This is a private note that has been shared.

Warp is now an "Agentic Development Environment"

If you don't know Warp, it's a pretty nice terminal app that I've been using for a number of years; I mostly use it because it lets me copy entire command responses and other quality of life stuff like that. I really enjoy it and have recommended to everyone I talk to.

One of the things it's never gotten me to do though is pay for it; I mostly just expect my terminal to be my terminal. I've seen a couple of angles they've taken: the enterprise route with some of their collaborative team features was the first one, and as AI started up everywhere, trying to directly integrate LLMs into your terminal.

It certainly sounds like they're trying to go well down the latter route with their 2.0 launch:

The products on the market today...bolt agents onto code editors through chat panels and bury them in CLI apps. What’s needed is a product native to the agentic workflow; one primarily designed for prompting, multi-threading, agent management, and human-agent collaboration across real-world codebases and infrastructure. [...] With Warp 2.0, the ADE ["Agentic Development Environment"], this is all fixed: it’s amazing at coding and really any development task you can think of. You tell it what to build, how to build it, and it gets to work, looping you in when needed.

To be honest though, I'm not seeing the vision. I mean, I like the new design of the terminal, but what's going to compel me to use their AI inputs over, say, Claude Code? (I'm also not gonna really comment on the SWE-bench scores because I don't really find them to represent how much they actually help me.) I'm seeing some possible answers in the post, but none are really interesting to me yet.

One contender is multitasking ("multithreading"). Cursor/Windsurf still don't really support having multiple chats yet, which annoys me. But far from being "buried" in a CLI app, claude can just be run in multiple tabs to the exact same effect. And every (local) solution so far is always working off the same copy of your code. So sure, like the demo shows, you can be writing some code in one tab, doing code review in another, and reading logs in a third. But I'm still awkwardly aware that I can't fix two bugs at the same time, or really, multitask anything that requires writing code.

The knowledge angle is similarly lacking for me. At anywhere I've worked, I already have Notion, Slack, Google Drive, as well as AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md and Cursor rules. It feels redundant to be creating another central team store. I think shared MCP could be interesting, but right now I'd be too scared of accidental credential leakage, so maybe one day that'll be interesting.

So really what it's doing is just giving me another coding wrapper. I don't think that's a bad thing! I think there are many fantastic wrappers out there, but I really don't think it's fair to call the status quo "bolted on," "buried," or inferior compared to the vision they describe. There's really just two things that would compel me to use it over my current spate of AI coding tools short of unique models: a better harness (which is a tough, tough hill to climb in a world with CLI coding tools built in tight connection with the underlying models), or a radically better way to manage and steer the agents. I'm excited to see if they can deliver on these.