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by arionmiles 53 days ago
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.

4 comments

They see their competitors as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, not ghostty or something.
GitHub is going to go after this too (unsurprisingly). Working "Ace" prototype from Github "lab."

https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/

The problem description is spot on, but the solution isn't. No-one is going to sit in that chat and "collaborate" on each other's stuff in real time all day. You may as well just all sit around a screen.

I welcome the experimentation, there will definitely be something new, but this ain't it. New primitives are needed, at a higher level of conceptualization, not merely a fancy new interface.

  > writing code is now fast, it's getting cheaper, and quality is going up to the right
I'm unconvinced... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
I swear I've heard that exact phrase repeated over and over by many people
Many people believe it’s true.

My hobby projects have 100x more tests than they used to, because LLMs are great at writing tests. And my subjective experience is that the net quality has increased as a result.

YMMV, but it’s certainly a common belief, and for me at least a lived experience.

A lot of people believe a lot of things are true. Plenty of things that are provably false too. People will have strong convictions. People will drink deadly Koolaid because they believe in things so much.

I don't care what people believe, I care about what is. What is measurable. What is factual. I need evidence for a belief to be meaningful. I need strong evidence for a belief to be strong. Not just evidence in favor, but evidence that alternative explanations are unlikely.

Currently I see evidence that things are moving fast. But I am unable to distinguish if this is actually because of AI or because increased efforts and motivation. Most importantly, speed isn't the same thing as velocity.

What I do not see evidence for is increasing quality. In fact, I see strong evidence to the contrary. I see strong evidence that quality is declining even quicker than it was before. I'm not convinced AI is that cause of this, but there's more than adequate evidence for me to believe it is a (significant) catalyst.

Right now you could throw a stone in a random direction and there's a good chance that whatever it lands on will be decreasing in quality. It is even easy to gesture broadly at Microsoft, but they aren't the only big tech disappointing their users.

I hear a lot of claims. I don't see a lot of evidence.

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.
That's immediately addressed in the talk. It's a GH Labs experiment.
correct - our business is our agent and orchestrator, not our terminal.
And of course harness [1] (I kid, this is my tiny personal project in the same space)

[1] https://harness.mikelyons.org

I'm not too familiar with Warp so can someone help clarify for me:

Is Warp a terminal? Or an agent harness? Or both?

Warp as a terminal to me seems less interesting than having a well built agent harness like OpenCode that can effectively use many different models. If it's both, is there any advantage to having them be the same thing? Like, is there any way your harness can be smarter if it is also tightly integrated in your terminal? Or is it just something that Warp happens to do both of?

It's a terminal. It was a terminal before they pivoted to AI (I don't blame them, with their funding rounds I don't see them having particularly free reins) Before this, it was all about collaborative (CRDT) features. I have no idea why you'd want a terminal that is also an agent harness, but I appreciate them making it open source none the less.
> Who are their highly funded closed-source competitors they claim Warp cannot beat on price?

Agentic AI, broadly speaking. Including CLI agents and IDEs.

soloterm.com is closed source