zachlloyd

We have a way of turning off all the AI if you don't like it (Settings > AI > turn it off). I get the desire here.

Warp founder here. It's cool to see the community excitement here.

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

we have a lot of users who like warp as a place to run other coding agents (e.g. claude code, codex) and have tried to improve the experience for those beyond what a typical terminal offers (e.g. code review, file tree)

argh, sorry that we made it worse for you, that definitely was not the intention. we were trying to make the modes clearer.

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.

that's fair. we try to be opinionated on the default experience but allow a lot of customizability.

thanks for the support here. we are very grateful for the help you all provided initially, and if you are interested in sponsorship for the repo, we are also happy to provide some. alacritty is awesome

that's the correct read - we shared what we were building and they helped us integrate alacritty. it's similar to how mitchell h reached out and asked today if we wanted to integrate ghostty.

we have a lot of open source library dependencies and are grateful to the folks who worked on them

We hear this feedback a bunch and are trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features you find most useful . You can turn off all the AI if you want, and also control what editing features are surfaced (e.g. file tree, diff view, etc). Would love feedback on how to improve the experience.

Glad the workflow is working for you!

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.

It's still a terminal at its core, and you can use it to run any CLI coding agent or use our built in agent.

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.

Warp founder here. Great question.

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.

Warp founder here. Totally understood on the feedback - one thing I would call out is that we actually worked with Alacritty on the initial implementation and they were super helpful and we are grateful for their support.

This is on our public roadmap actually. Would love to work with the community on this.

Correct, we got rid of this requirement a couple of years ago. No login required at all, except for using AI and team features.

Warp founder here. We actually are chatting with Mitchell about integrating Ghostty so it's the terminal grid renderer within Warp.

correct - our business is our agent and orchestrator, not our terminal.

It's good feedback. We've tried to make it so there is a single "turn off all the AI stuff" button (and you can opt into plain old terminal during onboarding as well, with no login, etc). Curious if this does the trick?

fair.

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.

fair criticism, and this is the reason we removed the login requirement.

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.

Hi HN - I'm the author of this post. It's about how productivity interfaces (e.g. Figma, GDocs, VSCode) are going to evolve in the world of generative AI.

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!

Hi, author of the blog post here. Happy to address any questions or comments!

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.

Hi HN - I'm the founder at Warp.dev and wrote up this guide (mostly for internal use) on our product process at Warp. Would love any community thoughts and feedback.

Thank you!

Zach from Warp here. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

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.

Looking forward to it! Please tag me at twitter.com/zachlloydtweets - i'd love to read and respond

That's an interesting point regarding the costs of the client vs. the cloud, and also that you can get a more hermetic experience with local VMS. Agreed on the latency concern.

Thanks for the feedback!

We spoke with a lot of users (someone mentioned our discord which has thousands of members) and there are thousands of developers using Warp every day (prior to this ShowHN).

We also were expecting some of this response from the HN community, and understand it.

The short answer to your question is that different developers care about different things. A lot of developers are OK with login, telemetry etc (we are not the only tool that has these things), and they exist in our case because it helps us produce a better product experience.

That said, I don't want to dismiss your question - we needed to do a better job understanding the perspective of more developers, and the response on HN has made that very clear. We are going to take the feedback and adjust course.

Thank you!

For sure - one of my main takeaways from our ShowHN is that there's a ton of reasonable concern around login, telemetry, and open source that we need to address. We are going to come back to HN as we do that.

The HN community has a different default perspective than I have on a lot of these issues, but a perspective that matters to a ton.

Thanks for the feedback - I'm the founder at Warp.

There was a ton of discussion on this yesterday with our ShowHN [0] and we are considering what changes to make based on the feedback (some of which are inline with your suggestions).

We do publish all the telemetry we collect here:

https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel...

And we are committed to making telemetry optional when we leave beta.

And it's definitely the case that command input / output are never sent to the server.

Login is a bit trickier as it's hard to build an app that leverages the internet and facilitates teamwork without understanding user identity. But point taken.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30921231

Hi - as the poster and founder I again completely get the concern.

We should make it even more transparent what we collect. You can see it here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel...

Re: big business, we're still pretty small, but it's true that we are trying to build a business around the command-line. I get that's controversial and it's not something that exists and that the terminal is a super-sensitive low level tool.

We will never ever build a business around terminal data, and to be super explicit, we are 100% not collecting any command inputs or outputs.

The business that we want to build is around making a terminal (or a platform for text based apps) that grows because it makes individuals and teams a lot more productive on the command line.

I've there's one thing I've taken away from this ShowHN so far is that there is a lot of well-founded concern about the terminal and user data and that we need to do a better job on this issue.

As the author of the post (and founder of the company), I think this is also a very reasonable concern. It's one that we have as well and that we take very seriously.

Our stance here is that:

1) We are very explicit about what gets sent (only telemetry and crash reporting) and you can see the full list of telemetry events here (https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel...)

2) For collaborative features like block-sharing (e.g. https://app.warp.dev/block/tbxmeAKsj657aHkPdHpmoY) it's completely opt-in

However, I do believe pretty deeply that every app has the potential to be much more powerful if it leverages the internet and I think the terminal is not an exception. I stand by that but get that it's a paradigm shift.

Please keep the feedback coming though - it's helpful to understand how you think about it.