Warp Code: the fastest way from prompt to production

Specialization into specific parts of the life cycle, specific technologies and integration into specific systems.

Things like self hosting and data privacy, model optionality too.

Plenty of companies still don’t want to ship their code, agreement or not over to these vendors or be locked into their specific model.

I feel like it's totally the opposite.

The differentiator is the fact that the scaling myth was a lie. The GPT-5 flop should make that obvious enough. These guys are spending billions and can't make the models show more than a few % improvement. You need to actually innovate, e.g. tricks like MoE, tool calling, better cache utilization, concurrency, better prompting, CoT, data labeling, and so on.

Not two weeks ago some Chinese academics put out a paper called Deep Think With Confidence where they coaxed GPT-OSS-120B into thinking a little longer causing it to perform better on benchmarks than it did when OpenAI released it.

I've pitched people working there this multiple times. Warp is not just a terminal, it's a full stack of interaction, they have more of the vertical of the development cycle to leverage.

You need different relationships at different parts of coding, ideation, debugging, testing, etc. Cleverly sharing context while maintaining different flows and respecting the relationship hygiene is the key. Most of the vscode extensions now do this with various system prompt selections of different "personas".

I used to (6 months ago) compare these agentic systems basically as if they were John Wayne as contract programmer, parachuting in a project, firing off their pistol, shooting the criminals, mayor, and burning the barn down all the while you're yelling at it to behave better.

There's contexts and places where this can be more productive. Warp is one of them if executed with clean semantic perimeters. It's in a rather strong positioning for it and an obvious loyalty builder

Sometimes worse is better. I haven't used it a lot yet, but so far I quite like this reduced focus on editing - I see this as close to the sweet spot of vibe coding, in between Claude Code and a full editor/IDE, whereby I generally trust the agent to right the code, but just want a simple editor to steer it more effectively.

I see this similarly to the way I would have a work session with a more junior dev where sometimes during the chat I would "drop down in abstraction" to show them how I'd code a specific function, but I don't want to take over - I'm giving them a bit of direction, and it's up to them to either keep my code or ignore/rewrite it to better suit their approach.

For me, the USP Warp used to have was generating shell commands from prompts inside the terminal - but Cursor has had this in its embedded terminal for a while now so increasingly I find myself using Ghostty instead

Insofar as CVEs issued for proprietary software, I would expect that the owning organization would not be inclined to blame AI code unless they think they can pass the buck.

But as for eventually having to hire senior developers to clean up the mess, I do expect that. Most organizations that think they can build and ship reliable products without human experts probably won’t be around long enough to be able to have actual CVEs issued. But larger organizations playing this game will eventually have to face some kind of reckoning.

Looking at the other side of the coin, I'm hoping that the proliferation of unsafe code would lead to more investment in vulnerability testing tooling, and particularly in reducing false positives by generating potential exploits. Having better security testing would be a massive boon to the industry regardless of whether we use AI to write the code.

I am not really convinced that rate is higher without AI tooling. CVEs existed before AI tools with only humans generating code...

Why would you need a human to fix it if you know what the CVE is.

The difference to me is that I can quickly switch in and out of “AI mode” with Warp. So it’s a terminal when I want that, and it’s an AI assistant when I want that.

With Claude Code, you’re stuck in AI mode all the time (which is slow for running vanilla terminal commands) or you have to have a second window for just terminal commands.

Edit: just read some documentation saying Claude has a “bash mode” where it will actually pass through the commands, so off to try that out now.

Would you be willing to share? I've been poking at this kind of thing, but I haven't had great success rolling my own agents.

What is the best thing you've built with the swarm? Is it measurably better in any way?

The real question is how does a startup that offers a terminal as its product command a $280 million valuation and need close to 100 employees?

Warp was never Electron-based. It's built with Rust

There was an intermediate step where they introduced AI command generation (super useful). Agentic coding follows naturally from that.

No. Its built atop rust iirc

The slick AI integration is exactly why I use it over the other thousand terminal emulators.

Claude Code can replicate some of the behavior, but it’s too slow to switch in and out of command / agent flows.