◧ Fig

Fig is a developer tool startup that I co-founded. We set out to make the commandline easier to use, by retro-fitting existing terminals and shells with a graphical interface.

Here are the first mockups I put together, alongside a few of the problems I thought we might be able to solve.

The terminal is powerful, but unforgiving. It emulates the constraints of hardware (like teletype printers and video terminals) that became obsolete a generation ago. There are no built-in affordances. No hints about the 'right way' of using a tool or even finding the right tool for the job. Beginners are thrown in the deep end. And even seasoned developers can screw up their system with a few unfortunate keystrokes.

To solve this, we add a UI overlay that is linked with the interactive shell. As you type, Fig pops up subcommands, options, and contextually relevant arguments in your existing terminal. For example, you can type npm run and Fig will show you the scripts available in your package.json. You could also type cd when SSH'd into a remote machine and Fig will list the folders within your current directory on the remote machine.

Fig uses the Accessibility API on Mac to insert text on your behalf and read what you've typed. We also integrate with the shell to determine the current process and working directory.

My co-founder and I went through YCombinator (opens in a new tab) in the Summer 2020 batch and had one of the most upvoted launches on Hacker News (opens in a new tab). We raised several million dollars in venture funding.

Fig was used by hundreds of thousands of software developers and we built an open-source ecosystem (opens in a new tab) around it with 400+ contributors and 24k stars on GitHub.

Over the the last three years, the team built products ranging from autocomplete to script management to dotfile syncing. (We even experimented with a novel TypeScript-first CI/CD framework and service!)

In August of 2023, we were acquired by Amazon (opens in a new tab) to incorporate our product into their generative AI coding companion, Amazon CodeWhisperer.