Fig

Overview

Fig was a developer-tool company founded by Brendan Falk and Matt Schrage and accepted into YC's Summer 2020 batch. It attached visual applications to existing terminals, beginning with IDE-style command-line autocomplete built from an open corpus of declarative specifications. Amazon announced on August 28, 2023 that it had acquired Fig's technology and that the team joined AWS.^[1]

This was an acquisition success with a partial product sunset, not a distress story. The team shipped CodeWhisperer for command line within months, that product became part of Amazon Q Developer, and current AWS code retains direct Fig components. Independent Fig ended on September 1, 2024. Autocomplete survived, but Scripts, Dotfiles, Plugins, and Servers had no planned replacements. Deal terms and exact code contribution remain undisclosed.

Founding Story

Brendan Falk was Fig's CEO, while Matt Schrage did most of the early coding.^[2] After several early-2020 pivots, they focused on a problem in their own work. Falk's concise description was that “the Terminal was a huge pain point for us.”^[2]

The decision was not to build another terminal emulator. Fig would attach visual tools to terminals and IDE consoles developers already used, preserving shells, workflows, and user choice. Technical exploration began in late April 2020. The founders committed on May 15 and shipped an MVP to users about two weeks later.^[2]

The first architecture paired a native Swift desktop application with small web applications rendered beside the terminal. This let the team move quickly while still controlling window position and local integration. The early deployment stack moved from Replit to Heroku, AWS, and S3 as the product matured.

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Timeline

• Late April 2020: Falk and Schrage began technical exploration around visual tools for existing terminals.^[2]
• May 15, 2020: The founders committed to Fig and put an MVP in users' hands roughly two weeks later.^[2]
• May 21, 2021: Fig's Launch HN surfaced enthusiasm for IDE-style completion and concern about an open spec corpus supporting a proprietary client.^[3]
• August 25, 2021: TechCrunch reported a $2.2 million seed round.^[4]
• November 17, 2021: Fig became generally available with autocomplete for more than 200 command-line tools.^[5]
• August 28, 2023: Fig announced that Amazon had acquired its technology and that the team joined AWS.^[1]
• November 20, 2023: Falk announced CodeWhisperer for command line at AWS.^[6]
• April 30, 2024: CodeWhisperer became part of Amazon Q Developer.^[7]
• September 1, 2024: The independent Fig product sunset and promised user-data deletion took effect.^[8]

What They Built

Fig's first product was autocomplete, but its thesis was broader. Fig.js exposed shell events, local command execution, UI positioning beside the terminal, and insertion of text into an active session. The goal was an application platform for the command line.^[5]

Autocomplete used declarative JavaScript specifications. A contributor could describe a command and its arguments in roughly ten lines, then share that specification with every user. At general availability, Fig supported more than 200 command-line tools, and more than 120 people had contributed to the open corpus.^[5]

The local terminal integration was technically difficult. The first MVP reconstructed input through a macOS event tap, which the team found brittle. Fig said keystrokes were never stored or transmitted and that autocomplete ran locally.^[9] The replacement, figterm, inserted a pseudoterminal passthrough, reconstructed the screen, and marked cells as prompt, suggestion, output, or edit-buffer content. The team rewrote figterm from C to Rust with Tokio and shared Rust components with a cross-platform desktop rewrite.