[gordonhart]

The impact of a few more network calls and decreased privacy is basically never felt by users beyond this abstract "they're spying on me" realization. The impact of this telemetry for a product development team is material.

Not saying that telemetry more valuable than privacy, just that it's a straightforward decision for a company to make when real benefits are only counterbalanced by abstract privacy concerns. This is why it's so universally applied across apps and tools developed commercially.

[TheDong]

For most CLIs, I definitely feel extra network calls because they translate to real latency for commands that _should_ be quick.

If I run "gh alias set foo bar", and that takes even a marginally perceptible amount of time, I'll feel like the tool I'm using is poorly built since a local alias obviously doesn't need network calls.

I do see that `gh` is spawning a child to do sending in the background (https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/3ad29588b8bf9f2390be652f46ee...), which also is something I'd be annoyed at since having background processes lingering in a shell's session is bad manners for a command that doesn't have a very good reason to do so.

[SchemaLoad]

If it's done in a background process then it won't impact the speed of the tool at all. When the choice is between getting data to help improve the tool at the cost of "bad manners" whatever that means, the choice is pretty easy.