Amazon has acquired Fig, a Y Combinator (YC) alum that has been setting out to turbo-charge the command line terminal.

In a blog post published yesterday, CEO and co-founder Brendan Falk said that Amazon was acquiring Fig's technology, while its employees - including two co-founders - would be joining Amazon's cloud subsidiary AWS.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Fig was founded in San Francisco out of stealth in 2020. The company raised a little north of $2 million in funding, so it is unlikely Amazon had to break the bank to acquire the startup. The company does count a swath of big-name backers, including YC, General Catalyst, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz and ex-GitHub CTO Jason Warner.

Commanding
Fig also includes a few nifty utilities, such as "autocomplete," which provides you with some personal suggestions, along with the description of what the next action a developer might want to perform is as they're typing a command. All these are for saving time and repetitive keystrokes.

In an era of high-gloss graphical user interfaces, many developers prefer to talk to their operating system in the older text-based command line interface. The CLI is generally more flexible, more efficient in its use, yet consumes less in the way of system resources.

And that, in short, has been the market Fig has looked to address, bringing into the realm of the CLI features heretofore familiar only to those using an integrated development environment, or IDE.

The company has provided a free tier for hobbyists and small teams, but its paid plans are available across more premium features that cater to bigger businesses and enterprises. Following the acquisition, Fig said all free features are now totally free for existing users, though.

The generative AI game
So. what business does Amazon have in buying Fig? Well, says Falk, it is all about bringing together their respective expertise to "enhance the developer experience." More specifically, though, it seems as though the burgeoning generative AI revolution might have a thing or two to do with Amazon's interest in Fig.

At its core, Fig saves developers grunt work by providing helpful suggestions. It's not too dissimilar from something like GitHub's Copilot; Google has launched a Copilot competitor of its own, with Facebook's parent Meta developing a Copilot-like tool that it's using internally.

Fig isn't at quite the scale of Copilot yet, but AWS has made its ambitions for generative AI fairly clear. And while the company launched an AI pair-programmer called CodeWhisperer in June, acqui-hiring the good people at Fig will go some way toward helping it keep pace with its cloud rivals.

Generative AI is a fundamental technology shift that is going to change how they build," said Falk. "AWS believes that; they're excited about this larger vision and looks forward to joining the ecosystem with GANAIN.".

What's also interesting here is that Fig claimed thousands of users from dozens of big-name organizations, including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon itself. So it's possible that Amazon's engineers brought this to the attention of the powers-that-be, perhaps even prompting its M&A unit into action before its rivals.

It continues, existing users will still be able to use Fig and get support, though it won't accept new signups for now while Amazon addresses "some needs identified to integrate Fig with AWS."

Over the longer term, it's not quite clear what ramifications this will have for developers and engineers working with other cloud providers.

As for future plans, "there are no updates to share at this time," he wrote in a blog post "but we continue working hard, innovating on behalf of developers, specifically in the terminal/shell."

We have reached out to Amazon for clarification on what this acquisition means, and will update if—or when—we hear back.