Warp sends a terminal session to LLM without user consent
Today, I got an LLM suggestion on how to fix a syntactic error after following an attempt to run a test.
So, I went on to Warp's Discord to ask what's going on, and sure enough, their "Friendly support bot" and I discovered that.
> Warp has introduced features like Prompt Suggestions and Next Command that use LLMs to provide contextual suggestions. These features are part of Warp's Active AI system, which proactively recommends fixes and next actions based on your terminal session, including errors, inputs, and outputs.
"Proactively" here also means without explicit user consent.
I did enjoy Warp, but that breach of trust is so enormous I'm removing it just now.
This tells volumes about ethics and what's important.
Ref: https://docs.warp.dev/agents/active-ai
Warp feels like it's at a similar spot with their agent albeit with less Anthropic secret sauce.
Consider subscribing to the RSS feed [1] at the very least :)
[0] https://terminal.click
[1] https://terminal.click/index.xml
I imagine there are zsh scripts and/or omz plugins for it too.
iTerm2 on Mac has extra integrations also.
I'm a Warp fanboy. Claude Code has it beat for writing software, but Warp is magic for linux sys admin. I SSH into my home server and feel like a wizard, no more constantly switching to a web browser to Google stuff. The experience of staring at a text only terminal for hours without ever switching to a different window feels like using DOS before the internet. It's magical.
But looking at the marketing for Warp, this thing screams LLM everything. Nothing about this hints that things are processed locally. I can't imagine using a tool like this and not thinking that everything I type into it (and give it access too) is getting routed to a server somewhere.
What am I missing here about being upset that... it seems to be doing its job?
Unless I am missing that it is installing something so this happens in your normal terminal or something like that... to be blunt if you used this tool and this is what breaks your trust... how did you think it worked in the first place?
Bye bye, Warp. Trash product. Trash leadership.
Or present a big warning before enabling.
I often set secret tokens as env variables, even if temporarily when running commands.
There's no way I'm touching warp with a ten foot pole after that.
Something makes me think HN might not be the target demographic for a bloaty proprietary terminal with a login prompt & LLMs stuffed into it.
I tend to append "clear &&" to commands I run frequently, to clear out output from a previous run. Every other terminal this works like you expect. In Warp, it doesn't. Turns they've hijacked the "clear" command for reasons I don't remember, such that it only works when you run it separately instead of as part a sequence. I only learned this when I went searching for a bug report on that found one that had been opened for a while where they essentially said they had no interest in making this sort of basic stuff work.