WTF indeed.

There has to be some grand vision behind this, presumably large-scale data capture. At the end of the day, the terminal is is to the dev what Google is to the internet user: the point of entry where many journeys begin, with dozens or hundreds of interactions every day. And while devs are a niche market compared to Google's userbase, they are a lucrative and strategic one nonetheless.

Casting aside the environment of low-interest rates and massive inflow of investment in startups, how does a product like this otherwise raise several millions? The pitch sounds like something that a competent indie dev studio could sell on the Mac App Store...

Yes, but when you’re Googling, you’re searching for public information.

When you’re using the terminal, you’re mostly manipulating your own data, often in ways that would reveal sensitive information if your terminal history was leaked.

Any attempt to collect data from users’ terminal interactions is indistinguishable from keylogging.

They could rationalize it as only capturing the commands and not the arguments, or something. (If that's indeed the long-term plan. No clue; for all I know data collection isn't intended as the business strategy whatsoever.)

I just wanted be a fly on the wall when Fig founders were pitching to these investors on how they are gonna make money.

Can NOT this tool say to my employer - How many times I compile my code in a day ?

When I get a compilation error - how quickly it gets to compiling state again ?

Was the compilation error a trivial mistake ?

How much time is spent between each commands ?

How productive I am keying in command one after another ?

Also can NOT Fig figure out current apps Im running on my machine ?

What is the current app in foreground ?

How long I run each app ?

When I log off ?

How many times I log off ?

It is getting interesting! Can anybody help with more usecases.

Your employer's group policy controls, management agents, etc. that control access to their internal network can (and are) already telling them all of that information. They're basically rootkits that run anything they want on computers that access their network. Usually they just distribute certs, keys, etc. or remotely wipe a lost/stolen machine, but the capability is there to do anything.

I think you misunderstand how tools like this sell, the enterprise offering will be fully supported integration of tools that are enterprisey (Cisco gear, Netapp, Fortinet, Xen, VMware, Veeam) and a hosted offering so teams can collaborate on scripts and snippets á la postman.

I saw the first few commands of the video on their site and I'm like "wait Wtf a visual representation of what hitting tab-tab does already? That can't be it"

But yes that's basically it. You have _all_ of this already and all it needs is for whatever tool you have to provide the "completion" definition file. The graphical nature of this makes it _less_ useful (as others have pointed out w/ regards to no Linux support). How this would sell to enterprise I do not get.

Kudos to them for getting funding for this tho. I wish I had the guts to take something that already exists better and free and ask for someone to pay me money to try and sell it to other people instead.

That’s one theoretical way to make money, except not only do few companies do this now, but few devs would accept that.

There are other ways to support developers thru honest tooling (eg IntelliJ).

pretty dystopian

> Can NOT this tool say to my employer - How many times I compile my code in a day ?

That would be a completely useless metric.

Also, don't you have a daily build pipeline anyways?

While debugging and coding.

Wait until they learn about incremental rebuild!

It strikes me as a pretty disgusting waste of "millions of dollars" to develop a Mac-exclusive app that does the same thing that your shell does, but slower.

Eh money is trying to park itself somewhere.

Maybe the founders sold this as a way to get dev telemetry data + a subscription.

Yeah but if there's dev telemetry involved it's a no-go from me. Definitely a no-go, the terminal is sensitive.

I mean, I agree, why is a cli tool YC backed, sure. But “several million dollars” is literally nothing in the VC space.

I mean they’re trying to be JetBrains but for Bash so it makes total sense to me why it would be a many many millions of dollars effort.

I think people forget that IDEs (which is essentially what this is) are a stupid amount of work. Then you have to add the rest of the business: sales, leadership, support, hr, ops. I mean a 25 person company $200k average total comp is 5mil annual burned cash just on salary.

This is shell completion that you can already do by hitting tab twice (if a definition file exists for your tool). If not, write a definition file.

This is Kite all over again.

> The fact that a CLI tool raised millions of dollars while also being basically powered by open-source contributions is also kind of a wtf moment to me, but what do I know.

There's probably more money than people know what to do with. So they might be investing in completely crazy ideas hoping that the founders figure it out along the way.

> There's probably more money than people know what to do with.

Not really, in the bay area engineers make $150K-500K/year (closer to the $150K end for startups) and office space costs upwards of $200K-300K/year.

I mean venture capital money.

With millions of dollars you could probably just write a shell that does this sort of completion inside the terminal.

I did exactly that for free ;)

Cool! Was it a one man project, and if so then how long did it took to get it to a reasonably functional state?

It's about 6(ish) years old and went through various states of reinvention before I landed on the current design and it's been my primary shell for the last 4 years now.

Can we check it out! :D

Sure, I'd love any and all feedback: https://github.com/lmorg/murex

> Sure, I'd love any and all feedback:

Here's one: you wasted a perfect opportunity to feast on that sweet investor's money.

Just commenting to appreciate the sea snail reference