iTerm2 and AI Hype Overload
xeiaso.net
xeiaso.net
It's absolutely rediculous that supporting something, thats opt-in not opt-out is causing a ruckus lol, people really have too much fuckin time on their hands to bitch about things.
This is like bitching that Firefox allows us to enable a proxy server, and throwing a fit that a feature exists even as an option to be enabled.
The proxy server was not created through petabyte-scale plagiarism.
A proxy server does not use half a million kilowatt hours of electricity a day.
This is nothing like complaining that Firefox allows you to enable a proxy server.
I use ChatGPT but I also think the AI detractors have some good points...
Im being facetious, but my point is that raw power/data usage isn't by itself a bad thing, as long as it is providing commensurate value. Now you can argue thy don't do that yet, but that would require a lt more nuance than "using resources bad".
For the record I believe a lot of the "AI Bad" discourse is a direct carryover from "NFT/Crypto Bad" discourse. A lot of the annoying voices that were loudly promoting NFTs and dodgy web3 companies two years ago are now LOUDLY promoting dodgy AI companies...
Some of it still rings true, a lot of it seems like "twitter is still mad"
If I had to draw a historical analogy, it'd be to the dot com bubble: Yes, it was a bubble – yet the Internet turns out to have been real. It just was almost impossible to guess correctly as to which company would still be around after the bubble burst (to say nothing of the now-giants that didn't even exist back then).
But that kind of bubble is very different from crypto, which so far has yet to prove that there was any substance to it, despite having gone through at least one global hype cycle and bubble burst two years ago. I don't recall there being two years of frantic search of an application for the web/Internet back in the early 2000s.
iTerm has always been an "everything and the kitchen sink" type of project/software. If you want minimalism, especially in the interest of security, it's definitely not the terminal emulator for you – its attack surface must be massive.
I happily use iTerm2 and will continue to do so.
I have, in principle, nothing against an opt-in feature that requires unmistakable user consent and a specific sequence of actions to enable. I'm just kinda tired of AI in general, and I'm also worried about potential licensing issues that may arise if you use genAI in your terminal to write scripts that weren't permissively licensed before being used as part of a training set. That's nothing new though, I had, and have, the same concerns with Github Copilot.
I also recognize that my complaint is pretty personal (not counting the licensing thing). My low-level annoyance with genAI isn't something the AI industry at large should seek to resolve. Maybe I'm more set in my ways than I should be at this point in my life. Either way, it's a factor for me and a few other tech people I know.
Weird. Does the company forbid its staff to use AI assistants?
I get that they want to find out what you know. If you know how to solve problems using an AI, isn't that what they are going to (increasingly) expect you to do on the job?
In fact, demonstrating that you can effectively use AI to develop, would seem to me to be something they'd want to see.
Why would you work somewhere that prescribed your workflow?
You're a professional. Do your job as you see fit, whether that involves AI assistance or not.
> demonstrating that you can effectively use AI to develop, would seem to me to be something they'd want to see.
Irrelevant. They want you to meet business needs more than play with today's shiny technology.
While I don't use it, I'll grant you that AI is good at solving small, repetitive, tedious problems; stuff that's maybe a bit too domain-specific to be widely available in a library, but that's consistently subtly different enough that you have to sink time into either making different implementations or trying to generalize.
AI is generally going to be poor at solving novel problems, and while that's something that you can never really use in an interview for a variety of reasons, I can send you a problem that's likely new to you and see how you tackle it.
I'll also admit that there's not a single good way to do that as it is. Technical interviewing is more of an art than a science, and it's difficult to get really good signal from an interview, generally speaking.
I've been able to tackle problems that would have otherwise taken up too much time and effort between my jobs as both expert witness for software related Federal lawsuits and as a father of two young children.
Here's just a sampling of what I've accomplished since I started using these tools:
A convolutional neural network trained using PyTorch to predict the next chord (as tablature) on a guitar based on image data. Includes labeling software for the image data as well as an iOS app for hosting and running the model.
A web framework written in C using clang blocks for the DSL, per request memory arena, and complete JSON-API compatible ORM, JWT auth, and enough sanitizers and leak detect to make your head spin.
A custom CLI DSL modeled somewhat on AWK syntax written with Python Lex Yacc for turning CSV data into matplotlib graphics.
A custom web framework written in F# that compiles to JS with Fable.
LLMs helped with looking up documentation, higher level architecture, fixing errors, and yes, plenty of boilerplate!
All of this being said, I brought with me almost 30 years of experience writing software and a pretty good idea high level of how to go about building these things. The devil is in the details and that's where the LLM was most useful.
Beyond that, if it helps you spend more time with your family while still being good at your job, that's always a win.
IMHO, this is the same as disabling linting or compiling. Or why companies (used to) do coding challenges on a white board.
Ironically, the most interesting positions I've held have almost universally been at companies that don't have leetcode-style questions as part of the hiring process.
They got that AI grease on them
Positive prompt: 1girl, hacker, laptop, terminal, coffee, green hair, green eyes, ponytail, hoodie
Negative prompt: worst quality, low quality, medium quality, deleted, lowres, comic, bad anatomy, bad hands, text, error, missing fingers, extra digit, fewer digits, cropped, jpeg artifacts, signature, watermark, username, blurry, looking at viewer
Steps: 25, Sampler: DPM++ 3M SDE Karras, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 1313606321, Size: 768x384, Model hash: 51a0c178b7, Model: kohaku-xl, VAE hash: 235745af8d, VAE: kohaku-xl.safetensors, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires resize: 2048x1024, Hires upscaler: Latent (bicubic), Version: v1.6.0-2-g4afaaf8a
I never thought I would end up hating the whole tech world so much, and I thought "Crypto" was peak - but that was just a bunch of scammy dudes and rugpulls for suckers. This? Everyone is suckers. In theory there's a case to be made for it, but I trust none of the entities involved in pushing this out.
For about 5 years I thought MS was going to do something good. WSL2 was actually good tech and they seemed to uh... "embrace" open source. But since 2020 I feel like things are just going downhill.
My inner old man yells at the lawnmowermanchild : GET OFF MY LAWN.
It's different if a paid or ad supported product wants to increase the amount of people who use a feature vs. an open source developer adding a feature for people to use and having no benefit by people using it. iTerm already has a lot of advanced options and that's just one more of it.
You might disagree with the way a specific feature works, but this is absolutely no reason to talk about someone like Mr. Nachman this way.
https://iterm2.com/downloads.html
And oh, they're now demanding an apology ... for a gift they willingly grabbed without a single thank you.
I hope iTerm moves this functionality into a plugin with the next version.
We’re not talking about a faceless company like JetBrains here, but a single human being, for chrissakes.
These people have benefitted from iTerm2, possibly for years. Instead of giving back or thanking the person behind it, they chose to flood HN and the issue tracker with insults and lies. They literally pretend as if he's trying to sneak in spyware that steals each and every keystroke. They berate, mock, and question the morality of him and anyone else who dares to push back.
I see this kind of bullying behavior in some open source communities and am taken aback every time I see it. The lack of empathy on display here is ironically less than an LLM and that's saying something.
AI is a lightning rod issue, while insults are not ok, disagreement is inevitable, disagreeing wirh a decision a maintainer made is orthogonal to dis/respect.
Open Source is fickle - you can diligently work on a project for years and have it forked for mundane reasons, such as some people thinking you're not doing things fast enough for their liking, or you included a controversial feature - and they won't have to pay you or even send you a "thank you" note, that does not change the value of the contributions.
I always find it so puzzling when people say this. If this author has "too much time" what would the ideal society look like to you? Would you prefer to live in a society where every person is worked to the bone for optimal productivity, such that there is not even a spare 30 minutes in their week to write something that isn't generating economic output? I really want to know what you mean when you say this.
Codecierge allows terminal scrollback and its presumably unredacted data to be sent to a third party, it is a conduit for data exfiltration and may violate a whole bunch of compliance policies, so if it cannot be disabled, it may put companies in violation of those compliance certifications.
People have preferences. They find their preferences meaningful to them. This means there will always be a healthy competitive market of alternatives to choose from in order to serve those preferences. This is not a bad outcome. Why do you find it "worthy of ridicule?"
Sure. I just wouldn't expect to get particularly far with that strategy.
> ought to shield you from people being able to say "that's a dumb opinion"
We're talking about a preference of which terminal emulator to use. Is there some larger social consequence that should be addressed this way?
Having openly genocidal racist attitudes are "dumb opinions" that are worthy of public challenge. Whether or not I want to use iTerm2 because they added LLM interfaces is probably not.
worthy of public challenge? we're commenting on an internet forum. not using a terminal because it has added a feature that is opt-in seems silly to me, it doesn't have to be racist or genocidal to reach the threshold of 'worthy to comment on'
yes, in the context of an internet discussion about iterm we can of course say that you’re being silly, even if genocide exists. Don’t be silly.
not exactly like the front page of the NYT is discussing akira2501’s iterm stance instead of genocide, here, you’re just having an emotional tantrum over some random computer thing.
people have just gotten silly over this whole thing, visceral emotional reaction is about right.
My preference is to not use software which has these features in it. I don't need my terminal software having a network request layer which can exfiltrate my data to unknown third parties.
You might feel comfortable with a labeled "off switch" but many of us do not. Is that an allowed preference? Or should I be ridiculed?
> press their legitimate preferences onto others
You mean describe their preferences openly and allow others to come to their own conclusion? Or are you suggesting that they're bullying other people into this position against their will?
To me it seems the opposite. Whenever these criticisms come up there is a contingent dedicated to minimizing them to the point of suggesting that they should be openly ridiculed. Or that they've misunderstood their own preferences. Or that they've taken them "too far" somehow.
> by blackballing companies that even touch LLMs.
Yes, preferences even extend to economic decisions. People often forget that this is the basis of all economy.
Seems like this preference only comes up when the endpoint is an LLM. It's an isolated demand for rigor rooted in the visceral emotions LLMs seem to inspire.
People (or power users at least) tend to remember incidents like that. I don’t think it’s entirely “just because LLM’s”.
Also, what was the bug?
I'm not complaining about iTerm2, but this statement on its own is not true.
For example - a healthy competitive market for phones that respect your privacy. Cars without touchscreen controls for everything. Televisions that are not "smart".
Honestly, I hope that iterm2 gets a "local AI" feature.
Running a local LLM or stable diffusion is fun.
I can't do anything about our government failing to enforce anti trust laws that have existed for more than a century. If they did enforce them then perhaps this statement would have wider truth to it.
Optional or not, I’d like core features to be privacy friendly and provider agnostic. Otherwise a plugin might be a better fit.
> I think that one of the greatest errors that was made with putting this in iTerm2 was making a big show of it, and by not letting you use local models (such as with Ollama) instead of having OpenAI be the only option.
Seems like lots of knee jerking going on.
I haven’t seen an official demo of using ai features with a local instance. I believe it should be the other way round, the focus should be on local (because again, this is provider agnostic and privacy friendly).
> I think that one of the greatest errors that was made with putting this in iTerm2 was making a big show of it, and by not letting you use local models (such as with Ollama) instead of having OpenAI be the only option.
There is not a single line this is that is true. A big show was not made and you can use Ollama with it. The “big show” was made by other people not the developer behind iTerm2.
Everyone of course knows perfectly well that it’s not anywhere near that level of concern in reality, one might say just concern trolling in fact.
But if you and enough other people really do feel strongly enough, you can maintain a security-focused fork with… removing an optional LLM thing that requires manually entering a key. Sure.
The “love it or leave it” of the open source world. Sorry, I don’t buy that framing. No one should be immune from criticism.
Fortunately I get paid to throw shade. Here is a free sample:
“Unsupervised use of LLMs can increase the risk of exposing sensitive information. Mitigation strategies and capabilities are not mature.
“Exploiting AI requires rapidly increasing the capital expenditures (input) per worker while the horizon for productivity gains (output) is uncharted and unknown.
iTerm is pretty extensible, and there are other ways of making the AI bloat (IMO) opt-in, without including it in the core software.
The biggest issue for me is that it increases the attack surface on iTerm2 with no tangible benefit (to me), I'd be similarly upset if they added an opt-in "Share on Facebook/StackOverflow" feature. I'd seriously consider switching to a purist fork that doesn't integrate social-media sharing as a core-feature of a terminal app.
What's your threat model?
Why do you ask, will you help with designing a mitigation plan?
I'll humor you: It's a turnkey gadget for sniffing/exfiltrating the output of any open iTerm2 shell.
I use web search, I don't use LLM websites.
I use MacOS, I don't use Siri.
I use Windows, I don't use Cortana/Copilot.
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I don't want LLMs to parrot back code from other projects without understanding what that code does and what my code does. I don't want it to parrot back irrelevant slop.
And I especially don't want it to parrot:
rm -rf $BUILDDIR/ && ./build-project.sh
and just hallucinate the assumption that $BUILDDIR is already defined.
A terminal on the other hand...
You have to explicitly pay for it and add it to your repo.
Oh really, which software would that be? And which other LLM-enabled software connects production environments or has access to auth credentials/tokens?
If you're using a TUI that works with the mouse but need to select some text, in iterm you hold Option and can select. In Terminal.app you need to use the menu to turn mouse handling off, select your text, then turn it back on.
EDIT: looks like someone even investigated that: https://babbagefiles.xyz/quake-drop-down-terminal-history/
But "AI powered" very often implies spying on you and sending home everything it can which has me a bit concerned. Is this true or likely to become true of iterm2?
Edit: looking around the thread and at other conversations like https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/11475 it's not just me with this concern
Feeling a bit like a dying breed.
What are the odds that this isn’t a ghost repo in 5 years let alone 25?
Also, Terminal Click is an experimental project. We'll see where it lands.
I'm very happy with iTerm2, its features are useful to me, but I can't see myself using the AI chat feature when I have copilot in VS code. I could see a use case for people unfamiliar with certain commands, something like "please sort this output by the first then fourth columns". But if I'm writing a script or small Python utility, then VS code will be where I do it.
For compliance though, the AI integration could be a separate binary that you can access via the command line, although as pointed out in a reply, that's the same as a code path that isn't used. However, it is easier to block a separate binary, so maybe that's the thinking there?
Instead, maybe the people who have an issue with this feature would be happy with an optional setting "assign this keyboard shortcut to the AI binary". Or a feature flag that says "do not access the network under any circumstances".
Agreed on the "do not access the network" feature flag though, every program should have that. Or really it should just be a toggle in the OS on a per-app basis.
I would claim that is not the responsibility of the app. That should be the sandbox/OS responsibility, to make sure it's actually true, rather than an app providing a checkbox that potentially does nothing.
Annoyingly though, in that scenario, the desire to not have my data processed by third-party vendor APIs, would need to apply to both the client (which I can control through technical measures, e.g. LittleSnitch) and to the cloud backend it talks to (which I fundamentally cannot control.) So such a config flag can't be purely a technical measure, but also has to be something communicated to the backend, ala "Do Not Track." And unlike HTTP, most of the other application-layer protocols we use today don't have anything like a standardized way to communicate "user-imposed constraints on how they want you to process their request, while still giving the same result".
Instead, a legal solution like the GDPR offers better means of protection. The way the fines are structured, vendors have a clear incentive to not exfiltrate your data in the first place.
I mean, yes, that was my point — that there'd need to be some legal thing like GDPR. But that thing would very likely need some kind of explicit user-driven policy choice (ala how websites are now forced to ask for a user-driven cookie-handling policy.)
To comply with such a law, it would be likely that every application-layer protocol that could in theory involve a backend that relies on the use of third-party ML vendors, would have to be modified to somehow carry that policy choice along with requests. It'd be a huge boondoggle.
This is the wrong approach and what you really want is for LLMs to instead have access to a palette of pre-vetted bugtested commands and options implemented by other applications.
ie think like those python embeds in OpenAI… but instead of building a python script, you should be building an Ansible playbook or a MacOS shortcut that does the task, rather than an LLM banging together shell code directly.
Things like file access or web request etc are just more primitives in this model. Don’t want it to call out to the web? Don’t give it access to the web request primitives. Like this literally has been a solved problem for 30 years - macOS intents and windows COM interfaces allow applications to expose these capabilities in a way that can be programmatically interfaced by other code to build up scripts.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/com/the-comp...
This is HyperCard-era stuff, Unix just won so thoroughly that people don’t consider these capabilities, and everyone assumes everything has to be a single giant unshaped command of CLI garbage piped together.
The Unix mindset is not the right one for LLMs working at a token level. The idiom you need to mimic is MacOS intents or Ansible actions… or at least powershell actions. The amount of unconstrained shell-scripting involved needs to be minimized rigorously. Every time you do it it’s a risk, so why make it write anything more complex than glue code or composable YAML commands?
I wasn't talking about the direct use-case at hand (iTerm), because iTerm communicates directly with ML APIs. But such a "request processing constraint" would not be for use in communicating with ML APIs.
If the client application is directly communicating with an ML API, then the technical measure — a group-policy flag that tells the app to just not do anything that would communicate with those APIs; or further, which alters the app's sandbox to forcibly disable access to any/all known ML API servers on the OS-network-stack level — is enough to prevent that.
Rather, what I was referring to by a "request processing constraint", is for the other case — the case that can't be addressed through purely technical measures. And that's the case where a client application is making a request or syncing its data to a regular, non-ML business-layer server; where that backend then might decide to make requests to third-party ML APIs using the client's submitted data.
Think: the specific REST or gRPC API that most proprietary "service client" apps are paired with; or an arbitrary SMTP server for your email client; or the hard-coded AMQP broker, for an IoT device that relies on async data push to a remote message-queue; or the arbitrary S3-compatible object-store endpoint for your `rclone` or `pgbackrest` invocation.
It is for these systems, that you'd need a way for the client to tell the backend system it is communicating with, that the client is operating under a regime where third-party ML is not to be used.
The spirit of such a "request processing constraint" being communicated to such a backend system, would be: "don't allow any of the data being carried by this request, once it arrives at your [regular non-ML business-layer] backend system, to then be sent to any third-party ML APIs for further processing. Not in the process of resolving the request, and not later on for any kind of asynchronous benefit, either. Skip all those code-paths; and tag this data as tainted when storing it, so all such code-paths will be skipped for this data in the future. Just do what processing you can do, locally to your own backend, and give me the results of that."
(Ideally, there would also be some level of legal regulation, requiring vendors to at least put their "best effort attempt" into creating and maintaining a fallback backend-local [if not client-side!] implementation, for people who opt out of third-party ML processing — rather than just saying "the best we can do is nothing; your data goes unprocessed, and so the app just does nothing at all for you, sorry.")
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You're also misunderstanding the misapprehensions that the people in the comments section of this post are having to data being passed to ML models.
Most of the people here who are having a visceral reaction to iTerm including ML capabilities, aren't thinking through the security concerns of this specific case of iTerm generating a shell script. I do understand that that's what you were trying to address here by talking about high-level capability-based APIs; but it wasn't what I was trying to suggest fixing, because "iTerm could generate a dangerous shell script" isn't what anyone was really complaining about here.
Rather, what people here were doing, was echoing a cached-thought response they had already long decided on, to the use or capture of their data by third-party ML-model service APIs generally.
The things that make people reject the idea of applications integrating with third-party ML APIs generally, are:
1. that the model would "do its job", but produce biased or censored results, creating unexpected "memory holes" in the resulting data (for recognition / transformer models), or tainting their processed data with arbitrary Intellectual Property captured from others (for generative models); or
2. that the ML company being sent your data would have Terms of Service (that the vendor of the product or service you're using agreed to, but which you never did) that any data submitted to them in a request can be used for model-training purposes. (And where, legally, due to the Terms of Service you consented to with the vendor, whatever minimal right they have over "your data" makes it "their data" just enough for them to be able to consent to the use that data with third parties, without any additional consent on your part.)
Regarding problem 1 — imagine, as I said above, the Evernote use-case. You add a bunch of notes and web clips to an Evernote notebook through their client app. This app syncs with their cloud backend; and then this cloud backend sends each note and clip in turn through several phases of third-party ML-assisted processing during the indexing process — "AI OCR", "AI fulltext keyword extraction", etc. But maybe the models don't know some words they weren't trained on; or worse yet, maybe the creators of those models intentionally trained the AI to not emit those words, but didn't document this anywhere for the vendor to see. Now some of your documents are un-searchable — lost in the depths of your notebook. And you don't even realize it's happening, because the ML-assisted indexing isn't "flaky", it's rock-solid at 100% recognition for all your other documents... it just entirely ignores the documents with certain specific words in them.
Regarding problem 2 — think about ML built into a professional creative tool. A tool like Adobe Illustrator (where it's probably called client-side) — or even Adobe Bridge (where it might just be happening in their "creative cloud", analyzing your Bridge library to suggest stock image assets that might "go well with" your projects.) What if your own Illustrator illustrations, sitting in Bridge, are being fed by Adobe to some third-party image2text model... owned by a company that also does generative image models? In other words, what if your own Illustrator illustrations — done as a work-for-hire for a company that is paying you to create them a unique and cutting-edge brand appearance — are being used to train a generative image model to ape that novel style you created for this client; and that version of the model trained on your images gets published for use; and people end up discovering and using your new style through it, putting out works on the cheap that look just like the thing you were going to charge your client for, before you even present it to them?
A "third-party ML processing opt-out" request-constraint, would be something intended to circumvent these two problems, by disallowing forwarding of "your" data to third-party ML APIs for processing altogether.
This constraint would disallow vendors from relying on third-party models that come with opaque problems of bias or censorship that the vendors were never informed of and so can't work around. (Such vendors, to enable their backend to still function with this constraint in play, would likely either fall back to non-ML heuristics; or to a "worse" but "more transparent" first-party-trained ML model — one trained specifically on and for the dataset of their own vertical, and so not suffering from unknown, generalized biases, but rather domain-specific or training-set specific biases that can be found and corrected and/or hacked around in response to customer complaints.)
And by disallowing vendors from submitting data to third-party model companies at all, this constraint would of course prevent anyone (other than the vendor themselves) from training a model on the submitted data. Which would in turn mean that any applicable "data use" by the vendor, could be completely encapsulated by contract (i.e. by the Terms of Use of the software and accompanying service) that the client can see and consent to; rather than being covered in part by agreements the vendor makes with third parties for use of "the vendor's" data that currently just happens to contain — but isn't legally considered to be — "the user's" data.
This is incredibly stupid. If they don't trust iTerm to respect their privacy, why were they using it in the first place? For all they know it very well could have been sharing all their data without telling them from the very beginning. Alas, the tool is open source they could just audit instead of yelling at clouds but hey.
There's no difference at all between a code path that's never called and another binary that's never called.
You are simply wrong for even trying to argue about privacy concerns when it is a feature that is entirely off by default (and also doesn't send anything that you don't enter in the box dedicated to it).
It makes absolutely 0 sense to have any concern about this but not have concerns about the capability of the terminal to perform any other call over the network.
The way I phrased it might be why you're misunderstanding me. I'll try to clean it up.
If they're worried about your terminal calling OpenAI servers if you ask it to call OpenAI servers, why are they not worried about all the many more damaging things you can do with your terminal when you ask it to?
Guess what? My terminal has always been able to call ChatGPT, even before this curl wrapper was released :O
The right thing to do, then, would be for the OS to have a group policy setting like:
"Disable application features that rely on processing documents, data, or application state using remote third-party inference APIs."
...and then for apps to look for it and respect it; and for corporations concerned about this to set it as part of MDM.
Then apps could offer these features as available by default, but also forcibly disabled when relevant.
I see this as not substantially different from a programmer having a browser tab open where they could type questions and get answers, just more convenient. If I didn't want my coworkers doing that at all, I'd push out a device policy adding a firewall block for OpenAI's API servers and then not worry about it at all.
> +1 to the people who'd like to donate 50$ for a version which does not send my input anywhere. Okay, previously I never donated the project. But use the iTerm2 for ~10yrs and would like to continue.
So, this person has been using iTerm2 for 10 years without paying, and would only consider donating if this feature is removed?
clearly hyperbole
Even when it's turn on you have to manually engage it
Rage posters always gloss over details in their rush to tell the world how mad they are
> it is a very unwelcome statement of disagreeable values. Adding OpenAI integration, as optional as it is here, makes it clear that you don't stand against OpenAI and the whole "AI" industry.
Imagine the crime of maintaining a free and open source terminal emulator in one's spare time... how hideous.
We also have decades of experience and culture around how to use network commands properly, especially for FLOSS tools.
Considering that newbies will be attracted to these cloud tools, the risk of information leakage sounds a lot higher in the second instance.
iTerm doesn't have that. It has a separate pop-up window where you can type questions and get answers.
If it had a feature like you describe, I'd be there with my pitchfork. Thankfully, it doesn't.
I can’t stand the people up in arms about an opt-in feature that is one of many that are in iTerm2. ITerm2 is not and will not become some kind of AI-based terminal, that idea is so absurd and so are the people making that argument.
In fact, the implementation is so barebones that it’s not useful IMHO so the outrage is even more silly.
1. A terminal shouldn't be able to ask some resource on the internet what to type and auto-execute it.
2. AI fear/fatigue/???
I understand point 2, I have never cared for any AI hype, it has near-zero interest for me, and doesn't affect my work. Almost every editor has some capacity to ask the internet for data and paste it in, from AI or otherwise, and no one is really sounding a major alarm bell around that. You could argue there is a big push for these integrations to train models, but even that requires a key.
Every Linux shell can do that, regardless of your terminal emulator, and arguably that's by design:
curl https://givemesomecoolshellcommands.com | sh
If you don't like it, just don't do it :)
So, when someone else integrates OpenAI where I don’t think it belongs, I feel like I can’t trust their judgment, and therefore can’t trust them to make good product management decisions in the future. Adding questionable features is a red flag indicating the product team isn’t focused or has poor judgment.
Put another way, you don’t put the person that says Taco Bell is quality Mexican food in charge of arranging catering for the company Christmas party. I can’t trust them to not screw it up.
gpt-4o seems fantastic at generating cli flags and such, not sure what troubles you have run into. i am questioning your judgement of their judgement, hah.
If this meets the bar for "worth inclusion in the core of the application", I would rather stick to terminal emulators that are spending their time on making the terminal emulator more responsive rather than adding gimmicks that have to be maintained.
All this integration is doing is making it more convenient for those people by removing the need for them to manually relay between the terminal and the LLM.
Which anyone who didn’t just read this misinformed blog post would know (it was all over the comments on this release yesterday and also in the iTerm2 wiki about this feature).
Edit Because I hit submit too soon: George Nachman is a great guy who delivers a cool tool for free and doesn't deserve the pushback.
For example I don't hate iTerm because I don't need to. I can just use a better terminal emulator and get on with my life. People say the same about vscode, why spend the energy hating it instead of just using neovim and forgetting it exists.
Why the heck not use AI when it's better?
I think that, in its current iteration, it is not that easy to know.
I haven't tried GPT 4 (which I've heard is much better), but my experiences with 3.5 have been extremely frustrating and underwhelming. I absolutely hate when it starts making stuff up and I have to fix it via the traditional way, it just wasted my time!
I guess this boils down to personal preference, but so far I just prefer a good old Google search.
I was quite happy with copilot auto complete, though. Mostly because of how low friction it was.
"Oh, sweet summer child..." :-D
Your condescension is embarrassing as it shows you have no idea what you are talking about in this context.
Not to mention iterm development has slowed a lot in recent years. Who knows how much longer the author will be around.
From: https://xeiaso.net/notes/2024/ai-hype/
“A terminal emulator is probably also a fairly bad place to implement this because it's probably one of the most privileged programs on a developer's machine. It deals with all the secrets in the world, and the threat that it could be used to upload them all to a third party is great enough that people are willing to switch away from it sight unseen.”
It’s important to call out poor judgment around development of our FLOSS tools, they are precious.
Having all of that built into the terminal is fantastic! The only feature I would ask for is obfuscation -- when I'm doing it for work, I am always careful that I change my question such that I get the right answer without revealing any company information.
Of course a solution to this is enabling someone to point at another model that they control, either locally or hosted privately.
It's not what I want iterm to do, I want iterm to be a great terminal.
And if it were, what's stopping the same filters to be added to google to convert the LLM output(or the google search results) into just the command to execute?
And sure, Google could add that, but it doesn't have that today.
That's how the plugin developed for iTerm2 works, but the actual result from chatgpt needs to be filtered by iTerm2 to get to the result in the demonstration.
What's stopping the same filtering from being used on a google search result instead of a response from an LLM API?
https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/blob/master/sources/iTe...
iTerm2 is a great terminal. It was great before the update and it’s still great after the update.
Well goodbye to that part.
prompt “command that you want it to generate”. Then inspect it and run it. If you are feeling very lucky type “$(prompt “command you want to run”)” and poof it executes. Why does this need to be in one of the most privileged apps on my machine?
I've no interest in using it because I'm a cheap bastard and am not going to pay $20/month for a key, but if I were going to use it I'd want it in the terminal emulator. If it were a shell plugin I'd have to install it in my shell on my Mac, the shells on my two Raspberry Pis, the shell on my Amazon Lightsail instance, and the shells on the half-dozen or so servers at work that I regularly ssh to from home. Oh, and also the shells in the Linux VMs I run my work test environment in.
I understand why people don't like that "integrates with third party LLM services" was just added as a core feature to their terminal emulator(which are typically very minimal applications when it comes to business logic).
I can also see the usefulness of having it in the terminal emulator, but I think most people's reaction comes from the confusion of it being included in the core code instead of an extra module you download.
This whole things feels like if vim added a copilot integration into the core app. It make a lot more sense as an additional download than core functionality.
I'm with the others that want it in a command, not embedded in my terminal
Good god yes. I'm bullish on AI, have been playing with it a lot over the past year, and am now making a commercial AI-powered desktop app but this is exactly how I feel. I went from feeling the most excited I've been since I started programming as a kid to feeling like I'm drowning.
Today on the front page of HN between a fifth and a quarter of the articles have been about AI of some sort. Not necessarily LLMs but between the Microsoft AI annoucements, a post on RAG and another on neural networks, CLIP representations, it feels like it's non stop onslaught of AI news that I try to keep up with and we're more than a year into the hype.
I have paid accounts with both OpenAI and Anthropic, so I'm not anti-AI in general, and I understand that it is opt-in, and requires your own API key to get it working. But it's the hype exhaustion that gets me. I really don't want AI in my terminal, just one keystroke away from sending some slop to a remote server. And just knowing that my terminal is capable of that is enough to turn me away.
It appears 95% of the people complaining about this feature don’t actually know what it is.
The implication being that LLMs and Stack Overflow are functionally the same?
We already know that's incorrect. Stack Overflow has:
1. Comments to warn about dangerous or incorrect suggestions
2. Voting to reduce the chance of someone using a dangerous or incorrect suggestion.
3. Mods to remove dangerous suggestions.
Do you really want to trust your terminal to generate:
rm -rf $BUILDDIR/ && ./build.sh
under the assumption that $BUILDDIR does not equal an empty string?
If that was suggested on Stack Overflow someone would immediately point out the flaw.
If you don’t want to use the feature then don’t register the account and don’t use the feature. But there is no reasonable fear or justification for that sort of claim and frankly it just makes you look like an idiot, imagine your grandchildren reading that, how are they not gonna think that grandpa was a moron who bought into some dumb Luddite backlash against a technology that will be as absolutely routine as alternating current by that point?
People forget they’re on the record with history here, try to at least maintain some bare minimum of plausibility. This isn’t the type of statement that is going to age like, at all. It’ll look dumb in a year, as soon as people move onto the next dumb protest thing the inertia will fade.
I guess you didn't read what I wrote: "...the generated code is a single key-press away from being sent to a remote server" - this is an accurate statement. I have no idea where you got the rest of your comment from, perhaps you replied to the wrong person?
Big show? You have to get several paragraphs into their announcement to read the first mention, middle to end of the list of features they add. In this huge announcement, only three paragraphs are devoted to their AI integration. When I updated, they presented a window showcasing 4 of the new features, the AI integration being the 3rd in the list. If some people here were not as hysterical about it, I may not even have noticed.
And btw as I wrote, the AI integration was 3rd in the list. You have to press the "next" button 2 times to get to it. One could have pressed x on the first slide and not even get to see that. The amount of effort put here into complaining about something that can ignored with 0 effort is absurd. And I cannot shake the feeling that this would have almost never been done for any closed source project.
The author has clearly no idea what they are talking about.
I upgraded this morning too and saw updates too.
It's been 3 hours since, continued working on my terminal, it has not gotten in my way at all.
It's a non-issue for me.
What am I missing?
What an absolutely absurd idea that can be easily confirmed (it’s open source) and is borderline libel against the developer who has been maintaining this project for over a decade.
It’s a crazy conspiracy theory that we can confirm or deny by looking at the code and it’s a theory about a practice (OpenAI taking training data from sources sending it to them not using the API, and also OpenAI doesn’t train on API data) that we have never seen in the wild.
I have no use for the feature, I can write shell commands on my own. But why in the world would I go berating the developer over this? Why would anyone? iTerm2 is a gift that users owe him for, not the other way around.
I see this in some open source communities. Is this kind of thing normal?
Based on the same unfounded paranoia, how do we know it’s not keylogging your passwords and or stealing other sensitive information you enter into the terminal? Oh right, we can just check the source code because it’s open source.
I have as much AI feature fatigue as the next person, but feel like I have way more anti-AI histeria fatigue at this point. Seems like for some people all rational thinking goes out the window as soon as AI is mentioned and pure emotion takes over.
- alacritty - kitty
are decent alternatives I have found as a drop in replacement. Might need to add tmux if you were reliant on the window/pane management of iTerm2
For heavy tmux user it could be a deal breaker, especially given that kovid (kitty author) is hostile towards tmux.
What extra stuff do I get from this "tmux integration" ?
Benefits:
-You can keep using a terminal app you apparently like (understandably, it’s great)
-You don’t have to find and install a replacement
-You don’t have to re-add tmux
-Not actively enabling a new chat feature you don’t like costs very little time
Downsides:
-…
Why Windows is adding an ai key?
Not sure what Ubuntu and other distributions will do but they will probably add it too.
(I'm not against this, just stating it)
Because they need a gimmick to sell new ipads to people who don't really understand what a nanometer means in the context of semiconductors?
To accelerate ai for Photoshop, after effects, local enhanced Siri, voice to text and text to voice.
The analogy is broken a little by subscription license trends but otherwise I'd suggest it may be like getting a car with either manual or automatic transmission. Most people will opt for the automatic and pay more because it's easier. A still sizable portion will opt for the manual either for simplicity, control, cost savings, or a combination of these.
A developer will not want to leave the market for AI-powered versions of their app on the table so obviously they'll pursue it; users given the choice will have needs based on some other context. Maybe a journalist wants GPT powered research tools and plain editing software. A romance novel writer can handle their own research but appreciates GPTs to help synthesize that into outlines and exposition. Will everyone get the kitchen sink without any say or will boundaries emerge which lead to different patterns of providing software?
I have been working on something like this that fits better into my existing bash/zsh workflow. So I landed on using ollama and a small widget that tries to mirror the same behavior of ctrl+r aka reverse-i-search. Barely functional, but I have found value from it.
I think saying there’s “no confidence in the answer provided by an AI” is an overstatement and underestimates the value AI can have for the majority of users because that statement overestimates the value of “a reputable source that provides not only the command I’m looking for, but an explanation of the syntax” for the majority of users. Reputable sources and thorough explanations are great in theory, but very few have the patience to go through all that for a single CLI command when they want to make visible progress on the bigger picture project they actually care about.
> I think saying there’s “no confidence in the answer provided by an AI” is an overstatement and underestimates the value AI can have for the majority of users because that statement overestimates the value of “a reputable source that provides not only the command I’m looking for, but an explanation of the syntax” for the majority of users. Reputable sources and thorough explanations are great in theory, but very few have the patience to go through all that for a single CLI command when they want to make visible progress on the bigger picture project they actually care about.
These are exactly the people who shouldn't be running code written by a random number generator.
The beauty of technology and the internet is that there's near-zero gatekeeping. Anyone with enough interest and time can learn to build anything without seriously harming anyone. Dismissing LLMs as a random number generator is very clearly an overstatement for the value they're already able to provide. Ideally, how would you suggest a new developer learn to build something such as a REST API in Python?
You don’t need to have confidence, these are shell one liners, you can generate it, run it, and verify the results in the time it would take you to open a browser window or scroll halfway down a man page.
And if it doesn’t work, then you can still fallback on those.
I don’t mean to be dismissive or reductive. If I need to do something more complex then I’m probably not trying to do it in a shell one-liner.
I used this feature earlier today and prompted it with something like “given piped input, use awk to filter just the 2nd and 5th columns, and truncate the 5th column to 25 chars”. I don’t use awk often but I know that it exists, and I could have figured out how to do this in about 20-40 seconds with a google search or man page, but this was 10x faster.
It sounds like you're recommending people to not understand the shell one-liners they're pasting into their CLI and instead just verify that the outcome was observed after the fact?
That's pretty much the opposite of what I've understood to be "good terminal practice" for my entire life, which can be summed up as "don't execute anything in the terminal that you don't understand".
Is "just paste it and hope you don't lost data/just installed a virus" the new modus-oprandi?
Yes
> Is "just paste it and hope you don't lost data/just installed a virus" the new modus-oprandi?
No
Somewhere in between those two extremes is knowing enough to know that the command you’re pasting in isn’t going to install a virus, even though you don’t fully understand what the -g flag is doing
I fail to see any middle ground between those two "extremes", it's pretty black and white.
You find something and discover after trying it out that you have the gnu version or Mac version or a outdated or much newer version of the tool.
Than I give up, scroll through some shitty man page to slowly pull out one option after the other.
If you enjoy iTerm (as I very much do), you can donate to the author here: https://iterm2.com/donate.html
Is iTerm2 really that popular? I used it in the past but then I found the stock mac terminal.app works just fine.
And I'm a pretty extensive terminal monkey.. just don't want to install more apps unless there's a significant benefit.
The AI feature in this instance is interesting but not quite compelling enough to risk sacrificing my currently very snappy and responsive CLI experience.
In the past I was really into iTerm2, when I was new to being a sw developer. Now I've learned to appreciate and favor having "good enough" tools available universally.
I also suspect there are tons of terminal.app users out there who'd never bother to comment about it on a message board, because they're busy getting stuff done and then simply move on with life.
I think there is a use case for this tech, but it is also fairly limited in its power, trying to replace all computing with kit bashed AI stuff don't seem like a good idea.
The backlash and outrage is probably too much, as usual, there is a part of social contagion, but still...
People need to grow the fuck up about whatever particular aspect of AI is making them personally salty (there are a number of common answers) and realize these models actually do deliver real value for people right now, and that they are going to have to learn to live with those feature being present in products even if they personally choose not to use them.
It’s the same thing in hardware, there is a large group of people who are not emotionally mature enough to realize that not every product is meant for every customer and just because you wouldn’t personally purchase some product that isn’t suited for your uses, doesn’t mean nobody will and that it shouldn’t exist. This is the same thing with people wanting to sandbag development of LLM features because they personally don’t use them. Well, tough.
I like the idea and may enable it.
Is there a MacOS app that does "Quicksilver" (cmd-space Spotlight box) style input that injects the GPT text at cursor or puts it into your clipboard?
- no external dependencies (OpenAI payment, network availability...)
- no data leaving my device
- it could deeply learn my configs and filesystem to give specific commands as opposed to general guidance (I know you can embed and send to OpenAI but I'd really not want to share all my hard drive)
DEFINE_STRING(aitermURL, @"https://api.openai.com/v1/completions", SECTION_EXPERIMENTAL @"URL for AI API.\nA ChatGPT API endpoint should be here. Note that this URL is only used if the model name does not begin with `gpt-` because those models used an older API.");
https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/a196d31658a8d0aa2dc5...
According to the docs it only uses that if the model doesn't begin tieh gpt- and uses an old API, so alas it doesn't seem compatible with ollama.
Edit: here is the relevant part of the code: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/a196d31658a8d0aa2dc5...
Looks like adding ollama support is really a matter of changing a few lines of code.
Edit 2: Seems to be fixed in the next beta release: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/fcd212490626f1d8ea...
This line alone makes me completely discredit the entire post.
A. There was no “big show” made. It wasn’t the headlining feature in either the release notes nor the post-install popup. People here on HN and probably on other social media made a big deal about it but iTerm2 itself did not.
B. You can change the OpenAI API endpoint to point to ollama or some other local OpenAI-compatible API (aka every major local LLM tool has this)
People are up in arms over an opt-in feature and it’s frankly embarrassing. On top of that, the feature is pretty shit IMHO.
You can’t undo/redo in the popup, it has no history, it wouldn’t paste the result of the command into my terminal (I had to do it manually), no way to retrieve the command again after closing the popup, and no way to alter the command if there was a problem. Using ChatGPT is still a way better experience.
Lastly, all the “I’m switching away from iTerm2!” comments/posts are just crazy. I mean, I guess I wish I had nothing better or more important to do in my life than go looking for a terminal replacement (a central and hugely important tool I use many times every day to do my job) just because it added a feature I don’t want to use and don’t have to use… Did all those users get up in arms about the tmux support if they don’t use tmux? Or any other of the vast config options iTerm2 has? I just don’t get it, people are being so irrational about this.
You still have to enable the feature, and you still have to hit enter.
If you are running commands in a privileged terminal then you ought to already have enough experience to be skeptical of commands that you don’t understand, and ensure that you do understand them before you run them.
The only thing that caused me any concern about the demo was that the user action to take the proposed command from the prompt window back into the terminal, was unclear. That is the dangerous step, and should be hard to do accidentally and be very clear on impact.
AI has none of this. An AI will tell you with full confidence to use a command that it doesn't understand, it merely constructed it from a statistical model that is impossible to understand completely. That command may work, or it may be totally invalid, or it may expose you to a major security risk. We really don't know.
Past wall of fame
- Network
- Big Data
- Blockchain
- Cloud
- NFT
- VR
It's nauseating, really, and I think for some devs they probably thought their terminal environment was the last place they'd see anything AI pop up, so they're taking out the pent up annoyance out on iTerm2.
Smart home Smart phone Smart watch Smart thermostat Etc.
Not all of these are created equal!
AI is here to stay but eventually it will die out as a buzzword and as a trend to be made to fit in places it has no reason being in.
Big Data, Blockchain etc are all still here and used but the trend of being used as a buzzwords and added to random products for no reason has long been forgotten.
Hope it clears it out.
I also switched to WezTerm from iTerm awhile ago, largely because iTerm does so much stuff which isn't a emulating a terminal. I have a tool for querying OpenAI from the command line, I don't need or want it built into my terminal emulator, just doesn't jibe with my philosophy. I keep iTerm around for the "Quake terminal" feature, though. That remains pretty slick.
The outrage and self-entitlement is absurd imho. Making it disabled-by-default rather than merely not configured seems like a reasonable accommodation, and is the likely outcome of all this hoopla. People who are complaining that their security policy won't allow it are either confused or dishonest: it makes a network call if you ask it to, the endpoint is either blocked by your policy or it isn't, this adds no new capabilities from a security standpoint.
Probably politically wise to emphasize that it works with any OpenAI compatible endpoint, including a local one. The program is not in fact tied to OpenAI in any way and it might unruffle some featheres.
It's reasonable to want your terminal to just be a terminal, and not feature badges, alerts, log search, its own autocomplete, triggers, annotations, a password manager, and now AI integration. If that's what you want, iTerm hasn't been the emulator for you for a long time. That's fine, there are options.
Engineers must be open to new ideas.
Personally I spend a lot do time googling arcane parameters and if AI can help me avoid that, it’s a win.
If you don’t want to use it great. Good for you. You’ve spent enough time on the command line to know all the inconsistent insanity. Not everyone has or wants to.
> I don't get it. It's a very optional feature that you have to:
> Go out of your way to enable, supply your own API key
> (and pay for it yourself), enable something that is not
> enabled by default. Why are people reacting so strongly
> to this?
> A lot of it boils down to having this "shoved down
> their throats". It's the fact that it's being added
> to a tool without the user having the agency to decide
> if they want it to be added or not.
> I think that one of the greatest errors that was made
> with putting this in iTerm2 was making a big show of it,
> and by not letting you use local models (such as with
> Ollama) instead of having OpenAI be the only option.
If someone wants a local model, why not submit a PR instead of complaining? Local models have OpenAI compatibility! https://ollama.com/blog/openai-compatibility
* EDIT: I see that the OpenAI URL is configurable under Advanced > Experimental > URL for AI API. Perhaps this already works?
It takes much less effort for me to simply switch back to Terminal.app.
Trust. “AI” features are a trust rubicon. Once you add it, the assumption is that surveillance is now baked in.
This is some wildly narcissistic logic.
Other people are free to add features to the software that they write, that is their agency.
Is a 3rd party getting every key stroke I make and output it produces?
My big disappointment is that you can't use providers other than OpenAI. Stop this. It's like making a web browser that can only use Google. AI APIs are actually kind of simple. Make it so I can pick one including a locally hosted one (ollama etc.) if I want.
No one really rips out iTerm2 from a mac setup and they can throw their Mac out of the window with iTerm2 if they really hate AI that much (because it has ai and will get more, you had to get out of your way with Siri and co already anyway...)
And as I said it before: this is not a hype. Look it up. Ai delivers already things it doesn't fit hype.
And no ai will not go away, at least I'm not seeing a single thing right now indicating a platoon very soon.
In the field of AI there are many issues to be debated and legal findings to be made.
People have disagreements on a lot of even basic premises yet proponents on either side will state them as fact without providing an argument.
I have seen people post messages on generative AI forums about how to handle the hate they receive. All too often people on those forums handle it by behaving like a 12 year old childishly retaliating.
When it comes to products with AI features, it stands to reason that there will be a lot of new things and a lot of them will be useless. It's an interesting new technology that nobody knows exactly where it fits in. We only find that out by experimentation.
My only concern with an optional feature like in iTerm2 is if it consumed significant resources when not used. Ie. Does it significantly contribute to bloat.
If not then the objection is not to the feature itself but to the idea of the feature.
That seems to be a step fraught with danger.
When big tech stops being creepy. Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. have taught us to be constantly vigilant, if we want to have any sort of privacy. They’re always finding new creative ways to datamine us. No reason we’d trust OpenAI either.
I have never had a Facebook account because I did not agree with their user-is-the-product model. This is my personal choice. People usually only find this out I tell people I can't do the thing they want me to do because it is on Facebook. The usual response is surprise, followed by general acceptance.
I do not see how this relates to AI though. AI is not a business, it is a technology. The antipathy seems to be directed at AI itself, not any particular company. I am all for criticism of company behaviour if it is well argued. I don't like the blanket "X is bad, everything X does is bad". Apart from being a non sequitur, I don't really accept the absoloute "X is bad" for any company. Companies are composed of individuals, those people have influences, agency, and beliefs. To say that they are uniformly bad is to say that every individual who works their is bad.
By all means criticize bad behaviour of companies. Criticize the leadership that let it happen, and keep on doing so if they let it continue. Declaring the lot of them to be evil is not only counter productive, but taking the easy way out. The idea of defeating them is just some revolutionary fantasy and without any other means to modulate their behaviour you are just supporting the status quo.
Absolutely, be constantly vigilant. Just remember to make a case for your point. An optional feature that you don't have to use does not seem like a good reason to hate a iTerm2. It would be like me declaring I am no longer going to use a web browser because it has the ability to view Facebook, I simply don't use that feature.