Today i was doing the daily ritual of looking at distrowatch. Todays reveiw section was about a termal called warp, it has built in AI for recomendations and correction for commands (like zhs and nushell). You can also as a chatbot for help. I think its a neat conscept however the security is what makes me a bit skittish. They say the dont collect data and you can check it aswell as opt out. But the idea of a terminal being read by an Ai makes me hesitant aswell as a account needed to use warp. What do you guys think?
I don’t know what AI could bring to the table in this case that you can’t do without it already. Command completions or fixing typos works without using AI. If there was an actual benefit, I’d be open to try it out but only by using an open source LLM running locally. I’m definitely not creating an account and paying a monthly subscription while not even being able to use it offline.
I really enjoy Warp. It’s sleek and modern, plus it saves me a lot of time with its advanced autofill features. It also gives me helpful suggestions for minor edits if I’m making small errors that keep a command from running.
I haven’t used the chatbot, but I have found the user experience of the program to be better than most other terminals I’ve used before.
I’m in the same boat. Best terminal app I’ve used in a long while. Not using AI features
I’m neutral towards AI, what I can’t wrap my head around is forcing users to sign in / sign up to use offline apps. Fuck you too, Postman.
I love hopscotch(formerly postwoman) https://hoppscotch.io/ thank me later
You can thank me later.
Wait, it’s Postman but better?
I feel like every use case they showcase is useless if you remember the commands. And if you don’t know a command, the classic googling until you find something that works usually does the trick.
tldr, fzf-tab suffices for me. For anything else you may give shellgpt a try. But I love my Alacritty with a zsh and p10k.
Helping with complex Terminal commands/shell scripts is basically my #1 practical use-case for AI right now… especially if you use tools like JQ a lot. Saving keystrokes is a lifestyle, after all.
I am also a really big fan of Warp, and was even before they added the AI feature (the editor-style functionality is wonderful). For the record, the AI isn’t always running in Warp, to use it you start a prompt with hash (#) and then ask for what you want and it presents options.
This is faily easy to build using offline models. Only problem is GPU whirring away running typically light terminal commands.
Big fat N-O
So,
This is a proprietary and therefore untrustworthy terminal in a space where virtually all the competition is libre/open source.
It’s connected to the cloud, therefore insecure and privacy-invasive as there is no reason for something as basic as a terminal to be connected to the cloud. Who wants their SSH keys leaked? Anyone?
They require an account but don’t collect data? Sketchy to say the least, a unique account is the perfect tool to collect data and there is no reason a terminal, the most basic interface to the underlying OS should require an online account. It should be tied to the system. (After further reading, apparently they do collect data by default).
It has a built-in AI autocomplete, because apparently normal auto complete isn’t good enough (just wait until it tells you to rm -rf /*).
Yeah, no matter how nice it is, I will never accept this terminal.
EDIT: They also forked Alacritty to create a “demo”, they took advantage of a libre/open source project for their proprietary terminal and never did so much as thank the authors of Alacritty. That’s scummy.
AI can be neat, but this is a solution looking for a problem, like most AI things.
IANAL but it looks like they are violating Apache 2, as they are supposed to retain the license and mark any changes.
the non AI features of warp, such as the modern editing and easy function creation, are more interesting to me than the AI features. I wish there was an open source terminal that felt this modern.
I have used AI to generate commands many times, but not often enough that I need it built into my terminal. I prefer my default terminal experience be more minimal.
AI that can auto generate all those command line arguments I keep forgetting? Sure.
Closed source terminal that requires account? No way.
And also, like… Data privacy… My terminal commands and command outputs contain sensitive data. Even company sensitive data. I don’t want to be liable.
I’m likely going to try out Wave Terminal with a self hosted LLM. I think it may well be quite useful, just don’t want to upload my entire command history to OpenAI.
Let me know if you get that working! That would be super cool.
DO NOT WANT!
I’m not the biggest fan of the forced account thing, but I do like a lot of Warp’s features. The command suggestions especially make dealing with tools that have like 1000 switches so much easier (like docker for example). Other than that… It’s easy to customize, fast and looks good.
Tl;Dr: I like Warp, cry about it.
Its not that i hate the idea of having an AI in the terminal its just the idea of having a account to use it. I played around with it last night and tried diffrent ideas which it sometimes is useful. I did #what is my graphics card “Lspci -k “VGA”” Ok that was helpful Then i tried #what driver is my graphics card using? “Lspci -k “VGA”” Which does not list your driver. Its hit or miss.
Command suggestions can be provided by the shell too for what it’s worth. fish ships with autosuggestion and autocompletion. For zsh, you need a separate plugin (but it’s well worth it)
I use fish and have used it for a long time and it works very well with warp, actually. You get both it’s autosuggestions and warp’s autocomplete. 's nice
“How about no”
I can hear the meme when i read it
