Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad the article questions _whether this is even a problem_, but it seems they tried to answer it and failed to come up with a convincing argument:

  > 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?

... and the article's answer(s), which I don't think are a very convincing rebuttal:

  > 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.

I mean, this is open-source. You get a lot of features without any agency here, you are free to edit those out and it has no impact if you don't use it.

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'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.

This is some wildly narcissistic logic.

Other people are free to add features to the software that they write, that is their agency.

This really stood out to me. Fork a github repo and manually merge in every upstream commit yourself if that's how you want software delivered to you.

> you are free to edit those out

It takes much less effort for me to simply switch back to Terminal.app.

Assuming you're unhappy with this (I am neutral on it), I'm actually curious: what do you lose by iTerm2 having an opt-in feature that you don't need to use? How do you replace all the lost features of iTerm2 that aren't in Terminal.app? And if there aren't any features you're losing out on, why did you even switch to iTerm2?

> what do you lose by iTerm2 having an opt-in feature that you don't need to use?

Trust. “AI” features are a trust rubicon. Once you add it, the assumption is that surveillance is now baked in.

Uhh, I don't understand. It's an open-source project with a ton of eyeballs on it. Are you saying that someone is going to sneak in a change to exfiltrate all keystrokes in a massively popular terminal app without anyone noticing? Is this risk new somehow?

Uhhh what? localhost to ollama is surveillance?

I guarantee this is the beginning of iTerm2 becoming a closed-source paid product. Oh, I'm sure there will always be an "open source" version of it, but we have all seen this movie before.

I fail to see how this is not a slippery slope argument. A feature was added to a GPL’d open-source project, and said feature relies on a third party (OpenAI) in order to work.

Why would you think this? There are plenty of open source products which intergrate with APIs, including OpenAI.

This was in response to the suggestion that one "edits" out the feature.

Hi! I'm someone who generally hates the "shoved-down-your-throat"ness of AI, and who got pretty upset at the MDN saga (which we do not need to relitigate here), so I think we have something in common. I'm not bothered by this feature though, because it's totally optional and unobtrusive. Can I ask why this is important to you?

This was specifically in response to the suggestion that one "edits" the app to remove the feature.

We litigated that? =)

How? how does it take less effort than... nothing... like its not enabled by default, and requires a api key if you even do want it, like the app is the same for everyone that doesn't want to use the feature lol

This was specifically in response to the suggestion that one "edit" iTerm to remove the feature.

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