AI Shell is an interactive shell that provides a chat interface with language models. The shell provides agents that connect to different AI models and other assistance providers. Users can interact with the agents in a conversational manner. ↫ Microsoft Learn Basically, what Microsoft means with this is a split-view terminal where one of the two views is a prompt where you can ask questions to an “AI”, like OpenAI or whatever. The “AI” features are not actually integrated into your shell, which instead lives in the other view and acts like a completely normal, standard shell. Instead of opening up an “AI” chatbot in a browser window or whatever, you now have it in a split view in your terminal – that’s really all there’s to it here. I’m going to blow your mind here and say that in theory, this could be an actually useful addition to terminals and shells, as a properly vetted and configured “AI” that has been trained on properly obtained source material could indeed be a great help in determining the right terminal commands and options. Tons of people already blindly copy and paste terminal commands from websites even though they really shouldn’t anyway, so it’s not like this introduces anything new here in terms of dangers. Hell, tutorial writers still add -y to dnf or apt-get commands, so it can really only go up from here.
