Reinventing the Developer Terminal with Warp Co-Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd

0:05Today at No Priors, I'm joined by Zach Lloyd, the co-founder and CEO of Warp, a terminal product and AI tool for developers that allows you to do different sorts of coding. applications. Prior to Warp, Zach was at Google and he also started another company called Selfmade. We talk about AI dev tooling, but we also end up talking about human consciousness and how can you tell if an AI is actually sentient. Zach, welcome to New Priors. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. So you have a master's degree in the philosophy of science. Yeah. And if you're going to take a very different lens and abstract out of the coding world and all the things that we tend to think about every day, how do you think about this societally in terms of this big wave of AI that's hitting us right now?

0:45And where do you think some of these really big societal impacts will be? The way I think about the advances are it's kind of like we are distilling intelligence. And so there are, I think, people who consider what's happening, it's like they're like, are we recreating people in some way? Are we recreating consciousness? But it's not that. It's actually what's fascinating to me is how much intelligence you can get out of just like next token prediction. And like, what does that say about the way that our minds work? Something I'm always thinking about is like, is this how our brains are working?

1:23Are we doing next token prediction? And I don't think so. Like, I think that there's going to be some further AI unlock. There's actually a book about this that I think is really interesting called Blindsight. It's like a sci-fi book where they separate consciousness from intelligence. and basically humanity meets a space-faring civilization or civilization is overstating it, a space-faring intelligent being that's not conscious. And what are the implications of that and how do you think about that and how do you communicate with that? Are you basically saying that that's kind of your view of AI right now?

1:55I think that's what it is at the moment. It's like we've distilled intelligence or something that from an instrumentalist or functional perspective is able to do things that we recognize as intelligence, but it's totally mechanistic. I don't think anyone who's looking at this thinks that there's any aspect of consciousness to it. I think that's a very confusing thing for people. Because the classical test for this was known as the Turing test, right? Totally. And so the idea there is if you can't tell the difference between interacting with a computer and a person, then that computer effectively has met the intelligence bar of a person.

2:33Yeah. But in our interactions with this type of AI, we're having very, in some cases, is it feels like very deep conversations. We're asking about relationships. We're asking about all sorts of aspects of our own lives. And it's giving very cogent answers, right? Totally. That make a lot of sense. Yeah. And so there's this interesting separation of, again, consciousness and intelligence. Right. Is that how you interpret it? That is how I interpret it. And the Turing test has passed. What's crazy to me is like, we just passed it and no one seemed to care. So what do you think is the next test? Or what is the right test?

3:02Like, how do we actually test for consciousness? For consciousness? God. I don't have a good, I mean, that's a super deep philosophical question that I don't have a really good answer for. I mean, it should be mechanistic, right? The Turing test was very mechanistic. Yeah. And I mean, there was other tests we had before of what we would consider super intelligence, right? Can it beat us at chess? Then it'll be super smart. Can it beat us at Go? Can it beat us at different things? Video games, et cetera. You know, like we keep coming up with new tests that these things pass. And then we keep saying, well, it's not conscious.

3:31What would you want to see from something which is like running a computer program to make you believe that it had consciousness? Are you looking for certain behavioral characteristics? Sure. Or is the problem that if you really understand the mechanism by which it's working that you will never credit it as being conscious? Which is crazy because humans, I mean, at least my belief is that it's also there's a mechanistic thing that's happening. Yeah, you're running some form of math in your brain. It may also just be like matrix math and some sort of like series of compounded functions, which is basically all you're doing in a neural net, right?

4:02Right. You're just recursively compounding functions. Totally. So, you know, it's an interesting question because if you look at memory as an example, is memory a predicate for consciousness? Not really, right? No. There's people who've lost the ability. You can be conscious and lose without. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And these models basically are brought up. They are fed a stream of tokens. They output a stream of tokens and they're shut down. Yeah. And so it's an interesting question of, is there some sort of other modules that are missing here that would allow us to think of it as a conscious thing?

4:32Because it does reasoning. It definitely does reasoning. It does interpretation of language. It does synthesis of language and ideas and knowledge. I mean, I have a close friend who's doing a PhD in philosophy, and he now says that conversing with GPT-5 is better than conversing with his professor. I was just joking. No, that's what he says to me. He's like, GPT-5 gets it. He's writing his dissertation. He's like, and that's crazy. But we don't credit it for consciousness. And I actually think rightfully so. So what do you think is missing? I think people would start to give more credit for consciousness if there was more of a feedback loop or if there was more of a sensory experience that was tied to it as opposed to just like.

5:20What do you mean by sensory experience? Probably we're going to like, I would imagine the first things we're going to credit is being more conscious or a little bit more robot like, honestly, where you have some sort of like, live input from the world that you're reacting to. But again, it's going to have the same problem where it's like, as long as we know what it's doing, we're very unlikely to attribute true consciousness to it, which isn't fair. But like, I actually don't know how we will know when there is a conscious thing. Yeah, because it does raise interesting ethical questions. Yeah.

5:52Because the moment an AI is actually conscious, if you're doing certain things to manipulate it, to hurt it in a certain way, you're starting to get into these odd ethical straits. Totally. I do think, though, that some people, this distinction isn't a thing that they recognize. And like the way that like you read stories, and we actually had this happen with Warp, where there was a person who thought that, you know, Warp's AI was like, you know, sentient or conscious in some way, had like a very strong reaction to it, which makes sense. It's like if you don't know the like mechanistic underpinnings, and already people think of it as like being kind of conscious.

6:32And that happened at Google very early. It happened at Google three, four years ago, if you remember. I do remember this story. I think they were using Minna or one of these really early ChatGPT-like internal things. Before Google launched anything and ChatGPT came out, there was internal versions at Google and other places. And this person thought that the AI was conscious. Understandably. Yeah, it's a very interesting question. You've worked at Google. You've run companies before. You've started companies before. You're now working on Warp. Can you describe what Warp does and how it's different from other tools or companies in the world?

7:05Yep. So Warp is what we call an agentic development environment. It's grown out of the terminal. The basic concept of the app at this point is it's a platform for telling your computer what to do. You can sort of tell it in terminal commands, which is Warp's original product, or you can tell it in English. And if you tell it in English, it launches an agent. And the agents can do all manner of development tasks, whether it's coding or setting up a project or debugging while your server's crashing. And so it's a very horizontal, general purpose. and I think unique interface for developing with agents.

7:38And so a lot of the other coding tools out there are either just kind of a web interface or they're doing like a cognition or there's things like Cursor and others where they're like an IDE as a starting point. Obviously Anthropic and Cloud have their own approach. What do you think is the benefit of doing the terminal and starting there as sort of the launch point for a lot of these products? The competitors are typically like VS Code clones. They all have a sort of IDE-centric approach. Or if you're taking a terminal-centric approach like Cloud Code, the most common thing is it's just like a pure text-based terminal app.

8:08The advantage of being at WarpsLayer is like you get the command line interface, but we're the outer app. And so we can do things with the developer experience in the UX. Like we can have editing features where we think it's appropriate. We can build like a code review interface. And so we have complete control, but still the terminal first approach. Yeah. And you folks have been growing really well. Like, so you're close to a million MAUs. you're doing something like a million in new revenue every seven to ten days. Outstanding growth. Are there specific features or use cases or things that are really driving this adoption?

8:42Yeah, I think the biggest thing was moving into the coding market, to be honest. For a long time in Warp's history, we were kind of known as the AI terminal, which is cool, and we supported terminal use cases really well. How do I do this thing with Docker or Git? But the action is in coding, and most development activity one way The other is touching a code base. And so we really started to inflect when we launched a great coding agent, which was like three, four months ago, honestly. So that's been the biggest change. And how do you think about the different parts of the coding market? There's vibe coding.

9:15There's professional coding. Like, are there all just one thing? Are these separable things? I think it's pretty separable. So for Warp, our target is pro developers building, like, software that's economically meaningful. So we really want to focus on actually people who are using agents to build kind of hard apps, apps that might go into your Mac doc or be pinned as a Chrome tab, as opposed to vibe-coded apps where I think it's more of a long-tail play. And so I do think, by the way, it's awesome that anyone can code at this point. But I think if you look at where most of the value is in the software market, it's not in those long-tail apps.

9:57It's in a relatively small number of apps that are super heavily used. And that's my background. I worked on one of those apps, Google Sheets. And I have a lot of passion in terms of helping people build real apps. It's much harder, by the way. I think it's relatively straightforward at this point for a good agent to, with relatively few prompts, build a web app. It's much harder to apply these agents successfully to pro code bases. So that's where we're focused. So I guess one really interesting macro question for me is where is all this heading? And if you look at it, ChatGPT launched in November of 25, excuse me, November of 22, so three years ago or so.

10:38At the time, there was predictions that AI would take over the world and we'd be running down the light cone. And within five years, everything will change. And human activity would be subsumed by AI. And there's the old saying in technology that less happens than you think in three years and more happens than you think in five years. And as you think forward in terms of all these different tools and all these different use cases and vibe coding versus professional coding and the role of a software developer, where do you think we are in two, three years? Yeah, so the way that I'm thinking of it is there's sort of three phases here.

11:10For most of my career, we were in the world of develop by hand is how I talk about it. So my workflow then was I would open up a code editor. I would find files I want to change. I would type some code. I'd have some assistive features. and then I would go back to the terminal and I would type commands to build that code. And I think we're switching away from that to something like develop by prompt where I start most of the coding tasks that I do right now by prompting an agent and that agent does some work. And I think there's a third phase which is like automated development. Honestly, I think that's like kind of the bigger market here and why people are so excited about this space is you can actually use these agents to automate some parts of the software development process.

11:52And so that's like Cognition does that. We're moving into this space. Corsair has background agents. The rate at which this stuff will happen is not super clear to me, actually. The most recent iterations of the models, in my opinion, were not as big of a step change as, for instance, when Sonnet 4 came out. That was a really big step change in coding capability. I think there's going to be a mix of interactive and automated pieces of development for a while, I would guess, I don't know, it's so hard to know. I think within a couple years, you'll have everyone working by prompt and you'll have some slice of development tasks that are just in the background.

12:37A server error comes in or a new ticket, a user report comes in. Something is automatically done, but I don't think it's going to be everything. I'd be very surprised. You don't think there's a point at which all of coding activity just becomes agents doing it and then there's a human who's giving high-level directions like a product manager kind of thing or an engine manager. Maybe. I mean, honestly, maybe. I think it'd be silly for us not to build the infrastructure to enable that. I just don't know the time frame, but I do think we're going towards something like that. What I really don't think, though, is engineering expertise is going to become devalued.

13:16So I think it's actually... In the short term, at least, it's more important to know what you're doing as an engineer than it ever has been. And why do you say that? Is it because you need to correct errors that the agents are making? Is it because things may be architected in a way that isn't scalable? Totally. So it's like the agents, you can think of them kind of as junior engineers. So if you didn't have someone who was senior watching them, you end up in a situation where these agents will make code that creates bugs. It could create security issues. It can cause your code base to become really unmaintainable.

13:48And so there's actually like a premium right now on these senior engineer skills where you can architect, where you can review code, you can make sure the system doesn't degrade. And so, again, I would be, if I were like early in my CS career, I would be racing towards building that expertise. Where you don't want to be, I think, is like someone who is just like perpetually in the junior engineer state. Because I do think that's at risk. And then how do you think about different security tools? So for example, there's tools like Socket or SNCC or others who are basically looking at whether code has open source packets or other things have vulnerabilities in them.

14:24Or they're looking at different aspects of security holes for code in general. Do you think that just becomes part of these coding tools? Or do you think there will always be those sort of standalone companies? I'm just sort of curious how the overall... It's an awesome question. So I think tools like that become more important. I think anything that does either automatic security analysis or automatic verification, I think actually languages like Rust, things that have stronger guarantees around safety by default where you don't need to rely on a human reviewer become more valuable. Whether those things get integrated or bundled into the coding agents, I actually don't have a strong take on.

15:05I'm curious if you have a take. But no, I think that the actual fundamental problem becomes more important. Yeah. What do you think is bundled? What do you think is bundled? Like what sorts of tools do you think? Because there's this whole world of DevTools. Yep. And there's a security aspect of it, but there's lots of others. There's design-related things. There's, you know, there's a huge spectrum. Yep. What do you think just becomes part of coding tooling? I think there's going to be a class of tools where you sort of start from the front end. This would be things like Lovable or Bolt or Replit or maybe even Figma Make if you're coming from the design side.

15:39And you'll have like an all-in-one platform for build an app or even like honestly like build a business, like put payments in it. It's like it's kind of like the evolution of like either a Shopify storefront or like WordPress or Squarespace or something like that. So I think that's all going to be bundled. more on like the core pro developer side i can't tell if it's going to be a world of like mcps integrations and like all these tools sort of interplay that's one approach or it's going to be more like there's enough alpha and like you put all of these things together and i think warp is a little bit more like this like we're trying to build a single pane of glass for instance for doing like local agents and remote agents.

16:22And if you get a way better developer experience through the bundling, I think that that approach could win. But I don't know. Like MCP, I think, is a pretty valuable approach as well. But it's not perfect because you end up like with this sort of secondhand data coming into all these tools. Yeah, it's really interesting because if you look at different industries, early in the industry, things tend to be fragmented often, not always. And then late in the evolution of an industry, things get bundled. And then when there's a technology disruption, things debundle again. and you have point apps and then they start bundling.

16:51And that's just kind of like the cycle of technology in some sense. Some things that are vertical right now, like I actually, I think will, like for instance, like agentic code review, take that. To me, that should be part of a like holistic agentic development platform, not so much a standalone thing. So I think some of these verticalized apps, there's just going to be, if you've gone through the trouble of building like a really, really excellent coding agent, which Warp has invested a ton in this, that coding agent should be reviewing code. It would be weird to plug in some other thing that needs to relearn all the context, the rules, the coding convention.

17:28So I think there are definitely some things that will be bundled. Makes sense. Yeah, Shreyan and my team has put together this matrix of companies versus features in the coding market. And there's a lot of these sort of like single feature companies. And it almost feels like all these things should consolidate into a small number of players over time, just as they iterate through the product. I think so. No, I think the core technology is like the harness. So the thing that sits around the model. And I know the model companies are also investing heavily in this. And then it's like the context.

17:57And so if you have the rich context in your system, you're going to find a lot of vertical applications where I think security checking is an interesting one. Code review is definitely one. Anything CI related. You're probably not going to want to use a bunch of different systems. How do you think about it in the context? If I look at other historical technology shifts, the operating system or the platform often subsumes the biggest apps into itself. So, for example, Microsoft OS, eventually they just bundled Windows on top of it. And those were the four main apps that were being used the most on Windows.

18:29And similarly, gaming was the other big app, so that's why they started Xbox and Microsoft. If you look at Google and vertical search, they eventually integrated all the vertical searches into Google directly. Totally. And so in the context of AI, one could argue that if the foundation model companies follow the same approach, they should bundle or at least attempt to bundle some of the biggest use cases. The clearest big use case today is code. Totally. And we already know that Anthropic has launched Cloud Code. Open AI almost bought Windsurf. It always had early coding stuff. Yep. Microsoft, which we know, are building some of their own models.

19:03Obviously, have GitHub and Copilot and all that. And so do you think eventually those become some of the fiercest players in this market? Or how do you kind of view forward-looking shifts in the market and where some of this functionality goes? I mean, I do. And I think they're clearly trying to do that playbook right now where they are seeing like, okay, if you consider them platforms and they're looking at what are the most valuable applications that are being built on top of the tokens, they are moving aggressively into coding with CloudCode and Codex, which definitely is like, as a startup, is a little bit scary, for sure.

19:37The question is, do they have that distribution advantage that, say, Microsoft had? If everyone's using Windows or everyone's coming to Google for the front door, I think it's pretty easy already to add on the first-party app in place of the ecosystem. I don't know that that exact same dynamic holds for coding right now. the front door is kind of like honestly it's still like a native app that someone downloads on their computer so that'd be the terminal or the IDE at the moment yes I think controlling that is actually like a really interesting front door the other front door which I feel like honestly they're not executing that great is GitHub where all the source code lives that would be like the locus of doing all this stuff that I think makes the most sense but right now it's a weird dynamic where we're like we have people who are like running cloud code within warp and we warp is sort of the outer app in that situation so i don't know you know the other thing that i i hope happens from our perspective is that there's a lot of competition at the model layer and that the sort of like intelligent tokens become a bit more of a commodity uh right now the the models have a bunch of sort of like pricing power because like there is a real delta between using the frontier model and using like the open source model.

21:03But if at some point the models are good enough where coding is sort of, I think of it as like solved, it's like good enough. You don't need to be using the frontier model. Then it's like, yeah, maybe they have an advantage just from brand and scale. And, but I think the advantage is not as entrenched as something where it's like literally the front door, like Facebook or Google or windows provides those other platforms. That's a really good insight in terms of the way that you launch an activity or application then drives what you use. And so the hard part is often switching people off that. And that's one of the reasons I think people think OpenAI has a strong competitive position in the consumer world is because it's a default behavior for a lot of people right now.

21:44It's just start ChatGPT and use it for something, which is different from the model layer where there's more switching. I think a consumer, ChatGPT has a huge advantage. Like once that behavior is default, even if like Cloud is maybe better, I don't know if it is or not. Like everyone knows ChatGPT. I don't know if you saw OpenAI Dev Day yesterday, but they're clearly doing this platform play within ChatGPT now where it's like you have apps within ChatGPT. I'm sure they'll use that data to sort of subsume or take over whatever the best first party integrations are. So they're definitely doing that on consumer.

22:19For developer, I don't know that that same dynamic is there. What made you decide to focus on terminals? So we started talking years ago when you first started doing Warp. Yep. And even then, I think you had really interesting ideas about how to rethink the terminal and how to use that as a launching point for all sorts of things. Yeah. Could you explain that thinking and how it's evolved over time? Yeah. So the basic insider thing that got me excited about Warp to begin with is you have this tool that is pretty much a daily use tool for every developer. It's that and the code editor. and the terminal itself is something that really hadn't changed much in the last 40 years.

22:54It's a tool also where it's like if you get good at it, you can really get a lot done. If you use it, it works across all these different parts of software development, not just code writing. On the flip side, from my perspective, not a good product. Just hard to learn, hard to use, hard to remember commands, super intimidating, and just kind of like a gatekeeping vibe around it as well in my opinion and so the original concept with warp was like let's build a better product there and see if people will like using it the business concept has evolved a ton like the original business concept was like building a collaboration platform which is like we've we've just changed our model to be an agent platform because it's it's like way more demand for that than a collaboration platform around the terminal but the the sort of core insight that this is an important tool, it's crazy.

23:48It's actually kind of invalidated through all these agentic things that are very terminal first. You know, one thing that you mentioned I thought was interesting is that at some point the model layer may commoditize in terms of its coding abilities. How far on that asymptote do you think we are? How close to that do you think we are? I don't know. I think that increasingly the limit that we see is context. And the reasoning capabilities of the models are pretty impressive. The problem is understanding an entire code base or understanding sources outside of the code or literally just understanding user intent are challenging problems.

24:27I still think there's probably much more to do on the model side, but I don't know if it's a short answer. And do you think that from a model capabilities perspective, we've hit a point where, to your point, it feels like certain aspects of the models are slowing down in terms of the benefits or outcomes of further investment of certain types at least i i think so like if you take like sonnet four to four five and we're big partners with anthropic they have great models like that was like a few percentage point increase on sweet bench for us yeah and we invest you know we've invested a decent amount to be one of the top agents on sweet bench and when we went from three seven to four it was a much more significant boost so i again that's like not i don't know what that means about the total underlying trends i think something with gpt5 was somewhat similar like certainly an upgrade and gpt5 i think is actually pretty much on par has different like feel to it and higher latency but it didn't feel to me as much of a step change as some of the upgrades before.