I'm Zach, founder of Warp, the first Agentic Development Environment (ADE). AMA! 🔥

@angus_mac love this idea. we participate in a ton of hackathons and i think it would be cool to do a warp hosted one. @erikeliason

@angus_mac hackaton with Warp sounds like a brilliant idea! Let's realize it!

@lina_huchok That's a great question. For developers who are super familiar with using a terminal, they can actually just still use that same muscle memory for the most part within Warp.

The future though is starting every task with a prompt. And in that respect, Warp is capitalizing on broad momentum towards the CLI as the primary interface.

Tools like Claude Code and Gemini CLI show that the command line is actually a great place to do agentic work. And with Warp, we realized that the best possible experience isn't just using a text-based CLI tool, it's a rich interface for doing agentic work that lets you review and iterate on diffs with the agent, run multiple agents at once, and save and share agent contexts all in an app that's built for the new workflow.

We have seen success in getting long-term Warp users to adopt the more agentic workflow. From a product perspective, we've done this by trying to get them to experience an AHA moment - usually when they're in the course of fixing some terminal error and see that the agent can help them achieve the task more easily.

We also have a lot of users who are coming into Warp who don't carry the baggage of using terminals or IDEs and are getting going with Agentic development for the first time.

@gabe Awesome questions.

Yes, we do see vibe coders, and our data shows that about 25% of people who are using Warp for coding are not experienced developers. However, most people who are using Warp these days do have a technical background.

Our roadmap is focused pretty squarely on the pro developer use case under the theory that if we can build something that's awesome for pro devs, it will probably also be sufficient for vibe coders. However, we don't really believe that the converse is true - a tool that's built primarily for vibe coders is unlikely to be super usable for the real development use cases that we want to support.

Totally agree on "developed by prompt" being totally new. The way that we evaluate it is through a bunch of standard product development practices that I've always believed in. You should check out how we work on how we solve user problems to get a good sense of it: https://notion.warp.dev/original-How-we-solve-user-problems-at-Warp-21643263616d81bc9347e20fc1b73d8e

The biggest thing is that we only want to build features if we're clear on what problem they're solving. We validate that by testing the features quickly with users and by testing the features internally at Warp.

The thing that has me most excited is that for people who love building software, this is a golden age where you can build not just more apps (I worry that there's a lot of crap that might get built) but better apps more quickly that solve more user problems. I also think it's cool how the agentic coding workflows are democratizing development so that a larger range of people are able to build software to solve their own problems.

and a follow up that is totally unrelated, what is the "highest complexity" code in your codebase? do you consider the "technicality of the code" to be part of your moat?

@catt_marroll somewhere in the middle.

our mission has stayed the same throughout -- empowering developers to ship better software more quickly, but the product has changed a ton with the rise of LLMs.

Our original product strategy and product vision of building the world's best command line is still highly relevant and differentiated, and happens to work extremely well for agents, not just terminal commands. Building a better terminal also helped us get hundreds of thousands of active developers into Warp even before our move towards the ADE.

That said, it wasn't until we started really embracing agentic development that our revenue took off.

@le_zhu We are already at this point. For Warp, LLM costs are far and away the number one variable cost at the company, which means that we need to be smart about how we manage the tokens that we send and receive from the LLMs.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to these costs over time. For any fixed level of intelligence, the cost of tokens is going down dramatically over time. But for the frontier models, which were the ones that are most useful for coding, the costs stayed around the same. Our hope is that there's a bunch of competition at the model layer which drives these costs down.

@alt8451 I wrote something up on this: https://notion.warp.dev/How-Warp-uses-Warp-to-build-Warp-21643263616d81a6b9e3e63fd8a7380c

@carter_hill1 It's a great question. We have a feature in Warp called session restoration where we store conversations in a local SQLite database so that even across app restarts you can specify that you want to continue a conversation. I think eventually these will be more cloud-synced so you can share them with your team or pick them up from different computers.

We also have global and cloud-synced rules, as well as the local and project-specific warp.md file. The agent has the ability to edit the warp.md file to save things so that it remembers your context. We're working on making the agent better at knowing when to create rules and when to edit the Warp MD file so it remembers stuff for you.

@gsmbk Glad it's working well. I'm going to steal that line. Love at first prompt. That's awesome.

I think we have a pretty differentiated spot in the space right now. All of our competitors are either forks of VSCode (which are basically the same UI app) or they are CLI apps (which are also basically the same app). To my knowledge at least Warp is the only app that is trying to build something from ground up principles for the agentic workflow, not just of today but of what we see coming down the pipe as agents become more and more autonomous.

So we are making a bet here that there's a bunch of product differentiation that actually isn't that easy for our competitors to replicate. And if it was, I think you would see more people trying to replicate what Warp has built (and maybe that's happening and I don't know it yet).

We do have BYOLLM on our roadmap, and it's something that I would really like to build. It's not just a common end-user request; it's a common enterprise request. My main concern with BYO LLM at the moment is actually that if you're talking about local LLMs, the quality isn't the same as the frontier models.

If you're talking about API keys, we'd have to figure out how to make our business model support that. We would probably wanna do something where we charge some usage premium on top of the API key so that we can recuperate some value.

@rolfadd The goal is to build the company for the long term, but I'm also pragmatic. If we get to a point where it seems like acquisition is the best option, we would consider it.

Right now, my goal is to position Warp to be the de facto tool that developers are using to build with AI, and I think we have a strong chance of doing that because we have such a differentiated approach, strong growth, and a very big and engaged user base.

@mihail_eric Thanks Mihail!!