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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

This is the bit resonated with me the most: "One of the main bits of feedback I've seen from people online is that iTerm2 having AI involved at all is enough to get them to want to switch away to another terminal emulator. They've cited the reason as exhaustion due to overexposure to AI 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.

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It’s many keystrokes away. You have to type the thing you want sent to OpenAI. Manually.

It appears 95% of the people complaining about this feature don’t actually know what it is.

Yeah, 95% of the people complaining never even opened up the "Engage AI" box much less the Codecierge panel.

I uninstalled iTerm2 before trying out the feature, but have watched the linked demo video and read the docs, and my point still stands - the generated code is a single key-press away from being sent to a remote server. It's like copying a terminal command from StackOverflow and pasting it directly into your terminal and hoping it works as described.

That is literally what people do with Stack Overflow, and yet there are no mobs with pitchforks demanding that the Paste command be removed from iTerm2.

> That is literally what people do with Stack Overflow

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.

"i didn't try the feature and do not understand how it works, but it has AI so i hate it" is how you sound, fwiw.

Claiming that iTerm2 is only a single key press away from silently registering an OpenAI account, entering your credit card number, and sending non-participating users’ shell pipeline data straight to Sam Altman is possibly the most moronically incompetent and shamefully/pitifully fearful objection since Kevin mitnick was going to launch the nukes by whistling into a prison pay phone.

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.

You're right - we're all on the record here, but I'll ignore your personal insults.

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?

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