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?
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.