“We’re moving from a world where developers traditionally have done most of their work by hand to one where they’re doing their work by prompt with agents,” Warp CEO Zach Lloyd said to Techstrong.tv after the launch of Warp Code. That shift, he argues, is the beginning of a new category of software development: the Agentic Development Environment (ADE).
For Lloyd, the command line interface is the perfect home for this evolution. “The terminal interface itself is actually a great interface for interacting with AI,” he explained. “Instead of just using terminal commands to drive your computer, you can use natural language directly to ask your computer to do things”
From Terminal to Agentic Platform
Warp began as an attempt to modernize a tool Lloyd felt had barely evolved in decades. “I’ve been an engineer for a really long time. I always worked in the terminal, but I was never a power user,” he told Techstrong.tv. “I wanted to build something that made that power more accessible to other developers.”
Early iterations focused on usability: collaboration, command search, natural language to CLI commands. But as large language models matured, Warp’s roadmap pivoted. The launch of Warp 2.0 reframed the product not as a terminal at all but as an ADE, a workbench where agents and humans can build software together.
“Compared to IDE-coding agents, Warp is a much more natural interface,” Lloyd said in a panel interview. “In a world where developers write less and less code by hand, there’s no reason to spend your day in an interface built for hand-editing code”
“If you’re not using the AI features, you’re kind of handicapping yourself as a developer.”
What Warp Code Adds
The most recent milestone is Warp Code, launched this September. The suite gives developers agent-steering tools, editable diffs, and lightweight file editing that bridges the gap between prompts and production-ready code.
“What you need in the tools today is something that shows you the agent’s work, the explanation the agent has at every single step,” Lloyd told Techstrong.tv. “It almost looks like code review – you want a human code reviewing the agent as it’s writing the code, so you don’t get into this position where you’re like: What the hell did it do?”
Early metrics are promising: Warp users generated more than 150 million lines of code per week inside the platform, with a 97% acceptance rate of AI diffs and reported productivity gains of an hour or more per day.
Still, Lloyd warns that coding by AI isn’t “fire and forget.” Developers must adapt their mindset. “It’s almost like guiding a junior engineer,” he said. “If you specify how you want it built, work in small chunks, and review as you go, you can get really great productivity gains”.
“Our philosophy is that coding by hand is going to become less common and go away entirely over time.”
Differentiating From Cursor and Claude Code
Warp enters a hotly contested space. IDE-based tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot focus on AI-driven autocomplete and in-editor agents. Anthropic’s Claude Code and Google’s Gemini CLI run as text-based apps inside the terminal. Lloyd says both camps miss the bigger opportunity.
“Cursor and Copilot still assume the developer’s primary workflow is hand-editing code,” he said. “Claude Code and Gemini are CLI apps, but they’re constrained by being text-only. You don’t get editable diffs, file pickers, or a code review pane. Warp can do all of that because the whole interface is dedicated to agents”.
Warp’s benchmarks add weight to that argument: its agent ranks #1 on Terminal-Bench (52%) and top three on SWE-bench Verified (75.8%), outperforming many peers
Culture, Adoption, and the Future
Warp now has over half a million users and is expanding into enterprises. Adoption varies: some companies push for near-total integration, while others remain cautious. Yet momentum is clear. Warp reported revenue growth of 5–15% week over week in 2025.
The stakes are high. Some fear AI will replace professional developers. Lloyd dismisses that. “I don’t think professional developers are going anywhere anytime soon,” he told Techstrong.tv. “The smart thing is to invest in learning AI as another tool. If you learn how to use it well, you can become a way better developer.”
He frames Warp’s mission not as replacement, but as amplification: empowering pros to ship software faster, with fewer bottlenecks. “It’s not about magic,” he said. “It’s about building the workflow where humans and agents actually work together.”
And if there was any doubt about Warp’s intent to stand out, its cowboy-themed launch for Warp Code, complete with Lloyd in a Stetson, on horseback, in a Western movie town, made the point clear. “We thought it’d be kind of fun to do it on a horse,” he joked. The message: Warp is betting big that agentic development will define the next era of software.
“Warp 2.0 is just the beginning of the next chapter.”
In Lloyd’s view, the future isn’t just about better autocomplete or AI assistants on the side. It’s about replacing the terminal and IDE as the developer’s primary environment. “It just is cool,” he said, “that the interface we built for commands works extremely well for agents”warpfeature.
Warp’s gamble is clear: if coding by prompt becomes the norm, it wants to be the workbench where the transition happens.
