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Comment by dkter | Hacker News Reader

Sad that they didn't open source the commit history. I would have loved to branch off of like 5 years ago when Warp was just a terminal, rip out all the AI and cloud shit, and turn it into just a nice terminal with some neat features.

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As someone who released the source of an app that was always expected to be public I appreciate that it would be interesting but I'm not surprised. If the code isn't being regularly published there is just less incentive to be sure that every commit is "public ready". So when releasing I wanted to do a full review of current code (and especially comments and docs). This was tedious enough and even though we didn't find anything major and only a handful of things that should be cleaned I absolutely wouldn't want to do this for the full history.

Could we have just released it? Absolutely. But I think everyone who contributed felt better knowing that what was released had one final "ready for public" review. Then our regular review process handled that going forward.

Ironically a task that an AI agent would have no problem doing.

Yeah, it would have been a great job for an LLM. Although if you find something in the history you then need to make the annoying choice of history rewriting or just leaving it in.

Their terminal is just Alacritty, why would you do all these extra steps instead of just using Alacritty, or Ghostty? The terminal emulator was never their selling point, the AI wrapper was.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049159764261925005

> The terminal emulator was never their selling point, the AI wrapper was.

Considering it came out in 2020 - a few years before the LLM hype train left the station, and when I started using it there was no AI integration, this doesn't seem accurate.

I liked using it because of the text input.

Thanks for the correction, I’ve only had it on my radar since they became the AI Terminal.

This is just incorrect. Warp predates the AI craze, and one of its original selling points was reimagining how the terminal could work: it could be more native, and act like a REPL/chat, instead of a grid of characters.

They have also innovated by requiring login (into a console!!) which is a very bold move. Today they have heaps of telemetry, so a privacy nightmare.

This is a terminal that is not designed for users.

You've just described 99% of modern non-FOSS software. The only thing actually novel is that it's a terminal in this case.

> not designed for users

It's not designed for you.

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