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Ugh, I am pretty sick of people trying to shoehorn AI into everything. AI is cool, don't get me wrong, but it feels like every company and organization is tryin

Ugh, I am pretty sick of people trying to shoehorn AI into everything. AI is cool, don't get me wrong, but it feels like every company and organization is trying to hop onto the bandwagon and add it to places where I really don't want it. I can understand how a terminal might be able to benefit from AI (in the same way coding does with Copilot), but I don't know if I really want it in my terminal; if nothing else I don't want my terminal sending lots of network requests behind the scenes. Maybe I'm in the minority but I dunno, I feel like I can't be the only person sick of adding AI to every damn thing. When I was applying to jobs last year, I ended up avoiding anything directly mentioning AI in the job description, because about 80% of the time it felt like it was some founder straight out of school who knew nothing about CS but knew just enough about how to proxy to ChatGPT that they were able to get a few million dollars of VC money, and they were extremely annoying to talk to. I guess having a bunch of people tell you that you're a visionary must give most people an ego, and I'm way too cynical to put up with that. I think iTerm moving this to a plugin is a pretty good idea. If people want to add AI crap into everything, don't let me stop them, but I don't really want it added to the default stack of iTerm.

mmastrac 2y ago
It's fair to say you're sick of it. I never even used the feature myself, but here's the thing: I never even saw it and wouldn't have known it existed if not for the backlash. I had to search through settings to find any evidence of it. You say it's "shoehorning" on one hand, then "I can understand how a terminal might be able to benefit from AI" on another. It didn't send anything off in the background (you don't need an AI feature to do that, BTW). The backlash was completely unwarranted here, and I say that as someone who wouldn't bother using that feature at all.
- tombert 2y ago
  I see how what I said might sound contradictory, so let me explain. In the case of startups using AI, most of them have some marginal benefit from the AI usage, if a bit overblown. By "shoehorning", what I was saying is that there isn't sufficient justification for a lot of the AI usage; it makes stuff 1% easier (maybe), while making the product more expensive (only being subsidized by VC money or just operating at a loss so it doesn't immediately look like it is in the short term). I didn't say "shoehorning" to imply that there's zero utility in it, just that there's not really enough to justify a lot of it. > It didn't send anything off in the background (you don't need an AI feature to do that, BTW). Fair enough, I didn't look into the implementation details, and obviously you can have stuff sent in the background without AI (e.g. usage statics). Most AI stuff I've seen has been just proxied to OpenAI (or some competitor/affiliate), so I guess I just assumed that that's what iTerm was doing. ETA: Looking into this a bit further, I completely agree that the vicious comments that have been spreading in regards to this are completely ridiculous and mean-spirited. I'm sick of AI as much of the next guy but people are being pretty dickish about something that fundamentally they're getting for free.
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mmastrac 2y ago

It's fair to say you're sick of it. I never even used the feature myself, but here's the thing: I never even saw it and wouldn't have known it existed if not for the backlash. I had to search through settings to find any evidence of it. You say it's "shoehorning" on one hand, then "I can understand how a terminal might be able to benefit from AI" on another. It didn't send anything off in the background (you don't need an AI feature to do that, BTW). The backlash was completely unwarranted here, and I say that as someone who wouldn't bother using that feature at all.

tombert 2y ago
I see how what I said might sound contradictory, so let me explain. In the case of startups using AI, most of them have some marginal benefit from the AI usage, if a bit overblown. By "shoehorning", what I was saying is that there isn't sufficient justification for a lot of the AI usage; it makes stuff 1% easier (maybe), while making the product more expensive (only being subsidized by VC money or just operating at a loss so it doesn't immediately look like it is in the short term). I didn't say "shoehorning" to imply that there's zero utility in it, just that there's not really enough to justify a lot of it. > It didn't send anything off in the background (you don't need an AI feature to do that, BTW). Fair enough, I didn't look into the implementation details, and obviously you can have stuff sent in the background without AI (e.g. usage statics). Most AI stuff I've seen has been just proxied to OpenAI (or some competitor/affiliate), so I guess I just assumed that that's what iTerm was doing. ETA: Looking into this a bit further, I completely agree that the vicious comments that have been spreading in regards to this are completely ridiculous and mean-spirited. I'm sick of AI as much of the next guy but people are being pretty dickish about something that fundamentally they're getting for free.

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