> Open-sourcing is fundamentally coming from our desire to build a successful business. We are competing with other highly funded, closed-source competitors, and we think opening and providing the resources for the community to improve Warp is a smart way for us to accelerate product development. Yes, we are a VC funded startup, but we do not have the resources to compete on price or massively subsidize usage – we need to build our business by offering the best possible product to the most excited community.
Who are their highly funded closed-source competitors they claim Warp cannot beat on price?
Warp is the only closed source terminal product I know of. Most other popular terminal emulators are open source already.
I feel like their funding is drying up and this is their last ditch effort to have the "community" build their product for them.
They claim agents will run the show, with inputs from community in the form of ideas/specs/direction. I wonder how long that will be sustainable for given the subsidized model prices are collapsing as we speak.
Is this an attempt to pivot to something else while the "community" keeps their first product alive? Maybe I'm being too cynical here, but I don't see this as an act of good faith, especially given their roots in VC funding.
the presenter is pretty sane, but the product is hardly a product at the current scenario. pretty much codemirror 6 collaborative editing demo + vm running claude code, with a web GUI. will fall apart with large code bases just like vscode, github codespaces and co. do, and expensive for llms to run against. Would be nice to see the foundational problems being worked on instead of regurgiting what everybody is doing.
I hope someone will create a lightweight version without AI and code editing stuff. The terminal experience is the best, but I don't have any use for the agentic stuff while having claude code, opencode, codex and plenty other options.
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?
Recently I've started to use https://superset.sh as alternative to Warp. After the volks @mastra mentioned it. Very cool open source project.
I'm actually pretty proud of the final setup I've created with it.
Each time I start to implement a new ticket, superset will pull the ticket from linear, create a worktree/workspace, reserve ports, start the servers, start a browser and start Claude with the ticket as instructions.
The cool thing with this setup is, I can have like 10x the same servers running on different ports/worktrees.
Each time an agent is done, I switch to the workspace, look at the browser and can immediately test things.
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.
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.
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.
I really like Warp. It's a lot nicer to be able to visualize what I'm doing in the terminal. Some people don't like the AI features, but they only activate if you log in.
My main driver has been Ghostty but I've been looking at Warp for a while. Warp seems like a full on IDE (~ADE) though, as opposed to a minimalistic terminal. Can anyone add some thoughts? Are these 2 very different?
tangential: I've seen Mitchel tweet that people in SF have ran up to him showing him how they fully riced their Ghostty setup. How many people here have done this and how easy/manageable is it? e.g. just forking the repo and implementing whatever Warp feature I like?
libghostty makes it pretty easy to do. I spent about two weeks setting something up until it was advanced enough to daily drive. I wanted to have a modal workflow similar to vim or tmux copy mode, but without having the overhead of using tmux... that's probably a lot more complicated than "I want Ghostty but with $X tweak". You can poke around in the repo to get a feel for what's involved if you want: https://github.com/milch/mistty
check out yaw terminal for a terminal first experience that also treats ai cli as a first class citizen. and if you're on windows is very dialed into git bash.
I've been trying to figure out what the long term play is here - is it an angling for a frontier lab acquisition? Or does open-sourcing put Warp in the same sort of category as OpenCode - where charging for LLM tokens becomes the main commercial driver?
Holy shit this made my day. Warp’s convenience shell wrapping is amazing. It’s the only terminal where I can actually edit a long command in place rather than copy pasting into an editor and doing so there.
Now I’m more or less assured I can retain this convenience without being forced into more AI crap.
Well, it hasn't under the OS/2 name, but as the licensed successor ArcOS, its last release was literally this year. (Of course, that's also why OS/2 is pretty unlikely to be open-sourced any time soon: it's actually still being developed and sold!)
Appreciate the candid take. Warp is great.
Warp is the only closed source terminal product I know of. Most other popular terminal emulators are open source already.
I feel like their funding is drying up and this is their last ditch effort to have the "community" build their product for them.
They claim agents will run the show, with inputs from community in the form of ideas/specs/direction. I wonder how long that will be sustainable for given the subsidized model prices are collapsing as we speak.
Is this an attempt to pivot to something else while the "community" keeps their first product alive? Maybe I'm being too cynical here, but I don't see this as an act of good faith, especially given their roots in VC funding.
https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/
edit: nevermind, it was quite discoverable...
i currently use tmux and ghostty for my workflow
I'm actually pretty proud of the final setup I've created with it.
Each time I start to implement a new ticket, superset will pull the ticket from linear, create a worktree/workspace, reserve ports, start the servers, start a browser and start Claude with the ticket as instructions.
The cool thing with this setup is, I can have like 10x the same servers running on different ports/worktrees. Each time an agent is done, I switch to the workspace, look at the browser and can immediately test things.
It's like having 10 virtual desktops. Wonderful!
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.
tangential: I've seen Mitchel tweet that people in SF have ran up to him showing him how they fully riced their Ghostty setup. How many people here have done this and how easy/manageable is it? e.g. just forking the repo and implementing whatever Warp feature I like?
Ghostty remains incredible stable and usable and fast compared to competition.
for zsh:
Alt-e for fish
Ctrl-g for Claude code
EDIT: well looks like this is not OS/2 Warp. I wish the title would have noted this is somekind of app instead of just saying "warp".