> 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.
To 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?
Of all PR, I think I may hate acquisition PR the most. It is almost entirely just lies. And the same ones every time.
Just tell us if you just wanted the employees, just wanted some rights, wanted to integrate their product for your use, or just wanted to kill something off. I'm sick of reading the same new release for every acquisition knowing it's bullshit.
I read it as “hosted AWS version coming soon, we will email you when it’s time to migrate”.
If it was just acquihire there probably wouldn’t have a big blog post tying it to AWS. Just negative publicity for acquirer when they could shut down quietly.
The blog post doesn't mean anything. HN is full of congratulatory posts of acquihires. They're all the same. "Now that we're part of $BIGCO we'll be working to integrate our technology into $BIGCO."
It never happens.
If $BIGCO had any intent to keep the product along, you'd be reading the post on $BIGCO's blog, not $FAILEDSTARTUP's blog.
Acquirers typically add terms to deal preventing vanity announcements and defining shutdown timeline. They don’t want the overhead of maintaining, or the negative brand hit. Each case is different, but there’s always a plan. They probably have some reason to keep maintaining the current customers/product, we can just guess what it is.
There is absolutely zero reason to believe that there is any plan to maintain this tiny product, let alone in any way to that is compatible with existing customers (if they exist).
> If it was just acquihire there probably wouldn’t have a big blog post tying it to AWS. Just negative publicity for acquirer when they could shut down quietly.
That’s a good point.
But what reason is there to disable new registrations?
Terms of the acquisition, most likely. Existing customers are worth $x/yr. New customers with the new product are worth $y/yr. Finance doesn't want $x competing with $y. Something something financial models making the deal worth what they paid, so closing registration is simply part of the deal that was signed.
They want to move the customers to a new AWS service (that will be this product rebranded with AWS) and tie into AWS infrastructure instead of using a special system for sign in.
By preventing sign ups, they fix the number of accounts that will need to be migrated in future.
I was at Cloud9 which was acquired by Amazon. We took most of the existing frontend and tech and rebuilt the backend on AWS, then relaunched it as AWS Cloud9. In the meantime we sunset the existing service.
I'd assume the same thing is going to happen here.
As an aside, can you explain to me why Cloud9 has never worked correctly in Safari? The cursor positioning in text has been messed up for as long as I can remember. AWS has never fixed it, despite having owned it for over a decade.
I worked at AWS from 2010 to 2014 after also getting acqui-hired (AWS SDK for PHP, fka CloudFusion).
> 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?
That’s an easy one: if it’s burning money like crazy on its current hosting, but only because of rents extracted by one of their competitors, not for any inherent OpEx-intensity; and that therefore Amazon expects it to be profitable when moved to live rent-free on their hosting.
I would never use a cloud-syncing cloud-connected terminal for simple security and privacy reasons alone, not to mention the fact that if it goes down I become basically disabled as a developer or admin.
Several companies have tried to SaaSify the terminal and failed, so I suspect I am not alone here.
"We've noticed that there's a component of the computing infrastructure that isn't sending everything you do to the cloud and charging monthly rent..."
Yes I'm genuinely shocked at the other comments here saying they use this happily; it should be a cause for concern. That it's now landing in Amazon's lap, doubly so.
> All cloud features are opt-in and your data is encrypted at rest. For autocomplete, all of your keystrokes are processed locally and never leave your device.
If Fig goes down, you fall back to the regular shell that doesn't have autocomplete etc. If Fig gets hacked, that's scary, then again GitHub and others are similarly big targets.
Idk though, this doesn't seem useful enough to me as an individual that I'd bother looking into it. Maybe for a team or company.
As a side note, if your security relies on you typing things into your terminal, you're doing it wrong. AWS even makes you check a box when generating creds that basically says "I understand the way I'm doing this is insecure" when generating creds that will be used that way.
I would use this as the way for company's command line tools to be provisioned to me as a team member. This means my tools can be separated from work tools
It actually makes sense for Amazon integrating this with the whole browser based shell thing (which is a sensible secure default for a lot of people).
Having something with autocomplete that works seamlessly with their services seems like a better idea than a plain prompt if you're going to use their shell. Hopefully they do something sensible and customer-centric with the telemetry stuff, that seemed to be the big drawback for many.
These 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.
Sticking to Vim and other very well-established CLIs is partially what enabled flexibility for me. As long as I have access to a *nix machine locally or over SSH, I have a capable dev setup that I'm well-versed in. Same thing for the past 8 jobs I've bounced around in, whether in-office or remote, with whatever security restrictions, with or without a desk, maybe with just a 13" laptop. It's the lowest common denominator. Meanwhile my teammates at my current job are constantly trying to protect their workstation setups so they can use their IDEs locally, and they've also been forced to switch IDEs twice in the past couple of years.
And this isn't coming from some FOSS ideology. I don't personally care about any of that, but the best tools are sometimes FOSS. I've got a Mac and can deal with Linux as needed.
To 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.
I think the part of this that feels wrong is that it steps into the realm of so many other perfectly good tools, and it seems like it’s there to enshrine crappy local development and deployment practices.
If you need reporting on the scripts your developers are running on their local machines, that probably means they have too much access to live environments. Guardrails and reporting should be in your CI/CD process and your source control.
Shells like fish or shell plug-ins already handle autocomplete nicely, so that feature isn’t that useful.
If you need env/dotfile management you probably need to spend time making a proper development environment rather than shimmying in a tool to make doing the wrong thing easier.
SSH key management is so trivially accomplished by numerous methods like configuration management or built-in solutions offered by cloud providers. Plus, most development teams almost certainly give out too much SSH access as it stands.
If you need to SSH regularly that means your application isn’t shipping logs and your local development tooling isn’t good enough.
Curious 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.
It's not a different terminal application, but an overlay that gives you autocomplete-style suggestions in your existing terminal emulator. I don't know all the terminal emulators it works with since it's MacOS only, but it works in both iTerm2 and the VSCode terminal, granted that you're not using a terminal multiplexer like tmux (which makes it useless for my workflow).
Interesting - 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.
Same 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.
Congratulations! 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.
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.
AFAICT 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.
I 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
Congratulations!? 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%?
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).
No, 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.
> Existing users will continue to be able to use Fig and will receive ongoing support. What's more, we are now making all the paid Fig Team features completely free.
Yeah this is true. I'm deeply disappointed with my experience with Fig. Despite high anticipation among my friends in the community, the inability to log in has rendered it useless for us, prompting me to uninstall fig. I hope Fig addresses these issues to provide a more satisfying user experience in the future with a proper timeline.
can't blame them. work on what seems to be a obviously needed tool, manage it for 2.5 years, then get "not acquired" by Amazon to take it off your hands, especially since the money was coming from enterprise and larger teams to begin with.
> 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.
I like that a lot! It would be awesome if the client running on goal mode had capabilities to request some search engine API + do some crawling. Imagine getting the info out of up to date github issues or directly from AWS docs.
I'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?
The 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 :)
i 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.
Fig 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.
Will 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.
I 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
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.
This 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.
Startups 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.
> 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.
I 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.
I'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.
I’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.
There 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.
Seems 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.
You 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.
Acquihires 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.
"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...
That wording implies an asset sale which is for anyone involved in or doing business with Fig a big difference. In that case existing ownership and obligations stay with the original entity (probably something like Fig Inc, Delaware corp), the whole team gets hired on at Amazon, Amazon buys the tech they want for some payment the Fig board signs off on, and then someone goes in to clean up and wind down Fig Inc. It's common when big companies buy much smaller companies because doing a full purchase can be a lot more complicated.
100% I would imagine there are big differences on both sides, and possibly some ways to exempt some of the payment for assets against the cost of building them. People don't usually write much about this level of detail but it would be interesting to see.
> 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
Often that kind of language is employed when the actual transaction was structured as an asset sale coupled with en-masse hiring of the team, rather than a true acquisition of the company as a complete entity, which is not an unusual scenario when a company is in distress.
If the arrangement involved both a tech purchase and a contractual obligation for employees to stay with AWS for a set period, simply saying "Fig was acquired" wouldn't be accurate. Given that Amazon is a publicly traded company, making such misleading statements is a no-go.
Amazon 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.
It'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.
Yep. 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.
Well, 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.
I've also been a paid user of Alfred for nearly a decade. I tried Raycast in it's early stages, also became a paid user, and haven't gone back to Alfred.
I adore and appreciate Alfred, it was one of the first applications I would install on a new Mac. However, Raycast is a very well polished product and has been a great add-on to the daily arsenal.
Try it. I've jumped ship a while ago, and it's amazing. I miss it a lot on Linux and Windows, FlowLauncher doesn't feel nearly as polished and I already forgot which launcher I use on my Linux install.
The ones I love the most are Keepass, Bitrise, and the fact that you can just press enter to join the Google Meet call attached to the next upcoming meeting.
nobody'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.
Oh 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.
I'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.
Right? To me it's more than just a cheap joke because it opens such possibilities. My first thought was of Amazon expanding out under Puget Sound in Bioshock-esque sunken office buildings.
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.