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Amazon acquires Fig
- myth_drannon 3y agoI checked Fig when it was announced but preferred Warp for some reason. I think it looked nicer and was snappier.
- shermix011 3y agoSo AWS's dev ex will get better?
- firstSpeaker 3y agovery likely this will become part of AWS CodeWhisperer. I wouldnt be surprised if MSFT or GOOG going after WARP for example to counter balance.
- msoad 3y agois this an aquahire?
- mzg 3y agoNo, presumably these employees will be based on dry land
- kashnote 3y agoSlow. Clap.
- cjaybo 3y agoOnce they dry off after leaving the hiring pool at least
- Brajeshwar 3y agoI'm not one that laughs at others' auto-correct bloopers. I have made quite a lot of mistakes myself. But your quick reply made me laugh for a good 90-sec or so.
- _hcuq 3y agoNo, it's an aquahire. They're joining Amazon...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ibejoeb 3y agoRumor is they're going to offshore the whole operation...
- KolmogorovComp 3y agoTo spare someone else a research, it’s another term for ‘talent acquisition’ [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- krembo 3y agoIn times of employers market it's less likely to see aquahires
- ilc 3y agoThe market is starting to shift. It ain't where it was a year and a half ago... but the numbers say, it ain't what it was a few months ago.
- theusus 3y ago[flagged]
- marstall 3y agomaybe don't comment then? It's a legit cool product that, among other things, lets you use natural language in the unix command line.
- gabereiser 3y agoCongratulations!? I do hope that means AWS’s ever growing cli commands will be all fig now (or will be)? It’s getting a bit long in the tooth. What about support outside of AWS? Will fig still be as awesome in iTerm2 with what-ever-is-in-%PATH%?
- 404mm 3y agoHe’s thrilled because it’s good for him, not for the users.
- seizethecheese 3y agoIs it not? Any venture funded product has a sword of Damocles over its head. After acquisition the company product is much less likely to be shut down in the long run (unless it’s Google).
- candiddevmike 3y agoThe blog post reads like an acqui-hire, which almost always means the product gets shut down or open sourced and left for dead.
- miah_ 3y agoNo, after acquisition usually the existing product is usually shutdown or phased out while its features are absorbed into some <new thing>. With Google, everything has a huge chance of being shutdown, unless its Gmail or Search, but in both of those cases they will also continue to get worse over time.
- hot_gril 3y agoor at least become more annoyingly entangled with stuff, like Minecraft + Microsoft
- jsnell 3y agoDays since AWS last announced they were killing a devtool service: 4 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37254198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37254198)
- w-ll 3y agoWait, this is Autocomplete for $12/month?
- k4rli 3y agoBased on their frontpage example videos, it seems to be for Mac users who don't know any better. I don't see anything useful that isn't FOSS already.
- yohannparis 3y ago1. Packaging solution in an easy to use tool is what software engineers do. Nothing wrong with non-FOSS solution. 2. You could provide a list of FOSS solutions to replace Fig.io, even better write a tutorial on how to install and setup those solutions.
- hot_gril 3y agoEither the FOSS solutions are lacking something or all those corporate customers are fools.
- daotoad 3y agoEven if the only thing fig adds is easier set up and integration and consistency of setup between users that could be enough to justify the cost. Saving an hour of engineering time spent fiddling with your CLI config every year makes this a good value for a business.
- hot_gril 3y agoYes. Plenty of people know how to DIY or can figure it out, it's not a special skill. They just don't consider it worthwhile.
- snoose 3y agoNo, its free, just some "advanced" features cost money
- 3y ago
- cush 3y agoFig is awesome. Congrats to the team!
- rvz 3y agoAnother so called 'incredible journey' which the VCs (including YC) accelerated an exit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- swyx 3y agonobody's forcing amazon to do anything they dont want to do lol but it is true that this is a rare devtools startup acquisition by amazon. i cant think of many here (cloud9 was the last one i know, and that was 2016) but that could be due to my ignorance.
- nicechianti 3y ago[dead]
- ilaksh 3y agoIs there anything similar for Linux?
- topato 3y agoThere is a Linux and (I believe) a Windows binary of Fig available. You might need to hunt a bit to find it, at least, I needed to last year. Their Discord used to be the place for that info.
- KomoD 3y agoExcept we (new users) can't use it regardless, since signups are closed.
- candiddevmike 3y agoSeems like direnv and shell scripts in a shared git repo could be similar: https://direnv.net/ https://direnv.net/
- scarface_74 3y ago> There aren't any updates to share at this time on future plans, Wait for the “Our amazing journey” post where Amazon is just going to shut their product down
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- appel 3y agoYep. Unfortunately great for the founders and (hopefully) for the team, but my first thought is always "another one bites the dust". Here's hoping we're both wrong.
- scarface_74 3y agoWell, not that I have any particular insight on how acquisitions work at AWS. But as a recent former employee in Professional Services, I do know how AWS operates as far as go to market strategies since we officially came under sales. Even though I was a billable consultant. It would make no sense for AWS to treat this as ongoing concern. They are probably going to integrate it with their other products - Cloud 9 , the AWS CLI, CloudShell etc.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoThat was fast. Fig's HackerNews launch (May 25, 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27277819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27277819 Have seen Brendan talk a lot about it on Twitter.
- mullingitover 3y agoSeems like tough competition in this space. Warp has what's essentially Github Copilot in the CLI, and it's the same price. Beyond that, actual GH Copilot does a damn good job of crafting any CLI command that you can describe.
- mirekrusin 3y agoWhere is open source alternative?
- mavamaarten 3y agoFig works in any terminal though, and its free tier gives me useful enough recommendations and docs. It's very useful to be able to use IDE-like autocomplete inside my IDE, which is the terminal I use 99% of the time. As far as I'm aware, Warp is really a standalone gig.
- Takennickname 3y agoIsn't it mac only?
- ranting-moth 3y agoHow does one join AWS?
- asadm 3y agoleetcode and reducing self-respect
- mrg3_2013 3y agoUnderrated comment :)
- throwawayfigs 3y ago[flagged]
- ilc 3y ago1. Wrong thread. 2. IMHO: Be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I've never heard a happy story about Amazon that didn't involve a metric ton of Kool-Aid.
- mrg3_2013 3y agoKool-aid was mostly leaders ending regurgitating leadership principles and gaming it (without internalizing the greatness of it)
- ilc 3y agoI've seen some employees that drank it too much. IMHO: Drinking the Kool-Aid is OK if you like the flavor. Just realize you are doing it.
- ranting-moth 3y agoNot wrong thread. The title of this post was the same as the blog entry, "Fig has joined AWS", before it was editorialized by HN eds.
- ibdf 3y agoCongratulations! I've been using it for about a year or so. Hopefully their product will continue to exist... that's what their blog says now, but that's pretty much what everyone says at first.
- sdesol 3y ago> Hopefully their product will continue to exist They seem to have built a decent community, so I can see it continuing, provided the core/all code for Fig is open source. In the last 6 weeks, 57 new contributors took the time to create 62 issues and 111 new contributors took the time to comment. These are very heathy community metrics, but there hasn't been a lot of code activity, which would make sense if they were focused on the sale to AWS. Source for my insights from https://devboard.gitsense.com/withfig https://devboard.gitsense.com/withfig Full Disclosure: This is my tool
- acka 3y agoAFAICT the core of Fig isn't open source. (Why else would there be a waiting list for Linux users if they could just grab the code for Fig and build it themselves?) What you are looking at seems to be a repository of autocompletion specs and some server to publish them.
- blondin 3y agoi never thought fig or warp would ever work. requiring an account and a subscription to use CLI tools sounds ludicrous. but they seem to have found a silver bullet with AWS since having an account is a requirement anyway. good luck to them on what comes next.
- jackblemming 3y agoSeems like I dodged a bullet. When I interviewed there the founder asked very generic questions that may as well have come straight out of an Amazon leadership principles pamphlet. I bet Amazon will be a good fit for them. I feel bad for the employees who likely wanted to work for a startup, not Amazon. I’d be surprised if they got much from the acquihire either.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ams92 3y agoYou join a startup in hopes of it getting acquired or going public some day. Fig was never going to go public so if I worked there I’d be happy about the acquisition assuming that I wasn’t stiffed on my stock options when joining.
- shrimpx 3y agoUnless it's an acquihire where you get ~nothing for your stock and you have to interview to keep your job.
- noitpmeder 3y agoLol and it's at amazon -- I imagine they'll lose a bunch of staff over that fact alone.
- w0mbat 3y agoAcquihires generally get a better comp deal than hires, they just don't tend to make much off the acquisition deal unless they are high up. If their comp includes accelerated vesting rather than the terrible Amazon slowcoach vesting it could be decent.
- gcampos 3y agoI had some exploratory conversations with them last year. The product was nice, but their business plan made zero sense to me, so I decided to not continue the process.
- nerdjon 3y agoWill be interesting to see what happens to this long term, but hopefully means good things. I use the tool personally but really for largely basic things. The dropdown for autocomplete is far from necessary but a nice addition. Helping with completing commands that I don't use often but know the basics of like "aws s3 cp" is nice. But because of that I could just never justify spending money on it. Hopefully it isn't abandoned, but maybe this will also mean they don't have to try to find artificial reasons (or bloat) to convince people to pay and can just focus on the core offering.
- diebillionaires 3y agoI can't help but not want to use a CLI I have to log into.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- acmecorps 3y agoTried to check it out, but I got "Signups are currently disabled" :(
- gurchik 3y ago> New users will not be able to sign up for Fig's products right now while we focus on optimizing them for existing customers and addressing some needs identified to integrate Fig with AWS.
- throwaway8725 3y agoI was trying to get it working and it seems like running `fig login` in the terminal and then restarting the app enables the terminal autocomplete!
- varispeed 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pbmango 3y agoCongrats! Big fan of Fig and excited to see the UX brought to aws CLIs
- masto 3y agoThese features are nice, but I've never liked the idea of having to use a whole new terminal application to get them. I may be becoming a dinosaur, but it's not that I'm not willing to try new things. On the contrary, after many years of being rigid about having one true development environment, I've moved away from Emacs to VS Code, and work from more heterogeneous environments instead of being 100% Mac. So these platform-specific thick client apps no longer feel like the way to go.
- veg 3y agoThere's no need for a new terminal. Their homepage literally says "IDE-style autocomplete for your existing terminal".
- hot_gril 3y agoI also thought the wrong thing at first since the big front and center title on the homepage says "The next-generation command line."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- askew 3y agoYou may be thinking of Warp (https://www.warp.dev/ https://www.warp.dev/)
- rollcat 3y agoTo be honest I do think it's time we move on from emulating teletypes, but I also believe that whatever comes next has to be an open standard, with competing implementations. There's a whole graveyard out there of "next-gen" terminal projects, and none of those still alive seems to be gaining dominance. I don't think writing down a spec would help this, but it would be great if whatever emerged victorious had one.
- oxalorg 3y agoCurious to learn more about your switch from Emacs to VSCode? I'm a super confused soul, and currently I use all of them: - Emacs (for clojure / lisps / big projects). - NeoVim (for when I want to work in the shell, smaller scripts/playground, ssh). - VScode (js / ts / frontend / figma / etc). I've made both my vim and emacs keybindings / features almost identical, so there is limited context switching there. I feel very slow in VSCode, I don't even have one of my most common task optimised in VSCode yet: grepping something and quickly moving to that buffer.
- throwawayfigs 3y ago"I am thrilled to announce that the Fig team will be joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon has acquired Fig's technology! " That's possibly the most inefficient way of saying "AWS bought Fig" but I guess it makes some people happier to frame it that way In any event, I'll pass on "the CLI with a subscription that sends telemetry". Paying hard earned dollars every month for a terminal is something so out of the realm of the possible for me I'm honestly baffled to see this has any customers...
- hot_gril 3y agoAmazon buying Fig doesn't imply the team joins AWS.
- gdsdfe 3y agowhen a company buys another company it kinda does the opposite would be the outlier
- hot_gril 3y agoAmazon isn't the same thing as AWS. Amazon might have bought Fig and kept the team separate, or they might've kept the tech and shortly after let the team go.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- onion2k 3y agoIt's much more common for the acquired company to continue as an entity in its own right with only the board changing in the short term, and often continuing as a brand within the acquirer's business in the long term. Integrating a existing team into a company is hard. That said, Amazon has a lot of experience doing exactly that. I think they'll be fine.
- hoffs 3y agoThis seem like perfect replacement of Amazon's cloud shell thing
- the_duke 3y ago> New users will not be able to sign up for Fig's products right now while we focus on optimizing them for existing customers and addressing some needs identified to integrate Fig with AWS. This sounds a lot like the product is dead, and may emerge again at some point as an AWS hosted, Amazon branded product... I'd never use a subscription + telemetry laden product like this in my core workflow, but sucks for the current users I guess.
- gpvos 3y agoThey give a timeline of a few weeks, so presumably we'll see soon enough.
- ryneandal 3y agoYeah, that is my expectation about its future as well. I really enjoyed using Fig for clear CLI introspection for many of my common workflows. I am fully expecting that I'll have to go back to zsh-autosuggestions once the current iteration is fully wound down.
- berkes 3y agoTo me the whole post read like "we are aquihired, but we cannot admit we are are aquihired". The closing of registration driving it home. If AWS bought it for the product, what reason would there ever be to stop the current business model entirely rather than leaving it on its current trajectory for a few months, untill said "needs" are addressed?
- theolivenbaum 3y agoReminds me of Slapdash's and Command-E acquisitions. Both still living in a limbo last I checked...
- jtreminio 3y agoCommand-E is now Dropbox Dash and has been receiving fairly heavy promotion.
- 3y ago
- w0mbat 3y agoI installed Fig just now and got "Something went wrong. Signups are currently disabled." when I tried to use it. Their servers have been overwhelmed by Hacker News traffic presumably.
- high_priest 3y agoThere is a note: ``` Note: While we integrate with AWS, Fig is currently not accepting new sign ups ```
- Alifatisk 3y agoI had completely forgot about Fig, I remember trying it out on my previous laptop, it didn't offer anything more than my zsh-autocomplete, which made me send in my feedback before uninstalling. The telemetry part didn't bug me that much, but the product itself was cool, reminds me of warp.dev Congratz on the acquisition.
- nikolay 3y agoSeems like an acquihire!
- tgv 3y agoI had never heard about them, but for the life of me, I cannot imagine sufficient paying customers: it's zsh/fish, basically. Sharing the settings is not really a $12/month productivity boost. Acquihire sounds likely.
- mteigers 3y agoI've been a personal paying customer going on 2 years now. The biggest benefit I get from fig is their "build a script / cli" functionality. With it you can define UI elements like "list all branches" and you have a nice UI sector and then you can string together code snippets using the outputs of the UI elements. So I have some fig scripts that prompt me for half a dozen inputs and then execute bash and python based on the outputs. Fig has been a godsend for acting as glue for one-off bash scripts that are added to repos.
- nikolay 3y agoI've been using Run [0] for this purposes. [0]: https://github.com/TekWizely/run https://github.com/TekWizely/run
- pbbakkum 3y agoPlugging a project of mine: I've been working on a similar idea for the era of LLMs: https://butterfi.sh https://butterfi.sh. It's much more bare-bones than Fig but perhaps useful if you're looking for an alternative! Send me feedback!
- xcdzvyn 3y agoJust curious, do you have any intent on adding local model support?
- pbbakkum 3y agoI've experimented with it, the reason I haven't yet added it is that I want deployment to be seamless, and it's not trivial to ship a binary that would (without extra fuss or configuration) efficiently support Metal and CUDA, plus download the models in a graceful way. This is of course possible, but still hard, and not clear if it's the right place to spend energy. I'm curious how you think about it - is your primary desire to work offline or avoid sending data to OpenAI? Or both?
- xcdzvyn 3y agoThe latter mostly. It's also free, uncensored, and can never disappear from under me. FWIW, from my understanding llama.cpp is pretty easy to integrate and is reasonably fast for being API agnostic. Ollama embeds it, for example. No pressure, just pointing it out :)
- Hamuko 3y agoIs this in any way related to the fish shell or is this just a very unfortunate name?
- politelemon 3y ago> Within Butterfish Shell you can send a ChatGPT prompt by just starting a command with a capital letter, for example: This is a dangerous assumption. Not all commands are lowercase. Interaction with an external service should be a deliberate, discrete action on the user's part.
- rmorey 3y agoI love this product, have contributed several times to it, and I'm a little torn. One thing I am thinking about now, is that the completion specs are MIT-licensed, and it should be possible to use them to re-implement a basic open-source version of the autocompletion product... https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete
- SoftwareDev6 3y agoPretty cool for the Fig team.
- dexterdog 3y agoProbably not the entire team.
- bastardoperator 3y agoI could never love it, but hopefully that's a nice exit for everyone involved. Congrats.
- desireco42 3y agoThis is very damaging for other startups. You create something, then you ask people to believe you and invest their time and sometimes money with you. Then you, in act of desperation, sell out and sell your users... The issue is, people are already super skeptical when these startups start asking for things, this just makes them even harder to get users to trust you as a emerging company or product with data and usage.
- hot_gril 3y agoStartups don't have big reputations to protect unless they're tied to someone famous, and also they need a path towards acquisition for early investors to care. There isn't really a way around that.
- charles_f 3y agoHow does that align with Amazon's product line? Is Fig an online product?
- resonious 3y agoGiven that they're shutting down registration, it probably doesn't.
- eikenberry 3y agoI feel sorry for their remote employees as their company just sold them out.
- jarek83 3y agoInteresting - I tried Fig for few days few months ago, it gave me more headaches than relief so uninstalled it. Surprised that it made into a viable product and shocked it actually got acquired.
- e-clinton 3y agoSame experience. Tried a few times in different machines and it either froze the machine, ate up crazy memory, or other random behavior. I’m shocked this made it anywhere.
- ae_throw 3y ago[flagged]
- dinckelman 3y agoAs a regular terminal user, I didn't find Fig particularly useful to begin with, but this just made me remove it entirely
- rexreed 3y agoOh times have changed. In days past acquisitions of startups by big tech were met with congratulation and adulation. Today they are met with dread and despair.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throw828away 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shishirpatil 3y agoCheck out Gorilla-CLI. An open source alternative to Fig, that’s also LLM powered! https://github.com/gorilla-llm/gorilla-cli https://github.com/gorilla-llm/gorilla-cli
- tianjunz 3y agoCheck out this cool research from UC Berkeley!
- Robdel12 3y agoI liked fig, but I got rid of it when I saw that email. Congrats to the team on the sale! Sadly, seems like it’s dead now. Happy they got paid :)
- rattray 3y agoHow popular is fig compared to warp?
- skinkestek 3y agoTangentially related: One of the most annoying thing is to learn about an interesting project by the post were they announce that they are aquihired, or even worse, closing down because of lack of interest.
- jdorfman 3y agoI’ve been using Fig since the beta days and I love it. I’m sure there will be some changes but at least they didn’t sell to Google. Congrats to Brendan and the team.
- throwmeback 3y agoEhh, time to uninstall. Too bad, it worked great for me.
- alexellisuk 3y agoFirst time hearing of fig, other than when the name was used for a precursor to Docker Compose. Is this effectively very similar to Atuin? https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin
- skenderbeu 3y agoI'll stick with Zsh completions