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For four decades, the command line has looked and behaved almost exactly the same. Developers still stare at a blank black box, hoping they can remember the commands that will build a project, clone a repo, or restart a service. <\/span><\/p>\n Zach Lloyd, former Google Sheets Principal Engineer and now Founder\u2011CEO of <\/span>Warp, thinks it is no longer good enough. After closing a US$50 million Series B led by Sequoia, he\u2019s betting that the next leap in developer productivity will come from giving the terminal a brain — one powered by large language models (LLMs)\u200b.<\/span><\/p>\n Lloyd\u2019s core insight is simple: the terminal is \u201cstuck in 40 years ago from a usability perspective.\u201d Warp keeps the speed and composability developers love, but layers on a modern, user\u2011friendly UI and, more importantly, an AI that understands natural language.<\/p>\n Installation is as friction\u2011free as any other terminal: download the native Mac, Linux, or Windows build and open it in place of the stock shell, or the VS Code pane. Because Warp sits above your preferred shell, 98 per cent of your aliases, dotfiles, and plugins work unchanged.<\/p>\n Instead of memorising 10s of commands, you can now just ask. Typing <\/span>\u201cHelp me set up a new Python tool\u2011chain, clone the repo, make a branch and ensure it runs\u201d<\/span>\u00a0 triggers the LLM to probe the environment, generate SSH keys when it hits an auth error, and iterate until the project builds cleanly. <\/span><\/p>\n The same principle applies to everyday frustrations: run your tests, hit a compiler error, and Warp automatically drafts the fix inline; all you do is accept or reject it\u200b. Lloyd calls this shift <\/span>\u201ccode by hand to code by prompt\u201d.<\/p>\n Today Warp lets users choose between Anthropic\u2019s Claude\u20113.5 \/ 3.7 \u201cSonic\u201d models or a two\u2011step pipeline with a smaller model before delegating execution to OpenAI for raw code generation. The team exposes that choice because tinkerers love knobs, but long\u2011term they plan to pick the best model automatically so developers can focus on outcomes rather than tokens.<\/span><\/p>\n Also Read:\u00a0Open source: The secret to boosting Singapore\u2019s startup ecosystem<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Keeping costs predictable is non\u2011trivial. Warp\u2019s individual plans sit at US$15 and US$40 per month, each bundling a quota of AI requests. Even with volatile model pricing, Lloyd says margins stay in the healthy 30\u201160 per cent range, helped by careful prompt engineering to avoid \u201ccontext\u2011hungry\u201d versions of models like Claude 3.7. <\/span>Hosting an open\u2011source weights file themselves could widen margins further, but right now quality\u2011of\u2011experience trumps raw cost savings \u200b.<\/span><\/p>\n Warp\u2019s go\u2011to\u2011market mirrors early GitHub: release a delightful free tier, win mindshare, and count on developers to drag the tool into work. Hundreds of thousands already use it every month, split between people who simply want a nicer terminal and early adopters chasing hot AI workflows\u200b. <\/span><\/p>\n Roughly 10 per cent of all actions executed in Warp are now either natural\u2011language prompts or autonomous AI commands, a metric the company tracks closely because higher AI engagement reliably precedes upgrades to paid plans. Most growth is organic: word\u2011of\u2011mouth, tweeted demos, and even copy\u2011pasted Warp \u201cnotebooks\u201d that embed terminal output in a link\u2011shareable format \u200b.<\/span><\/p>\n Lloyd argues that neither the IDE nor the classic CLI will remain the centre of gravity. As models improve, developers will increasingly fire off long\u2011running agents that gather context, draft code, run tests, and even deploy — tasks that can take minutes, not seconds.<\/p>\n Also Read:\u00a0Engineering the future: IMI\u2019s 3-prong strategy to building new ventures in transformative sectors<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n The terminal\u2019s multiplexer heritage (backgrounded jobs, REPL\u2011style streams, and session logs) already provides the right mental model for monitoring those agents while they work in parallel. In other words, Warp wants to turn your prompt into a workflow manager, surfacing progress and asking for human guidance only when the AI gets stuck.<\/p>\n If this vision lands, the traditional boundary between \u201cwrite code in the editor\u201d and \u201crun it in the shell\u201d blurs. Developers will open Warp, describe the feature they need, and grab a coffee while the agent assembles the skeleton. When it finishes, they\u2019ll drop into the editor for the last 10\u201120 per cent of polish that still benefits from human taste. Over time, Lloyd hopes most interactions will start in English and only fall back to Bash when necessary.<\/p>\n Lloyd and team at Warp spent years rewriting the terminal core in Rust before shipping because he wanted foundations that would outlast UI fads — a risky path he says only works when you swing big and hire slowly but exceptionally well\u200b. The payoff is a product with deep technical moat just as the AI wave breaks over developer tooling.<\/p>\n In 2025 we are drowning in coding copilots, but Warp is betting that the interface — not just the model — is the real unlock. By melding the terminal\u2019s proven ergonomics with conversational intelligence, it turns a place historically reserved for cryptic one\u2011liners into a collaborative teammate.<\/p>\n If Lloyd is right, the next time you open a shell you won\u2019t type git clone; you\u2019ll simply ask — and then watch the agent get to work. That feels like progress worth another 40 years.<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0e27<\/b>\u00a0aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by\u00a0submitting<\/a>\u00a0an article, video, podcast, or infographic.<\/p>\n Join us on\u00a0Instagram<\/a>,\u00a0Facebook<\/a>,\u00a0X<\/a>, and\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a> to stay connected. We\u2019re building the most useful WA community for founders and enablers. Join\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and be part of it.<\/p>\n Image courtesy of the author.<\/p>\n The post Why the terminal could become the AI workbench product<\/a> appeared first on e27<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For four decades, the command line has looked and behaved almost exactly the same. Developers still stare at a blank black box, hoping they can remember the commands that will build a project, clone a repo, or restart a service. Zach Lloyd, former Google Sheets Principal Engineer and now Founder\u2011CEO of Warp, thinks it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1893,"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890\/revisions\/1893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fresnoforeclosure.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}From the 1980s command line to 2025 conversation<\/strong><\/h1>\n
Talk, don\u2019t type<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What\u2019s under the hood?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Adoption: Bottom\u2011up and outcome driven<\/strong><\/h2>\n
A glimpse of the future workbench<\/strong><\/h2>\n