I designed the World’s First Agentic Development Environment - AMA about Warp 2.0
Hey Product Hunt 👋
Dave here — I lead design at Warp, and today our team is thrilled to debut Warp 2.0, the first Agentic Development Environment (ADE). We just achieved a 71% SWE-bench score and ranked #1 on terminal-bench, making Warp the most powerful coding agent in the world. Check us out on the leaderboard for more details!
Our philosophy at Warp is that over the next year the process of developers starting off projects editing code by hand in IDEs will become relatively obsolete and most coding tasks will start with a prompt (and many will be finished by one). It’s a strong take - but that’s the future we’re building towards at Warp.
Our entire team is super thankful for all the love and support that we’ve gotten from the Product Hunt community in our past two launches and I’m excited to do an AMA here and chat about anything.
Ask me about how we’re thinking about pivoting into this new category, what led us to this vision, the future of development, or even Warp’s culture! I’ll be here all day ✌️
Replies
Big time fan of Warp. It has saved me so many times. But for coding, i've been relying more on ClaudeCode (which has been fantastic - (hint hint, would love to try warp out if you have any promo codes!)).
Question - Claude code right now has a notion of "Claude.md" which it uses as a hinting system. Other coding helpers (like cursor) have their own optimizations. The biggest gripe i have with Claude is it takes a long time, to search through things that it has already looked through before. This makes it fairly slow.
How are you guys thinking about improving "speed" for agentic tasks? What sorts of optimizations (without giving away secret sauce) makes warp faster at doing my tasks?
Related, agentic tasks are async. You say something, you let it do stuff for a few mins. For those few mins (which I honestly compare to long-build times), how do you think about managing user experience? Maybe a good way to answer this is, for an experienced developer who uses Warp daily, what does an ideal setup look like?
Warp
@aamir_j We currently have Rules, which you can find in Warp Drive. These function similarly to a Claude.md or .cursorrules file. We're working on more ways to manage context in between and during conversations, more soon.
WRT speed, we have a bit of an advantage controlling the terminal application and giving the agent access to terminal commands and CLI tools, which are typically pretty fast. However, we are ultimately limited by the speed of the underlying model providers. Different models are optimized for speed vs power, try different ones and figure out which works for your flow!
As far as Agent Management, asynchronous Agent work is something we're building a first class experience for. Check out the features we've built for this at https://www.warp.dev/agents, and we're working on building out even more ways to manage Agents and their tasks.
Yo! Warp 2.0 feels great. Been using it for the past day. I feel joy using it. Thank you for your hard work in design and UX - because there are many ways to skin a cat. I like the balance y'all have taken between code editor and agentic terminal LEROY JENKINS kind of type.
Long story short: https://x.com/CameronPak/status/1937885535235715177
I'm finding that I love being able to inline edit files in Warp 2.0. I did find a shortcut to open a file in the inline code editor: CMD+P and then the file name.
Would y'all ever consider me being able to see my tree of files in the current project in the lefthand side bar for easy editing access? or is that more reserved for like a typical IDE?
Warp
@campak We are thinking deeply about the right way to build a file system view into Warp. We want to do it in a first principled way that is crafted specifically for the experience of working with Agents. There are definitely some buns in the oven here, more soon.
@dplakon Love it. Thanks, David!
Warp
What did the story look like for going from an AI chat panel (i.e. what Warp used to have or what a lot of devtools have) to a fully integrated in-line experience? I definitely love using Agent Mode (I guess, now the ADE!) and it feels a lot more "integrated" than a side-panel, curious on what inspired the shift/what the design side of this looked like
Warp
@advait_maybhate AI chat panels were a great first pass at integrating AI into products, but they feel a bit bolt-on, and didn't provide a ton of value compared to just having a web browser open with ChatGPT.
The first version of Agent Mode released in June of 2024, but started in earnest in October of 2023, was our V1 of integrating AI directly into the terminal, giving Agents direct access to run commands. Since then, we've added a bunch of capabilities and tools to allow them to write code, browse the web, install various packages and CLIs, etc.
We thought the correct UX was to bring the Agent directly into where the action is happening instead of silo'd into a chat panel. Definitely feel validated with how many Agent Modes are out there now :)
Warp
@dplakon awesome to hear the context, and totally agree, thanks - yeah, it makes a ton of sense with how popular the concept has gotten haha!
Product Hunt
I've been curious what kind of "secret sauce" the different editors use to guide the model output. It feels like using the same models in different editors get pretty different results, but it's hard to be objective as a single user.
What kind of cool tech can you tell us about that helps you outperform the competition? How much room for improvement do you see -- has the rate of improvement been consistent, slowing down, or speeding up?
Warp
@andrew_g_stewart Hi Andrew! Thanks for the question. We've found quite a bit of room for improvement on the terminal-bench benchmarks. We're now #1 by a significant margin. There's some really good info on the techniques our engineering team used to achieve this on our blog. Particularly, long running command support was impactful and something Warp is uniquely positioned to do with our place in the stack.
https://www.warp.dev/blog/terminal-bench
Warp
Right now I'm using Warp for larger diffs and VSCode to supplement super quick fixes. What are Warp's plans to build better capabilities to help developers finish that 90% -> 100% of the development process?
Warp
@ericdachen Warp has a built in code editor for those last mile fixes. You can access it by clicking on file links in agent responses, or opening a file with cmd p. We’re working on enhancing our code editor to better support these workflows, though we think the code editor will be less important over time.
Product Hunt
The terminal and modern IDEs are increasingly being approached now by non-technical users who traditionally wouldn't have opened these tools if it weren't for the ability to prompt a solution either directly in them or from another application in how to use them.
How do you imagine onboarding this new user-type? Should Warp be non-dev friendly? How much variance do you see user behavior change based on their technical experience when using Warp?
I've been loving Warp so far, the 2.0 announcement was top-tier. Thanks for all that you and the team do!
Warp
@gabe Thank you! We are currently focusing on designing great tools for professional software engineers. From our perspective, there are a lot of great tools like v0, lovable, bolt, replit, etc that are going after more of the wider consumer market. Typically when you simplify your product for a wider market, there are tradeoffs in complexity and power. We're focused on adding power to engineers.
Replit's ex-product design lead gave a great talk on this tradeoff at Config in 2024, highly recommend: