It isn't always on or anything. It's actually kind of hard to find and use.
Is there maybe something I'm missing? Or is this a general backlash against AI?
I prefer Apple’s built-in Terminal but even I’m wincing at this new “feature” being included in iTerm2.
Honestly iTerm has always been loaded with features that of dubious usefulness. They all tend to be useful to someone though. This is just another one on the list.
I think the biggest failure here was the way it was communicated. Extremely ambiguous about WHAT it actually does and any privacy concerns.
I just can’t recall any other product or tech that has so many executive types and techbros frothing so intensely at the mouth and desperate to shoehorn it into everything like this.
While they're allowed to do whatever they want, and I'm happy for the years of wonderfully useful software they've provided, 3rd party AI features are radioactive for some organizations and the suddenness of this is jarring to impacted folks.
Yes, it's overkill, but legal's stance is that anything that can possibly talk to a third party AI service is forbidden regardless of the other technical solutions in place preventing information leakage.
FWIW, anything that has telemetry to third parties (crash reports, usage stats) are also forbidden, with extremely limited exceptions that legal has approved.
So then your company just needs to block AI at the network level then?
Within a few keystrokes you could already very easily communicate with third party AI services via terminal prior to 3.5 (curl... etc)
This is a very weird over-reaction considering what iTerm2 and shells in general are already capable of.
And iTerm2 itself has allowed for custom python scripts to be loaded for a long time [https://iterm2.com/python-api/] easily modifying the behavior (and also allowing outbound connections wherever...)
If you work in a sensitive environment and outbound connections to OpenAI are already blocked on the network level (or even better iTerm is only able to communicate to whitelisted hosts, then problem solved... there really is no issue here for people to be so worked up about).
Sounds like legal really needs to understand these tools better.
Technical means, we monitor for every outbound connection attempt and DNS request and can trace it back fairly easily to a particular application. We've certainly caught software that was reporting back when it's stated otherwise in the privacy policy or website.
Legal does feel better when there's an entity they can seek damages from in the event that a piece of software turned out to be malicious. They're less inclined to give free software the same benefit of the doubt.
Do you mean your company has people who can’t use Terminal.app at all — the iTerm2 ban means they can’t do their job?
Or do you mean the switch to Terminal.app affects productivity in some negative way? Curious what that means and how that gets measured.
I’ve used both and I don’t understand how one terminal emulator makes someone more or less productive — whatever that means — in any significant way. They do the same thing with mere superficial differences. Not liking how something looks or missing a convenience feature doesn’t necessarily mean less productive.
Whether that implies it’s ok to have a toggle or not is frequently not up to technologists it’s up to compliance folk who may have no interest or incentive to look deeper.
And not for nothing it’s a weird coupling. I can’t think of a single reason I’d integrate with an ai agent in this way over a more unixy approach.
The AI Agent part is a bit weird, but the "Engage AI" feature is pretty nice. Just hit "cmd+y" and type something you want to do like "Clone without blobs", or "get the last two fields from a CSV", and it shows you the command which you can then run with "shift+enter"
Do these locations have no devices running Windows, OSX, or iOS?
And I'm not even like other commenters who have strict security needs around their work where things that can access the network need to be vetted before being approved for use.
I think some of it is backlash against AI though; you're probably right about that.
If companies are that worried about rogue employee access to forbidden AI APIs, the network layer seems like a more appropriate place for those blocks.
edit: several rephrases of the middle sentence
The only two AI interfaces I see are the "Engage Artificial Intelligence" menu item where you ask it how to form a command, and then a second interface in the Toolbelt called Codecierge where it tries to complete a task you tell it to do.
Both of which are completely optional and require an OpenAI key. If you do use them you're sending your request to OpenAI but as far as I can tell it doesn't get any of your command history or anything like that.
Let's not blame iTerm2, which is a highly useful, amazing piece of software that many of us have relied on on every day for years and have never paid anything to use.
If you really are so worried about the AI feature being part of iTerm2 then go fork it and strip the AI functionality yourself: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2
It's a threat. Disrespectful to users.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't! If it doesn't maybe it will someday! When just the right person gets hired into exec.