aware, Warp is really a standalone gig.

Isn't it mac only?

Where is open source alternative?

Will be interesting to see what happens to this long term, but hopefully means good things. I use the tool personally but really for largely basic things.

The dropdown for autocomplete is far from necessary but a nice addition. Helping with completing commands that I don't use often but know the basics of like "aws s3 cp" is nice. But because of that I could just never justify spending money on it.

Hopefully it isn't abandoned, but maybe this will also mean they don't have to try to find artificial reasons (or bloat) to convince people to pay and can just focus on the core offering.

I had completely forgot about Fig, I remember trying it out on my previous laptop, it didn't offer anything more than my zsh-autocomplete, which made me send in my feedback before uninstalling.

The telemetry part didn't bug me that much, but the product itself was cool, reminds me of warp.dev

Congratz on the acquisition.

Tangentially related:

One of the most annoying thing is to learn about an interesting project by the post were they announce that they are aquihired, or even worse, closing down because of lack of interest.

Congrats! Big fan of Fig and excited to see the UX brought to aws CLIs

This is very damaging for other startups. You create something, then you ask people to believe you and invest their time and sometimes money with you.

Then you, in act of desperation, sell out and sell your users...

The issue is, people are already super skeptical when these startups start asking for things, this just makes them even harder to get users to trust you as a emerging company or product with data and usage.

Startups don't have big reputations to protect unless they're tied to someone famous, and also they need a path towards acquisition for early investors to care. There isn't really a way around that.

I liked fig, but I got rid of it when I saw that email.

Congrats to the team on the sale! Sadly, seems like it’s dead now. Happy they got paid :)

I checked Fig when it was announced but preferred Warp for some reason. I think it looked nicer and was snappier.

I could never love it, but hopefully that's a nice exit for everyone involved. Congrats.

Pretty cool for the Fig team.

Probably not the entire team.

Check out Gorilla-CLI. An open source alternative to Fig, that’s also LLM powered!

https://github.com/gorilla-llm/gorilla-cli

Check out this cool research from UC Berkeley!

Tried to check it out, but I got "Signups are currently disabled" :(

> New users will not be able to sign up for Fig's products right now while we focus on optimizing them for existing customers and addressing some needs identified to integrate Fig with AWS.

I was trying to get it working and it seems like running `fig login` in the terminal and then restarting the app enables the terminal autocomplete!

I feel sorry for their remote employees as their company just sold them out.

I installed Fig just now and got "Something went wrong. Signups are currently disabled." when I tried to use it.

Their servers have been overwhelmed by Hacker News traffic presumably.

There is a note: ``` Note: While we integrate with AWS, Fig is currently not accepting new sign ups ```

Yeah, now I see it.

Banning signups just when they get an inrush like this seems a boneheaded move. You never know who you can upsell on AWS later.

brew remove fig

Really makes me think they don't intend to keep it around for long.

Seems like an acquihire!

I had never heard about them, but for the life of me, I cannot imagine sufficient paying customers: it's zsh/fish, basically. Sharing the settings is not really a $12/month productivity boost. Acquihire sounds likely.

I've been a personal paying customer going on 2 years now. The biggest benefit I get from fig is their "build a script / cli" functionality. With it you can define UI elements like "list all branches" and you have a nice UI sector and then you can string together code snippets using the outputs of the UI elements. So I have some fig scripts that prompt me for half a dozen inputs and then execute bash and python based on the outputs.

Fig has been a godsend for acting as glue for one-off bash scripts that are added to repos.

I've been using Run [0] for this purposes.

[0]: https://github.com/TekWizely/run

I’ve been using Fig since the beta days and I love it. I’m sure there will be some changes but at least they didn’t sell to Google. Congrats to Brendan and the team.

Fig is awesome. Congrats to the team!

So AWS's dev ex will get better?

very likely this will become part of AWS CodeWhisperer. I wouldnt be surprised if MSFT or GOOG going after WARP for example to counter balance.

Is there anything similar for Linux?

Seems like direnv and shell scripts in a shared git repo could be similar:

https://direnv.net/

There is a Linux and (I believe) a Windows binary of Fig available. You might need to hunt a bit to find it, at least, I needed to last year. Their Discord used to be the place for that info.

Except we (new users) can't use it regardless, since signups are closed.

How does that align with Amazon's product line? Is Fig an online product?

Given that they're shutting down registration, it probably doesn't.

Seems like I dodged a bullet. When I interviewed there the founder asked very generic questions that may as well have come straight out of an Amazon leadership principles pamphlet. I bet Amazon will be a good fit for them. I feel bad for the employees who likely wanted to work for a startup, not Amazon. I’d be surprised if they got much from the acquihire either.

You join a startup in hopes of it getting acquired or going public some day. Fig was never going to go public so if I worked there I’d be happy about the acquisition assuming that I wasn’t stiffed on my stock options when joining.

Unless it's an acquihire where you get ~nothing for your stock and you have to interview to keep your job.

Lol and it's at amazon -- I imagine they'll lose a bunch of staff over that fact alone.

Acquihires generally get a better comp deal than hires, they just don't tend to make much off the acquisition deal unless they are high up. If their comp includes accelerated vesting rather than the terrible Amazon slowcoach vesting it could be decent.

I had some exploratory conversations with them last year.

The product was nice, but their business plan made zero sense to me, so I decided to not continue the process.

Ehh, time to uninstall. Too bad, it worked great for me.

I'll stick with Zsh completions

How popular is fig compared to warp?

"I am thrilled to announce that the Fig team will be joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon has acquired Fig's technology! "

That's possibly the most inefficient way of saying "AWS bought Fig" but I guess it makes some people happier to frame it that way

In any event, I'll pass on "the CLI with a subscription that sends telemetry".

Paying hard earned dollars every month for a terminal is something so out of the realm of the possible for me I'm honestly baffled to see this has any customers...

We usually change such titles to something like "$Acquirer aquires $Acquiree" and I've done that above now.

That wording implies an asset sale which is for anyone involved in or doing business with Fig a big difference. In that case existing ownership and obligations stay with the original entity (probably something like Fig Inc, Delaware corp), the whole team gets hired on at Amazon, Amazon buys the tech they want for some payment the Fig board signs off on, and then someone goes in to clean up and wind down Fig Inc. It's common when big companies buy much smaller companies because doing a full purchase can be a lot more complicated.

... and ther's a big difference in taxation.

100% I would imagine there are big differences on both sides, and possibly some ways to exempt some of the payment for assets against the cost of building them. People don't usually write much about this level of detail but it would be interesting to see.

> That's possibly the most inefficient way of saying "AWS bought Fig" but I guess it makes some people happier to frame it that way

Often that kind of language is employed when the actual transaction was structured as an asset sale coupled with en-masse hiring of the team, rather than a true acquisition of the company as a complete entity, which is not an unusual scenario when a company is in distress.

This seem like perfect replacement of Amazon's cloud shell thing

If the arrangement involved both a tech purchase and a contractual obligation for employees to stay with AWS for a set period, simply saying "Fig was acquired" wouldn't be accurate. Given that Amazon is a publicly traded company, making such misleading statements is a no-go.

Amazon buying Fig doesn't imply the team joins AWS.

when a company buys another company it kinda does the opposite would be the outlier

Amazon isn't the same thing as AWS. Amazon might have bought Fig and kept the team separate, or they might've kept the tech and shortly after let the team go.

It's much more common for the acquired company to continue as an entity in its own right with only the board changing in the short term, and often continuing as a brand within the acquirer's business in the long term. Integrating a existing team into a company is hard. That said, Amazon has a lot of experience doing exactly that. I think they'll be fine.

> There aren't any updates to share at this time on future plans,

Wait for the “Our amazing journey” post where Amazon is just going to shut their product down

Yep. Unfortunately great for the founders and (hopefully) for the team, but my first thought is always "another one bites the dust". Here's hoping we're both wrong.

Well, not that I have any particular insight on how acquisitions work at AWS. But as a recent former employee in Professional Services, I do know how AWS operates as far as go to market strategies since we officially came under sales. Even though I was a billable consultant.

It would make no sense for AWS to treat this as ongoing concern. They are probably going to integrate it with their other products - Cloud 9 , the AWS CLI, CloudShell etc.

Wait, this is Autocomplete for $12/month?

Based on their frontpage example videos, it seems to be for Mac users who don't know any better. I don't see anything useful that isn't FOSS already.

1. Packaging solution in an easy to use tool is what software engineers do. Nothing wrong with non-FOSS solution.

2. You could provide a list of FOSS solutions to replace Fig.io, even better write a tutorial on how to install and setup those solutions.

Either the FOSS solutions are lacking something or all those corporate customers are fools.

Even if the only thing fig adds is easier set up and integration and consistency of setup between users that could be enough to justify the cost.

Saving an hour of engineering time spent fiddling with your CLI config every year makes this a good value for a business.

Yes. Plenty of people know how to DIY or can figure it out, it's not a special skill. They just don't consider it worthwhile.

Wait till you learn about Raycast. https://www.raycast.com

I've heard a lot of good things about Raycast. I'm very tempted to jump ship from Alfred. Still hanging on.

I've also been a paid user of Alfred for nearly a decade. I tried Raycast in it's early stages, also became a paid user, and haven't gone back to Alfred.

I adore and appreciate Alfred, it was one of the first applications I would install on a new Mac. However, Raycast is a very well polished product and has been a great add-on to the daily arsenal.

Try it. I've jumped ship a while ago, and it's amazing. I miss it a lot on Linux and Windows, FlowLauncher doesn't feel nearly as polished and I already forgot which launcher I use on my Linux install.

The ones I love the most are Keepass, Bitrise, and the fact that you can just press enter to join the Google Meet call attached to the next upcoming meeting.

ive been using raycast on a new computer, i prefer alfred, much faster, and i know the tooling better.

I use Raycast - it's pretty dope and I also made my own extensions

I was a 10-ish year paid user of alfred and decided to try raycast about a year ago. I've never gone back to alfred.

I reckon scripts and secrets sharing within teams is the primary feature customers pay for.

No, its free, just some "advanced" features cost money

It does more than just autocomplete and it does it well.

I can't help but not want to use a CLI I have to log into.

Another so called 'incredible journey' which the VCs (including YC) accelerated an exit.

nobody's forcing amazon to do anything they dont want to do lol

but it is true that this is a rare devtools startup acquisition by amazon. i cant think of many here (cloud9 was the last one i know, and that was 2016) but that could be due to my ignorance.

Oh times have changed. In days past acquisitions of startups by big tech were met with congratulation and adulation. Today they are met with dread and despair.

is this an aquahire?

To spare someone else a research, it’s another term for ‘talent acquisition’ [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring

In times of employers market it's less likely to see aquahires

The market is starting to shift. It ain't where it was a year and a half ago... but the numbers say, it ain't what it was a few months ago.

No, presumably these employees will be based on dry land

I'm not one that laughs at others' auto-correct bloopers. I have made quite a lot of mistakes myself. But your quick reply made me laugh for a good 90-sec or so.

Right? To me it's more than just a cheap joke because it opens such possibilities. My first thought was of Amazon expanding out under Puget Sound in Bioshock-esque sunken office buildings.

lmao some times auto-correct typo's are better than what you wrote indeed

Rumor is they're going to offshore the whole operation...

Once they dry off after leaving the hiring pool at least

Slow. Clap.

No, it's an aquahire. They're joining Amazon...

How does one join AWS?

leetcode and reducing self-respect

Underrated comment :)

1. Wrong thread.

2. IMHO: Be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I've never heard a happy story about Amazon that didn't involve a metric ton of Kool-Aid.

Not wrong thread. The title of this post was the same as the blog entry, "Fig has joined AWS", before it was editorialized by HN eds.

Kool-aid was mostly leaders ending regurgitating leadership principles and gaming it (without internalizing the greatness of it)

I've seen some employees that drank it too much.

IMHO: Drinking the Kool-Aid is OK if you like the flavor. Just realize you are doing it.

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