zachlloyd
Note that we are going to add bring-your-own-model directly into Warp. Would love interested folks to weigh in on the discussion here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp/discussions/9619
You can still basically get back to the same way of working if you set new terminal sessions to be "agent sessions" and enable natural language detection. that's how i use it.
we have a lot of open source library dependencies and are grateful to the folks who worked on them
In terms of monetization, we actually don't monetize the terminal at all, we monetize our agent and our orchestration platform (www.oz.dev). Totally happy for you to use Claude or Codex CLI within Warp as your main driver.
We've added features to make using CLI coding agents easier (e.g. a file tree and code review) but they are all optional and customizable.
I outline the thought process in detail in our blog (https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source)
But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.
The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.
Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.
there is a large segment of developers who find the command line hard to use or who just want a better, more productive experience using it. to be clear, you may not fall into that bucket, and that's OK.
the point of the login is that we have features that cost us money to provide like AI, and we need some concept of identity to prevent their abuse. i don't think that's detestable (e.g. it's very similar to cursor or copilot), but i get that's a new behavior in the terminal and am sorry it put you off.
just to clarify though, the point of the login is that we have features that cost money to provide like AI and collaboration, not anything more nefarious, but i get that it's a new behavior and reasonable devs might not like it.
Warp terminal – no more login required
Solve problems, don't just talk about them: Design interviews at early startups
The basic thesis is pretty straightforward: all of these interfaces are going to have to shift to be geared towards revisions of AI generated drafts as opposed to de novo creation.
Would love any feedback!
Ask and Adjust: The future of productivity interfaces
tl;dr I believe we are moving to an AI-first world in productivity, but, importantly, not an AI-only world. I think the main paradigm in horizontal productivity apps is going to be Ask & Adjust: AIs will iteratively generate drafts or edits, and humans will hand-tweak them until they are right. For activities like coding where it’s very hard to express your intent exactly to an AI, the hand-editing interfaces, along with collaborative re-use, will remain crucial.
Thank you!
How we solve user problems at Warp
Re: login, I get the concern and we are exploring product options that let folks preview warp without login.
From a product perspective our goal is to make the terminal cloud-native and have a way of facilitating collaboration, and it's not really possible to build that without user identity. Specifically, login allows us to build cloud-oriented features that make the terminal have a concept of “your stuff” and “your team’s stuff” – for example Block Sharing. This is the same reason other collaborative apps like Figma and Github require login. We do get the concerns though and understand that this is not traditionally how a terminal has functioned and that it will make some users uncomfortable. But on the whole we feel like it's the right way to push the command line experience forward.
Re: configuration issues, we are trying as fast as we can to fix them. It's hard technically to both innovate on the command-line and maintain complete backwards compatibility, but that is our goal.
Re: Mac only, this is also really just a limitation of eng bandwidth, not a product strategy. We are 100% planning on bringing warp to more platforms as fast as we can.