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Comment by irskep | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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