Warp CEO Zach Lloyd introduces Warp 2.0: AI agents that run in the terminal and why model competition drives quality

talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Uh next up, we have Zack from Warp coming into the studio. Uh Zack Lloyd, uh we will welcome into the studio. It's been a good show so far. We got three more folks in this lightning round. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? I'm doing great.

Thank you both for having me here. Thanks for hopping on. Would you mind kicking us off with the introduction on yourself and the company? Yeah. So, I am Zach Lloyd. I'm the founder and CEO of Warp. As of today, Warp is an agentic development environment. We are a uh sort of in the AI developer tools space.

The uh sort of general uh thing our product does is it lets you prompt uh something that looks like a terminal interface to run developer agents and they code they can debug production issues. They can basically do any kind of development task. You said as of today what what what has been the key change? Warp 2. 0.

Yeah. So today we launched Warp 2. 0. Congrats. I mean the the the backstory of the company is we uh Congratulations.

We we started off with the vision of um kind of reimagining the terminal which is this very very old school developer tool you know black screen green text um and as the world has changed with more AI we realized actually the the terminal interface the form factor of that is kind of awesome for deploying agents running an agent is very similar to running a command and so as of today we're kind of like fully in the game with a we have like a state-of-the-art coding agent it's it's towards the top of the list on the Sweetbench Eval.

It's the number one on the terminal bench eval. And so we're we're kind of in in the game of like automated software production at this point. What is the uh how do you see like kind of the modern software developer workflow over the next year you know folks using cursor windfur in their idees or GitHub copilot.

Then there's these agents that you can dev yeah you can kick off codecs from inside chatbt which feels like a very different flow than the than the terminal. Uh is it a certain type of developer that gets the most value out of this? Do you see it more as like an ensemble approach? Uh what are you thinking here?

Here here's what I see happening. So I think we are um we're moving from a world where most development has been done traditionally by hand. What I mean by that is like if you're a developer, and I've been a developer forever, my everyday workflow is I would come in, I'd be like, "Okay, I want to work on this feature.

I want to work on this bug. " I would open up my code editor and I would find some files and I would type some code and then I would go to the terminal and I would type some commands to build that code.

And I think that the big shift that's happening right now uh is that instead of like doing all this work by hand, developers are going to be starting most of their tasks with a prompt. Uh and the prompt is going to launch an agent and the agent will do some maybe all of the task depending on how complex it is.

And so I think I think that's the workflow and the job of an engineer is going to increasingly look like how do I multitask? How do I multi-thread myself by being able to like have one agent fixing a bug, another one debugging a production issue? So I think that's what's happening for the next year.

Beyond that, I think maybe it looks a little different, but that's that's what's now possible and it's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. I I want to get to like the Minority Report style interface or like some sort of completely new UI paradigm, but I guess the terminal is undefeated. It's extremely lindy at this point.

But I mean, do you see people using like, you know, 25 multiple, you know, terminal tabs and kind of switching through all of them as different agents. They pop stuff off to just send out their that's the state today. I think um when you when you look at where you can do this because you asked that.

So you can do this in an IDE and if you look at like cursor winds surf they have a sort of chat panel uh that like it does something kind of similar to the terminal honestly it's like a log of like what an agent is doing.

You could do this uh with something like cloud code which is pretty cool and it's actually kind of proving that this workflow is is is like achievable. Uh but the the disadvantage of something like cloud code is it like it's a terminal app and so it's not the whole platform.

It's like a thing you run within the terminal and that kind of limits pretty severely what the user experience could look like.

Or you could do it in something, you know, with what we're trying to do, which is like basically create an interface so that you can do this kind of multi-threaded development and it's got a very natural interface and actually just like the interface of the command line is basically what you need.

You need a way of telling the computer what to do and like splitting off tabs and panes and watching it do it. Honestly, you might not even need to watch it do it a lot of the time. I I think that that's coming pretty soon, too. Uh but like that's the interface.

It's like how do I tell the computer what to do on multiple tasks, have it check in with me when it needs my help? Uh be able to like hop in and actually edit. Uh and so you can do that in Warp now. And so, but like you know, it's going to do a lot of the work under your supervision. Yeah.

Is open source important to your business? Do you have a horse in the race?

Do you care about uh you know how llama 5 turns out for example or what's going on with deepseek or do you just want to pass through the actual inference cost to the user let them pick what what's the strategy there super interesting question that I'm thinking about a lot right now uh I mean so so right now I think it's very clear to us that we're going to give just the best experience to our users and that is using today that's using anthropics models just to be totally frank.

Yeah, I mean that's what people like, right? What's that?

Yeah, I mean that's just like the popular one that we hear about all the time and yeah, we have um we have sort of evals that that test all these models and like there are interesting models from OpenAI that are competitive Gemini from Google has some interesting aspects has a very long context window but like our attitude on this right now at least is like let's pick the thing that provides the best user experience and at the moment that you know I don't think I'm saying anything groundbreaking if you look at the other benchmarks.

Yeah, it's uh it's like the Sonnet uh it's like Cloud 4 and Sonnet and Opus. Um I do think it would be awesome if the what what I want is like a healthy competitive model provider landscape to be totally honest. I don't really want one model provider running away.

I would like to see uh these model providers continue to compete with each other to provide it does price down for you, right? It it it brings the price down. It brings the quality up. Uh, and if at some point there is an open source model that is at the same level, that's super interesting.

Uh, cuz cuz where we're adding the most value right now is like it's in it's in packaging the entire user experience into something that takes what's best out of the magic of these models and makes it so that users can actually like, you know, easily use them to accomplish their development task. Yep. Anything else?

How how are you thinking about uh you know do you think that in the long run having open source models get really good is going to be key to the durability of the business over the next decade.

I imagine and you know the the dynamic with anthropic obviously cares a lot about codegen developer experiences you know this is an area that they're clearly going to generate you know would like to generate I imagine tens of billions of dollars a year in and so it has to be um you know it sounds like a great relationship right now but how do you kind of continue to evolve it's a tricky one because they're they're we're both their customer and their competitor and so um I don't know how that's going to evolve like optionality, us having optionality does seem like a potentially uh valuable thing, but um you know right right now the way it is is like we're working great with Anthropic.

They're like a close partner of ours and you know they seem very very committed to doing the API and doing the end user product. Not too different from you know a place like Google or AWS who has like cloud infrastructure and also builds things on top of it. Mhm.

Um I don't think it's like a necessary condition for us to have a working business model that open source models uh like catch up as long as there's competition amongst the uh the foundation model providers.

If we were in a world where there was just sort of like one provider who won, I think that that's like that's a tricky spot, but I think that's a tricky spot for anyone who's building at the application layer right now. Yeah. Yeah.

We uh I have a portfolio company that was kicked off uh one of the the the the big lab that will go unnamed that their business was entirely dependent on uh and over you know within basically 24 hours he had to like completely you know he ended up surviving and thriving uh but it was tumultuous but um but yeah sounds like a great relationship uh for now and and hopefully will continue to be.

Yeah, that's great. Uh thank you so much for stopping. We'll we'll talk to you soon. This was awesome. Congrats on the lunch. Talk to you soon. Cheers.