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> EDIT: gnachman, if you're reading this, thank you for your tireless work on iTerm. It serves me extremely well whenever I'm on macOS and holds a special place in my heart. I bought a MacBook in 2013 and it was the first *nix system that I daily drove as a desktop for a long time. I installed iTerm 2 in my first week and it was a constant companion for many years.

I'd like to second this. I had to move to a mac for a bunch of reasons that I wasn't super thrilled with and iTerm2 was one of the first things I installed. It made the transition much more bearable and the system just that much more comfortable overall.

I'm sorry that people didn't take kindly to this feature. For what it's worth, I find myself wishing that `Konsole` had a plugin on the side that would allow me to interact with chatGPT and the like. If I ever end up back on a mac full time, I'll (probably) be a happy user of this new function!

I wonder if a lot of the heated discussion is purely an emotional reaction to be hit with "AI feature onboarding" immediately after a normally-drama-free terminal emulator software update. If they had gone with a much more low-key way of notifying users of the feature, maybe folks would be more reasonable.

Not that I blame the maintainers for using the approach they did, though! Usually you do want to be super obvious about new things.

I suspect a lot of it isn't just this feature in itself, but the overall fatigue of having it shoe-horned in everywhere. I recently had to replace the Logitech software for our mice with the (hidden in a kbase) offline version because they'd added AI to what's essentially a mouse driver - two weeks later it pops up in my terminal.

I think for most people, it's not any one mole that's the problem, it's the overall game of whac-a-mole.

The rage was obviously premature, but to give the ragers the benefit of the doubt, maybe it was in anticipation of the all-too-common "You'll get over it"[1] stance that actually didn't end up happening this time. I can totally understand users' frustration with software in general these days, where developers keep cramming in unwanted features, with an "Eat it--it's good for you" attitude. This particular maintainer did not have this attitude, but it's so common as to be expected now.

Whenever any software I use changes anymore, I instinctively expect it to get worse because the developer chose to add something unwanted. It's a sad state for software in general.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9823324

> I wonder if a lot of the heated discussion is purely an emotional reaction to be hit with "AI feature onboarding"

It's most likely the reason. Everybody wants to ride the hype wave with AI just like they did with NFTs, dApps, Web3, and so on and people are tired of it.

I'm not for or against AI if we can even call LLMs AI, but I genuinely can't find a use case for an AI prompt in a terminal emulator app. I know it's open-source and I can "take it or leave it", but this feature addition to me seems more like hype than anything else.

> I think this is a good change, if only to pacify the masses

It has nothing to do with "pacifying the masses" and everything to do it with being the right product decision to make. It should never have been added to core and should have been offered as a 100% optional add-on in the first place. People had every right to be deeply upset.

We run into this problem constantly with cloud software where we have zero control over what features they add (aka AI) and often there's no way to opt-out. Thankfully we can expect better from a locally-executing open source terminal app.

> It has nothing to do with "pacifying the masses" and everything to do it with being the right product decision to make. It should never have been added to core and should have been offered as a 100% optional add-on in the first place. People had every right to be deeply upset.

Why do you get to decide that?

I echo your sentiments.

I should not be surprised really, but it is amazing how vehemently anti-AI some people are becoming. It is interesting that it is already creating such divides and rifts. Almost as if all those sci-fi writers predicting the upcoming AI schisms were surprisingly accurate.

While the AI feature wasn't as intrusive as Windows & Microsoft has been, I am glad developers protested a force AI adoption. And also somewhat successful. Only wish enterprise CXO to know where to adopt and where not.

There was a highly upvoted article on here yesterday.

Honestly I agree with their sentiments. iTerm should be a terminal app. Any of this stuff should be an extension/plugin, and not a core feature.

It should be whatever the maintainers want it to be. That’s the best part of open source. If someone isn’t happy, they can fork it and make their own.

Ca. 2006 iTerm added a feature to perform a google search based on text selection

You could see how this is even more dangerous than a completely separate window to an API

The only difference is: in 2006 people online in general weren’t absolute shitheads

> community's reaction was... not great, to put it lightly.

Perhaps, but it was IMO 100% predictable. You don't go walking in a crime ridden area of a big city waving around a bunch of cash and then be shocked when you get mugged, even when it's legally still not your fault.