The "opt-in" you're speaking of was leaving the API key textbox blank.
My understanding is that this being filled in with anything is enough to have iTerm potentially send commands to OpenAI. There are also many companies that reject any applications that integrate with 3p AI services, which iTerm would have been caught up with.
Once your labor of love is used by hundreds of thousands/millions of people, then it's not unreasonable to receive complaints when the maintainer makes an unpopular decision. Not everyone has time to fork and maintain their own copy.
OpenAI integration is activated after you write a question to be sent to the AI [3]. It takes many clicking and typing to get to that point and can't possibly happen by accident.
It's one thing to not like a feature. But to behave in the way people behaved is not merely ridiculous, it's wrong and horrifying. People came to the issue tracker from Mastodon looking to start a fight that was uncalled for, threw insults and lies, and fantasized about physically harming the dev [4]. When all they could've done to avoid the feature was to simply do nothing.
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/11475
[2]: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/11470
[3]: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/a3122c0100d8900a15cb...
[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240613165712/https://archive.i...
I have no idea how to solve that problem though, it's just part of our zeitgeist and I hope people get bored with it sooner rather than later.
People who responded with anger ("ragebait-hateporn") at this feel pressured on all sides by this AI hype cycle (not saying all AI features are hype, just that we are in a hype cycle where many are useless). It's getting frustrating and tired. For many it feels like the crypto hype cycle again.
It's easy to understand how "great, now even my terminal is putting AI features in?!" is the response, especially with a tool as beloved as iTerm, and as "close to the machine" as a terminal is. It's one thing for Notion to put AI things in, it's another for the interface where I regularly type sudo to do massive operations across my machine.
The feature wasn't added out of pure hype either. It was likely inspired by user feedback [2], and the dev ultimately added it because it was useful for him personally [3].
Despite all of this, people are raging about unprovable nefarious motives and making claims about spyware, as if it's Windows we're talking about. They pretend as if it's maintained by some faceless for-profit entity trying to screw us over instead of a sole developer trying to create good software in his spare time. Some are even openly fantasizing about inflicting physical violence [4].
This kind of behavior should be condemned, not praised.
[1]: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/a3122c0100d8900a15cb...
[2]: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/6955
[3]: https://techhub.social/@gnachman/109542492387391561
[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240613165712/https://archive.i...
Perhaps we can start by signaling that we personally care about how we behave online.