The Terminal as an Agentic Interface

0:00The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zach Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Warp, and a former principal engineer at Google where he led engineering on the Google Docs suite.

0:44In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Vann to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn.

1:31Hello and welcome to Software Engineering Daily. My guest today is Zach Lloyd, who's returning after four years. So we've already had Zach on in 2022. Yeah, welcome, Zach.

1:43Zach Lloyd:It's good to be here. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, we're going to be talking all about Warp, which some of our listener base will be quite familiar with, I think. Before we get into Warp itself, we normally sort of go through a story of our guest. I suggest our listeners go back to the 2022 episode if you want to get the full version. But what's the kind of like TLDR of how you ended up building Warp? Yeah. So my background, I've been a software engineer for most of my career. I was at Google for a really long time. I helped build a lot of Google Sheets. And then I led engineering on the whole Google Docs suite.

2:18Zach Lloyd:I was a principal engineer there. I've been out of Google, though for a while as well. I've been founding companies. Warp's like my second venture-backed startup that I've done. First one, totally, totally different space, pretty interesting learning experience. But fundamentally, I would say I'm someone who I really, really like building stuff. It's really fun for me. My goal has been to build useful software, sometimes for knowledge workers like with google docs with warp i'm really trying to build something that's very useful for developers and honestly increasingly like since anyone can be a developer it's really useful for a lot of knowledge workers as well it's like a crazy changing space to be in but that's like me in a nutshell yeah nice so i think sort of thinking about what you might have been talking about in the in the episode back in 2022 but i guess sort of back then the pitch was you know warp was a sort of like beautiful, fast, Rust-based terminal, you know, trying to bring command line, you know, into the 21st century because, you know, command line hadn't really changed in many ways.

3:28But since then, a lot of things have happened, including your AR has grown a ton and you've got open source, which you're going to get to and all sorts of things. So walk us through maybe the last four years, if you can. Well, it's more than the warp.

3:43Zach Lloyd:It's not just the warp has changed. I'd say like the, obviously the world has changed. The world of what it is to be a software developer is just fundamentally different. Yeah. So I would say like the warp journey is right. The way you talk, the way you described it. So, you know, for folks who maybe aren't familiar with warp, we started off focused on just sort of re-imagining the experience of using the terminal. The concept was like terminals are really important app. It's where developers spend a lot of their time. It was, you know, the terminal and the code editor, I've always said, are like the two most important developer apps.

4:16Zach Lloyd:And the terminal just hadn't had a lot of innovation. And so we tried to reimagine kind of from first principles, what should a great command line experience be like? I'm very proud of what we've built. Like a lot of people really love the command line. Like you said, it's Rust-based, has some very distinct features compared to a normal terminal. Like our hero feature at the beginning was just the mouse worked to edit your terminal commands, which is way harder than it seems. You'll notice there are not a lot of terminals out there that have that even still. We have this feature where we separate the terminal outputs into blocks.

4:47Zach Lloyd:It makes them more readable. You can take actions on them. So those were the sorts of things that we started off focusing on. We started adding features around AI into warp pretty early on as well. So I don't know if we had them when I was on the pod last. But even before ChatGPT came out, we were using, it was called the Codex API. At the time, it was through OpenAI. And what we were using it for was we would translate English into terminal commands. So it was really like translation, not like a agentic capability. But you'd be like, give me the command for finding all Python files that are greater than 100 lines in this directory or something like that.

5:26Zach Lloyd:You'd say that in English and we would translate it for you. And then when ChatGPT came out, we realized very quickly like, oh, this is is going to be very applicable to the command line. Because one of the big challenges of using the command line has always been that you just have to remember all these arcane commands. And LLMs are great at helping people construct those commands. So we brought in like a chat panel in like 2023 into Warp. We realized that was actually like a sort of stupid implementation. Like the terminal itself is almost like a chat interface in a lot of ways. And so we then changed the interface to be honestly something that's very much like Cloud Code or Codex or how all these terminal apps work, these coding agents in 2024, like, I don't know, nine months to a year before those tools came out.

6:15Zach Lloyd:But what we were aiming for was helping people do terminal tasks. So we kind of like didn't do the more like the better thing, which was coding until Cloud Code had come out. But we had basically that same way of interacting with warp where you could either type a terminal command or you could ask in English. And if you asked in English, we had this thing called agent mode, which is a term that we actually coined, which has been adopted. And it would basically do whatever you asked to do, but do it with terminal commands. And then we've just evolved warp more and more over the past year into something that doesn't just do terminal stuff.

6:51Zach Lloyd:It does everything in the software lifecycle. So it does coding. It's a really, really good coding agent. in the distinct thing about Warp's coding agent versus like CloudCode or Codex is that it's built into the terminal. So you get like a very, very rich experience using it. And then increasingly, and we could talk about this in a bit, we're moving these coding features into the cloud. So we've kind of moved beyond just being like a local desktop app. We have a second product that's called Oz, that's cloud agent infrastructure. And so we're just kind of, You know, the mission of the company is to help developers ship better software more quickly.

7:28Zach Lloyd:And we're just sort of leaning into that and building off of our initial terminal routes to sort of try to do that. So that's the evolution. Yeah, nice. And at least back then, the vision, I guess, was, you know, things like multiplayer. Has that kind of survived vision-wise? It has. So it's like the whole world has kind of moved in our favor, kind of through luck. So yeah, the original business model for Warp was around multiplayer features. So think of things like I ran a terminal command and I want to share a link to the command's output across my team. So we have that feature. It's actually super useful.

8:05Zach Lloyd:You could have multiple people real time in the terminal. That is actually not that useful across teams of people, but it's extremely useful for joining agent sessions. So that piece of like technology has actually proven to be very useful for us. And then we have like a built-in knowledge store. It's called Warp Drive. And it basically lets you store notebooks, environment variables, shared commands, all that type of stuff. I would say that stuff has had like mixed success across teams, but is more useful for an agent world. And what's really useful for an agent world that we've had forever is just having a team concept in the app and being sort of team native.

8:42Zach Lloyd:because what you find as like you try to scale agents and build automations off of them, you want agents that are not like purely interactive. You want things that are owned by your team. So just having that collaborative infrastructure has actually proven to be very valuable in ways that we did not exactly foresee. That's kind of often how it goes with startups. Yeah, for sure. And while we're sort of still in 2022, was there anything that you were like, you deeply felt was true then. And now you're like, no, like that's just, yeah. It's really interesting. I've actually changed the way that I think about building products for developers a lot over the last four years.

9:24Zach Lloyd:You know, I came out of like the Google docs basically. And like we built, I would say fairly opinionated, somewhat inflexible products where we were like the best product experience is x this is how it's going to work and use it or lose it and i i brought a little bit of that mentality into the initial building of warp like i would say it was initially like a pretty highly opinionated product on what the terminal should work like it was not at all hackable it wasn't programmably customizable our settings were kind of limited we were like this is how it should work i feel like there were a lot of products around that So time that were that kind of.

10:06Zach Lloyd:Yeah, I would say like a linear. Ultra opinionated. Yeah, yeah. Notion. Like this is like the school of product development. I was like, we're just building a better thing. And if you don't like the thing, tough. And that might work for some kinds of products. But I've actually totally revised the way that I think about this. And I'm writing a blog post on this. Where I think when you're building for developers specifically, you really want to be super duper flexible. and acknowledge and build for basically build for people who like to hack on their stuff. And this is one of the main reasons that we went open source, actually, is because I thought we were kind of doing the product too opinionated and doing it wrong.

10:46Zach Lloyd:And at this point, I think it's fine to have like a good opinionated set of defaults. But the way that I think about developer product is much more like developers themselves have strong opinions and varied workflows, and we want to let them hack on, warp, and customize it. And some people like their tabs looking like one thing, some people like it totally different. They're running in totally different environments and so on. And so I feel like the most powerful and successful developer products are ones that are more of that ethos and school of product thinking than my initial product thinking.

11:20Zach Lloyd:So it's really evolved. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I mean, because developers are, as we know, very opinionated and, you know, where someone just would love to use Vim and I'm not in that camp, for example. Exactly. And then others would like love to use like the most kind of visual IDE possible. Yeah. But both are developers, but like very opinionated on what they want to use. Yeah, and that's, so we're just, now we're way more in the mode of trying to build for that rather than build a system opinionated workflow. There's pros and cons to be clear, but my thinking on it has totally changed.

11:54Yeah, that's super interesting. so i guess like looking at where things have gone you know we've got obviously like cloud code codex gemini cli like do you think you saw that coming like at least i definitely didn't maybe in the sense that you know i still um i was just at a conference i think a couple weeks back in sf and i'm still amazed at like people that would never have described themselves as developers and now saying well i do this all in the terminal and i just think that's incredible did i see it coming

12:25Zach Lloyd:I was arguing that the terminal was going to be the most important to do agentic work over the IDE for a while before these tools really became prominent. Now it was kind of a self-serving argument because I like, I run a terminal company just to be clear, but it makes a lot of sense to me that the terminal is the place and not the IDE. And the reason is like the IDE is it's like Microsoft word for your code. like it's all about hand editing code and that's just not what people do and the better these agents get the less that you have to do that at all and so i feel like we were pitching that code editing was going to be like a secondary thing that developers do pretty early on and by pretty early on i mean like mid 2025 like we're not talking like three years ago or something but like early in the world of agents and the reason i think that terminal makes a lot of sense is because the whole interface is oriented around telling your computer what to do.

13:26Zach Lloyd:And that's what you're doing with agents. It's just before agents, you would be telling the computer what to do through terminal commands. With agents, you're telling it what to do in English. And so, you know, it makes sense to me. It's set up for multitasking. It's also at the right level of the stack where these agents have all the tools they need. And so it makes complete sense. It's been a really good break for warp, obviously. it is wild to see people who are not have no development experience popping open a terminal or popping open warp and like building stuff but it it does make sense to me yeah and warp does explicitly support cloud code codex yes gemini cli open code clearly you've decided to be like very i guess agent agnostic what is like supporting these like what does it actually entail like from a like let's go a bit technical for a second like what does actually entail when you have to think well we're gonna explicitly support these and give like a first class experience yeah so that's a great point so our strategy is again just to reiterate what i said earlier it's like we're trying to meet developers where they are and be very flexible and i also think that the best model the best harness all that stuff is changing every single week and where one place Warp can add value is by not making you change your entire tool set as these things change.

14:47Zach Lloyd:So we have features in Warp. We invested a bunch in this where whatever agentic CLI you use, whether it's ours, which is built in, or just like one of these TUI apps, we try to give you things like integration with our code review features, integration with our file tree notifications. So all of these things that make working with these agents nice vertical tab support. And so to do that, it's relatively similar to how we integrate with different shells. So warp works with bash fish and ZSH. And the way that we integrate with those is we essentially provide those shells instructions to provide metadata to warp as they're doing things.

15:30Zach Lloyd:So for instance, if we want to render the warp blocks in ZSH, ZSH needs to tell us when a command is starting, when a command is ending. And so we configure ZSH to do that. Similar for these coding agents, they're all configurable enough via their hooks or via agent skills or via plugin system. like they all have some version of this where you can instruct them to provide enough metadata back to warp so that we are able to do things like render in-app notifications for them. And so we do this literally by letting people run the CLI and configuring the CLI. There are other approaches you could do with this.

16:12Zach Lloyd:Like you could use the SDK for some of these things, but we think that people actually, or you could use ACP, which I don't know if listeners are familiar with that, agent client protocol. But we think actually users of these tools actually generally really like the text-based TUI experience. And so we're not trying to totally take that over. It's more like we're trying to make that feel more natural and more powerful. Yeah. You're building agents that can write code, summarize documents, and automate workflows, but they're missing one thing, awareness of the world around them. Xweather combines enterprise-grade weather intelligence with agent-ready APIs, natural language capabilities, and an MCP server built for tools like CLAWD, Codex, Copilot, and modern IDEs, so your agents can adapt workflows, automate responses, and make better decisions based on real-world conditions.

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19:11And then you would have a terminal bit of the IDE. And now we've kind of, it feels like we're kind of going the other way, which is like you start with the terminal bit, but now we're bolting on like other kind of views and windows into the terminal. That's what it looks like to me. But like, what does that sound like to you?

19:26Zach Lloyd:That's not totally wrong. Like, so the way that we describe it is as an agentic development environment. So an ADE, which is another term we've coined. I'm very proud of these terms we've coined and other people have adopted that as well. Great. So for us, I would say like the primary interface is the terminal still. And then we have added back features related to code editing that we think are useful for agentic workflows. And so it is useful to be able to see a diff of what the agent has done. As long as you're reviewing agentic stuff by hand, and it's useful to see that in the inner loop of development.

20:03Zach Lloyd:So while you're actually working with the agent, I think it's way more useful to see it then is just like have to push it to GitHub and do it. So we're like, that's useful in this new workflow. It's useful to be able to see a file tree and be able to drag files in its context and know what files the agent is creating. And so our like guiding principle here has been like, well, there's new technology. There's a whole new workflow for building software. Let's try to build the product that supports that workflow the best. And it's not like we're going to be super duper rigid around what that product looks like.

20:36Zach Lloyd:That's not our ethos. Our ethos has always been like build the product that makes people using it the most productive. And so, yeah, we've brought in some features that are more traditionally IDE-like. I'm cool with that. Now, some users don't like it, just to be clear, and they can turn it off. So it's like we're really trying to let people control this and control how they do it. But I think that is actually a sensible default these days is these are useful things if you're building with agents. yeah i really like that distinction where like just sort of thinking of it as like the main pain that when i say pain window pain that a user would be looking at now is the terminal whereas previously a lot of what a developer would look at is a window of of code you know and i think that's sort of where that distinction is totally and like by having the main view be the terminal like in the typical ide you'll have like n files open like 10 files open in one terminal and in the typical agentic development setup you might have like 10 terminal windows open and just one diff view that's focused on whatever your current change is so i think you just we've like converted it and it's interesting you'll notice everyone's converging to that design because it makes sense like if you open cursor today or whatever their their new cursor glass or whatever it kind of looks like that so i think that's you know people are building the form factor that makes the most for this new kind of development.

21:56Yeah. And then just looking at Cloud Code, for example, it does run in Warp equally quite, you know, can easily be seen as a competitor, I guess, as well. Like, how do you sort of look at the rest of the landscape? And like, you've mentioned Cursor there. And like, I'm just curious, like things like Cursor, did you see it as like rising tide raises all boats kind of thing? Like, how do you look at that?

22:18Zach Lloyd:It's a really, really interesting landscape. And the way we've looked at it has changed over time. So we do have like a built-in coding agent to warp. And that does generate a bunch of revenue for us. And it's an awesome coding agent. Like we at various times have been at the top of the different benchmarks, like Terminal Bench. We were top three on SweetBench. But developers just want to try different stuff. And so our overall strategy right now is not to like try to push our own thing above what some developer might want to use. There are advantages to ours. Like you get a richer UI, but a lot of people want to use cloud code.

22:56Zach Lloyd:Companies want to use cloud code. They want to use codecs. They have contracts with codecs. And so like, I think from a strategic business perspective, it is more in our interests to try to be complimentary and not purely competitive and be a great place to run any coding agent. And, you know, warp will cross a million active developers this month, which is really exciting. And like, we want to be part of like the chain of building with AI. And, you know, we think there's a lot of strategic value in that. And like our like business bet is less on the like interactive coding agent within warp than it is on like helping companies that want to build software factories internally and automate software development.

23:41Zach Lloyd:And like, like that's, I think where our business will have last emote. And with the developer facing side, we want to just have as many developers using it. and liking it and helping that as be part of our funnel into a more of an enterprise business. So that's how I'm thinking about the strategy currently. Yeah, very interesting. We'll get to kind of how Warp is built later, actually, because I think it'll be interesting to touch on when we touch on the fact that Warp is now open source. So we'll come back to that. I want to just move on to Oz. So Oz is something that was launched, I believe, in February this year.

24:17Talk to us about Oz. What is Oz? Yeah.

24:20Zach Lloyd:So Oz is cloud agent infrastructure. The way to think of it is if you are trying to automate certain development tasks and it could be like automated code review or it could be automated that code cleanup, code migrations. it could be issue triage it could literally just be like implementing features and fixing bugs the way that's going to happen in the future i strongly believe is not on individual developers laptops or at least not entirely on their laptops but it's going to happen the only way you're going to scale it is if you move it to the cloud and so we're trying to help companies so oz is primarily an enterprise product.

25:03Zach Lloyd:We're trying to help companies set up this infrastructure so that they can automate a lot of these development tasks. And the other big pieces of it are increasingly we hear that companies want cost controls on these agents. As part of that, I think they want to be able to use different models and different harnesses for different tasks. They want auditability. So if an agent does something that causes a problem, You want to be able to go see what it did. They want handoff from cloud to local. And so there's actually a really rich suite of features for automating software development that come with Oz, where we think every company is going to want something like this.

25:45Zach Lloyd:Some companies will build it, but most companies will buy something like this. And so that's actually driving most of our enterprise business, which is growing really fast right now. So I think there's a huge market here. Yeah, I mean, maybe just talk to us a bit more about the auditability side. I mean, I think that's something, certainly, I would say maybe last year when I was going to a few conferences here in Singapore and conferences here tend to be very enterprise focused, you know, like Singapore is a sort of sales hub for technology. And it was all about, it was all about agentic, but it was all about sort of, but how do we know what's going on and all that kind of stuff.