Hello, hello, and welcome to Coder Radio episode 607. I'm Mike, obviously, and today is the, well, it's Valentine's Day. It's the February the 14th in the year 2025. So you've probably heard there's been some changes. TNB has acquired the show. There's really no story, no drama there at all. It's the ad winter. Yep. Been talking about it for a long time. That's why we were doing the booths.
And this just kind of made a lot of sense, I think, for everybody. So great. What that means is, and I'm diving right into the changes because I've been getting the DMs and the emails. Let's just do it, right? That means we're going to have for a few months a slightly different format at least. So one thing, feedback. There's a Discord channel. There's a link in the show notes.
It's going to be probably the primary chat room, not probably, definitely the primary chat room and the primary avenue for feedback. The Reddit is still around. That's, you know, r slash Coderadio. YouTube, a new YouTube channel is coming up that will be where all live broadcasts are on. So you got Discord, you got YouTube, you got Reddit for feedback.
We're also probably going to have some sort of catch-all form. It's a little challenging because spam can be a pain in the butt. But, you know, we'll see where we go. Other changes. No more boosts. You don't need to boost. So you want to give your feedback? You just give your feedback directly in any of those avenues that I just described. There's going to be no more paid feed. So everything's in the main feed. Right now we have no advertisers.
Although I would be open to relevant advertisement, not super worried about it. Again, part of the reason for the change is just, you know, business model, right? The ad winter is not something that, you know, my company TMB really cares about. because we use the show for, you know, marketing, stuff like that. There will be an Alice ad at the end of the show. Don't worry. So probably before the end, let's be honest.
A few other things that might change or that are changing, I should say. We're going to keep to a weekly cadence for now. Those shows will be live starting in a week or two. The hang-up there is getting the YouTube approvals for live streaming and all that stuff set up. This show will probably air before, or I should say hit your feeds, before next week, before Monday, or on Monday.
Hopefully. We're going to be interviewing some interesting people from the community, possibly my cat, if you can hear her in the background as well. I think you Linux heads are going to be happy. Today we have an interview at work. Warp CEO, Zach Lloyd, who is going to tell us all about how Warp was developed. And yes, Rustation has developed in Rust.
Click your claws. Enjoy. Good stuff. So another change, just going through all the housekeeping up front, right, is there's going to be a little gaming segment. Astute people might notice that the... Code Radio Discord. What's the game of Radio Discord? They're merging. That's kind of the way for everybody to carry on here, to survive. So we're not always going to have a ton of gaming content.
We may have some weeks where there's more, some weeks where there's less. A lot of it's going to be focused on people making game, game developers. Even outside of the gaming stuff, I really want to get some more... different voices in who are, you know, building the projects we all maybe use, right? Open source developers. But also, you know, I know a lot of you are dark matter developers and...
So is the majority of the industry, right? So let's hear from some of y'all, right? What's going on? How is Java 4? Kidding. I hope that's not true. I honestly hope you're not living back there. We're gonna have swag. It's not gonna be robes. Yeah, robes are a pain in the butt. You know, Chris is right about that. So, but we are gonna have swag. I'm...
I'm a little hesitant to say what it's going to be because I'm talking to a few vendors right now. There's lots of complications with trying to produce and ship anything, particularly if you need to ship out of the United States and you're in the United States. So I'm trying to figure out what realistically I can do there. And I'm trying to do something, you know, not the normal baseball cap, right? Something interesting, something different. So we'll see how that goes.
to the folks writing in you know what happened well basically like i said up front the ad winter right there's no bad blood there's no issue it's uh you know coder hasn't had ads for a long time and that that's a problem right that's an issue So everybody's happy. We've took care of it like this. I'm hoping to explore other opportunities for different types of content. I know we're going to keep it audio only, so don't worry because I know.
A lot of my favorite shows go by video too. And that's just, I'm just not, I'm just not that into that. I don't know. I just never liked it. So that will be something probably for the spring or the summer. Right now we're going to keep the format pretty straight. You will have a top story, a little bit of news, maybe a clip or two.
And then an interview with, you know, someone working on something interesting or, you know, just whatever makes sense, right? I do want a little more audience engagement. I'm particularly curious to see like... What kind of side projects is everybody working on? What's your workstation like? Are you running desktop Linux? And if so, did you exit this from the Mac?
Are you a, you know, iLife diehard? Are you a Windows guy, right? Like, let's find out. But this is my little intro. Most shows will be more structured than this one. I wanted to get this out because I did a really great interview with, like I said, Zach Lloyd of Warp. And if you have not tried Warp, it's an alternative terminal that has some optional. That's the key, optional.
ai functionality using claude but you can change that and they do have they are vc funded but they do have an interesting monetization model that targets like the enterprise right enterprise and there's a a pro plan for like small teams interesting stuff it's I've been using it day to day on Mac and on my dev one which is a pop OS machine for several months and I really enjoy it
Let me see. Oh, the last question you guys keep asking is potential co-host. Yeah, so probably, right? What I'm doing now to make my life easy is interviews are super hard. That's why we didn't do a lot of them in the past. I am pre-recording the interviews when it's convenient for both me and the interviewee, and I'm cutting them in. So while I'm doing that...
I would say for the next month or so, we're probably not going to try out co-hosts. We might have guest co-hosts from time to time, right? And once we kind of get, I mean, there's a whole bunch of back of house process that we have to get down, right? There's...
editing, which this is going to be interesting. So, you know, I'm trying out a brand new editor. There's just the process of moving the feeds and all that jazz. Huge pain in the butt. And I'm sure there's stuff that's going to come up that I had not considered. So, yeah, we're going to, you know, I appreciate any feedback. I appreciate any assistance. The best place to reach me is that Discord. I tend to at least lurk there during the day, and I'm always kind of online.
So usually I get back to people within 24 hours. And that's about it. So let's dive right in with Zach Lloyd of Warp. And if you enjoy that, go check Warbat. And also the show is now brought to you by Alice.dev. If you or your employer needs any kind of automation or Rails development or Python development done. Let me know. Go check out alice.dev. There's a handy dandy thing that book a time to talk. All right. Have a great day. Here's Zach.
All right. Hello. I have Mr. Zach Lloyd of Warp Terminal here. Zach, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm psyched to be here. Great. Now, where are you calling out of? I currently live in Taos, New Mexico. Oh, very cool. Okay. You know, for some reason, I thought you guys were in New York for a while, but I think you have an office there or something. Yeah. So the company started in New York in 2020.
right after the pandemic started. So we've kind of been remote first, but about half of our team is in New York. Very cool. I've actually been a longtime user of Warp on macOS. Well, I'll put you this way. You're preaching to the converted here. Good. It should be pretty easy. That's nice. I like that. So what is warp? I mean, we're getting over our skis, right? I'm sure a lot of folks don't know what it is.
Yeah, so Warp is a reimagination of the command line terminal. The sort of overarching theory behind it is terminal is one of the two tools that developers spend their days in. The other one being the code editor can do a lot of amazing things from the terminal as a developer, whether it's like, you know, as simple as build test run or doing get stuff. It's where you control your whole production.
systems it's where you might write all your internal tools so very important tool but you know our theory was that it's been sort of under invested in from a user experience standpoint and it's kind of hard to use But if you get to use it, get to learn it really well, it can really give you much more productivity to the developer. So Warp is like just a total ground up rethinking of it. And recently, it's really about how can we...
you know, use AI to make it so that very, you know, complex terminal workflows are really accessible to all developers. Okay. So when you say use AI, I mean, I obviously use warp day to day, so. I think I know the answer to this question. But what are the use cases that you kind of feature for someone who's maybe, you know, a little curious, right? They've been using iTerm or maybe they've been using...
I don't know, whatever, right? GNOME terminal. Sure. And they're thinking of stepping up, but they're not exactly sure how they would use an AI-powered terminal. Yeah. So the simplest way to think about it is that you can tell Warp to do what to do. in English. So you can do sort of prompt-driven development in it or prompt-driven DevOps, meaning that rather than typing a series of commands to accomplish whatever task you want to accomplish, and let's just pick a task. Say you want to like...
set up a new node project. You know, typically you could do that with like npm init and a bunch of other things, npm fetch, make a bunch of files. In warp, you can just tell the terminal to do it for you. and literally by typing or even speaking in English now to it. And it will plan out what it needs to do. It will run the commands for you with various degrees of autonomy. So you can...
You know, you can actually just sort of let it do read-only things on its own and step in when it wants to write something, or you can even let it just do the task for you. And so I think the simplest way of thinking of it is, like, it increases the level of abstraction in the terminal from commands to English.
So you can kind of just tell it what you want it to do and it will do it for you, which is pretty cool. Okay, so you could tell it something like, I don't know, write me a Postgres query for... Finding all the Pokemon that are fire type and that are stage two evolution, right? A hundred percent. Got it. And you can do that. And what's cool is you can do that in warp, not just from like a shell prompt.
you can do it from within like the PSQL REPL if that's where you're working. So we've even brought the sort of ability to interact this higher level abstraction into the, you know, terminal apps themselves. So we should say for the individual user, Warp is totally free, right? You just download it, you use it. I think you log in with GitHub. I've been logged in for months. I don't remember. You don't even have to log in. So this was a...
We started off warp where we required sign in. We've gotten rid of that requirement. We want people to experience the power of it as quickly as possible. If you log in. You do get extra stuff. So we encourage users to log in, meaning you get a higher free request limit for AI. You get a bunch of cool collaboration features which let you work with your team. But no, you just download and start using it in place of like iTerm or...
whatever else you're using. Now, you mentioned request limits on AI. I'm assuming you're using one of the big AI APIs. Are you? Can you say who that is? Yeah. So in fact, if you get a choice as a warp user, so... You can use, like our default right now is Claude Sonnet 3.5. For a while, our default was OpenAI. We just added DeepSeaCar1, like a US-hosted version of that.
So you have a choice. There's, I think, Gemini also. We try to guide users into the best model for the tasks that they're doing. And so, for instance, we are adding more agentic features. And for those, it's actually... valuable to have a sort of planning step that is driven by one of the deeper reasoning models like O1 or R1, but it's up to the user right now with a sensible default. Okay, where did you get the idea for this?
For warp in general or for like how to use the AI in it? Well, let's say warp in general first, but yeah, both really. Yeah, so warp in general just comes back to my own personal experience. I have been a developer for longer than I care to say, like over 20 years. I used to be the engineering lead on Google Docs and Sheet. I built a lot of...
Don't tell them that. The next time they can't access a doc, you'll be getting emails now. Yeah, I still get bug reports. But I really enjoy building productivity software as part of it. I enjoy building stuff that helps. you know, that I personally use was the second part of it. And so when I was thinking about what I want to spend my time doing, I was kind of looking for tools that are daily use for me.
where I thought that there was the biggest potential impact to help other people get more stuff done. And the terminal was... was one of the few tools which i use every day where i was like how is this thing still work the way it works like you know you kind of are stepping back into a time machine when you use it like when you open up the standard terminal you're opening up a
GUI app that runs on your computer that is emulating a piece of physical hardware that hasn't been regularly used since the 80s. And it comes with all these crazy UI quirks because that's like what it is.
hardware emulation for a really old piece of hardware and so for instance like the mouse doesn't work the way you'd expect and so you know it's just like looking at like hey this tool is really important and i use it very frequently and it hasn't changed in 40 years i was like this is an exciting sort of area to work on. And then as far as the AI goes, we kind of got, I would say lucky here in that we had already started working on improving the fundamental UX of the command line.
for about a year and a half before before chat gpt came out and when it came out it became pretty clear pretty quickly that the The terminal was an amazing place to apply this technology because it's all text-based, so text in, text out, and because it's a really hard interface to use, but it's also super powerful, and these models are trained.
on lots of coding and command line data and are really good at helping users do very obscure stuff in the command line. So it kind of just like was a great application of this new technology to this very powerful but hard to use tool. Interesting. So I have to tell you, and it's a little shameful, my primary use for warp is fixing, I mean, if I was being generous to myself, I would say totally understandable fat finger errors.
If I was telling the truth, I'd say my unwillingness to learn proper SQL syntax. Yep. It's amazing how it's always kind of like, no, I think you're an idiot. You mean this. And usually it gets it. So I'm curious. You mentioned Sonnet. 5.3, was it? 3.5. 3.5, I'm sorry. Yep. So we have like three questions that the Coder Radio folks in the Discord came up with. I think I know the answer to one, but I'm going to ask you the one I don't know the answer to.
can I bring my own AI model? Now, I say this because we have a lot of folks using, you know, they're playing around with like ML Studio, right? They're playing around with Deep Seek. They're doing all these wacky things. can they bring their own model or are you kind of stuck with the preset options? You can't do it today. It's one of our top user requests. It's a thing that we are planning on adding. I think local model support is...
Super interesting. And also potentially for people who have API keys to the cloud-hosted models. Can't do it today, but it's something we would like to add. Okay. And the second question is kind of related. We have some very paranoid tinfoil hat folks that are constantly worried about their inputs being used as a, you know, ML training, right?
training data i'm assuming that's not what's happening here because you're just you well you're not just but you are using the you know you're using claude you're using uh chat gbt it sounds like correct so there's no there's no training whatsoever based on people's inputs there's um
There's zero data retention with all the model providers that we have as well, so they're not even holding on to your data. Makes tons of sense. The other thing I would say is we definitely have people who are using warp who... are not there on ai yet and that's fine and so you know there is actually there's a our original value prop was just like much nicer ux in the terminal and so we're still
Very happy for people to use warp just for that. And if they want to turn off AI, there's a big fat toggle where you just are like, you know, I'm not comfortable with this yet. Turn it off. But my belief is that... That will be a sort of like competitive disadvantage for individuals going forward. So I do encourage people to try the AI and just like you may be wowed by.
what it can do for you but I totally understand and sympathetic to like hey terminal is a sensitive environment I don't want any kind of like data leaving or I don't want any sort of assistance from these big models that makes total sense to me It makes sense, but I totally agree with you. We had a similar conversation about coding assistance, right? So think like VS Code's Copilot or... I always... Poor Jeff Reigns. I always forget what they call theirs, but...
It's, you know, they have their version, right? Jeff Ranks AI thing. And I use them both because I tend to live in, you know, if you want to learn about RubyMine, real large legacy Ruby applications, I'm your guy. And sometimes it suggests crazy shit, right? Sometimes it's out there in left field with, you know, whatever. Yeah, it's fallible. It's fallible. But it's almost like I called it...
I think I was talking to some younger developers and I'm helping out. I basically just called it IntelliSense on steroids, right? That's all it is. It's just better IntelliSense. You can't trust it all the time. Sometimes it's wacky. But I do think, you know, being John Henry about it and saying, I'm never using these tools, you're going to hurt yourself. Yeah, I think it's a sort of self-obsoleting viewpoint.
But it's also one that I'm sympathetic to. And I would say use with care is kind of where we're at right now. But when supervised... or used by someone who knows what they're doing, I find it to be like a, it's a huge speed up, whether it's in the terminal or in a IDE as like a coding assistant. Yeah, I totally agree. It's like having your own stack overflow right there with you. Except this one doesn't yell at you for framing the question incorrectly or something.
You have to be a certain age to understand what I'm talking about there. No, I understand that completely. That's really funny. Okay, so you're out on Mac, obviously. I actually have it open behind our recording window because I was doing some... server stuff yep you're out on linux right so you got debians and rpm so you basically cover i mean most if not all of the popular desktop linuxes with that yep
And Windows, I know I have the early access, but Windows is coming hashtag soon, right? Yep, Windows is coming really soon, I would say. So we've given some people early access. We're in the state with Windows where we are... Just trying to get the quality of the build to where we want it. But it's almost there.
Now, with the Windows Clanks, I think that's a really interesting space. You've got Microsoft Terminal, which I personally think is an awesome terminal. It can do all the PowerShell stuff, all the WSL stuff. Yep. A bunch of other weird crap. How is warp handling that? Well, can warp handle WSL? I guess. Yep. So we have, um, we have PowerShell support and then we, we have, um, Git Bash support and then we have WSL support.
Very similar sort of way of managing the sessions that Windows Terminal has. I think that they do a pretty good job of it. And then it has all of the... In addition to that, you get all the stuff that you get with WorkOne and the other platforms. So you get the AI and kind of really nice UX. Interesting. So you're on all three major platforms.
Now, I already know that it's written in Rust because we briefly chatted about it this morning. So how did the crap people get you? We actually started by prototyping it in JavaScript and TypeScript. It makes a ton of sense, yeah. It was slow. It was slow. And one of the things that I took away from my experience building Google Docs and Google Sheets...
If you're building an app that has potentially a lot of textual data, it's really hard to do that efficiently on the web platform, which sounds a little weird because the web platform renders a bunch of text. But if you... It just is not nearly as robust of like an application building platform as something like Rust. There's a lot of overhead from the browser environment. There's a lot of overhead from JavaScript. And so...
we decided to go fully native to give the highest performance experience. I also personally really, I like a lot of this sort of safety and static typing, all those guarantees that you get from working in Rust. It's a little bit of a steeper learning curve, for sure, if you're coming from JavaScript, TypeScript, or even Java, even any kind of GC language. But it's been great for us. And now that's Rust on all three platforms, right?
Yeah, we share something like 98% of code across all the platforms. And then the platform-specific stuff is all around like windowing and graphics integration, that kind of thing. Right. Like notification settings. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Good old growl is dead, unfortunately. Okay. So the last big question, because I had forgotten it and somebody just pinged me, was how do you all make money?
We make money from people paying for more AI or for our collaboration features. And it's both individual developers who pay us and it's a company. So we have enterprise contracts. with like Ramp, Docker. So like some really like one of companies, some I can't really say also. So for those enterprise contracts, it's more like an engineering leader.
wants their team to use AI tools or wants their team to be working together more efficiently. And by that, I mean, Warp has some very cool features where you can sort of standardize the way that terminal commands are used across the team. You can standardize environment variables and run books and do that all without having to leave the terminal and have AI actually be able to answer questions based on that knowledge.
Those are the two ways that we make money. The faster growing of the two is definitely just like people reaching an aha moment where they realize like, like. holy shit warp can fix this python dependency issue for me or warp can help me fix this really hairy production issue and they're like that's worth 15 20 bucks a month easy if you think about the value of developer time
It's just like it's a no-brainer. And so that's actually growing really well on the revenue side, which is exciting. Awesome. Yeah. So is there anything else you'd like to share about Warp before we wrap up?
No, I guess I could share just a thought on how I think development is changing, if you think that would be interesting. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so the big thing that I see happening, the thing that has me most excited about working in this space... is that I think there's going to be a shift in the next year, two years, something like that, where most development, rather than starting by pulling open like a code editor and finding a bunch of files or...
opening your terminal and running a bunch of commands you are going to start by with a prompt essentially and this is going to be very foreign to engineers in a lot of ways but it's just something that's going to happen And I think it's a super exciting transformation in that the developers who embrace and learn how to do this kind of prompt-driven development where you sort of say what you want done.
And you let the AI or the agent, whatever you want to call it, do some of it where you're supervising it is going to be the predominant way that people work. And I think... We are in a very, very interesting position as like this imperative sort of like command line interface to help developers do that. So I don't know if how things will transform it.
100%, but I am pretty confident that we are in a period where a year or two from now, development is going to look very, very different. I find it super exciting. I totally agree with you. I have this thing, we're doing a whole series called the 10X Executive. So not developers, but business folks. And in fact, I have a few of them scheduled to come on. And these are like...
You know, this is your typical business guy, right? You know, they love fintech. They're sitting in New York right on 7th Avenue somewhere. And they don't know how to code. They don't know how to write an SQL query. but they know how to use Snowflake or Power BI, and they can basically, between that and any kind of AI, right? ChatGPT seems to be the most popular, but it doesn't really matter.
voltron themselves up what they would have had to pay you know a development shop like mine uh basically voltron up a dashboard without having to even a crude dashboard right simple not designed whatever but just something for a meeting within 20 minutes with no technical skills other than knowing their Power BI. It's wild. In development, it's going to be the same thing in development. I don't think it's going to obsolete.
developers per se or make development knowledge irrelevant because there's a need for guidance and supervision and there's also I think it's kind of underappreciated how much the skill of guiding the sort of AI coworker or the AI prompt, that's like a real skill that needs to be cultivated and developed for anyone who's building software. And so I think it's just going to look different, but this...
the need for skill around it is not going to go away, in my opinion. Totally agree. So last question. This one's a hard ball. Ready? Okay. Other than warp, you can't in your own tool. What is one tool, either proprietary, open source, doesn't even have to be a dev tool, but one tool you cannot live without? So one thing I started using lately that is...
Super cool is this note-taking tool called Granola. I'm not sure if you've heard of it. What's cool about it? There's this whole class of these note-taking tools where you add a virtual... square to your zoom and it shows up as like ai note taker granola on the other hand doesn't like pop into your zoom what it does is it actually sort of listens it's just like
It's as though you were personally taking notes. So it listens in and then it generates a cool summary of your meeting and makes it very, very shareable and lets you ask questions of it. And I don't know, it's just like, it's a kind of subtle. difference in terms of how meeting notes should work but it's a really awesome experience so i like that tool a lot that sounds amazing zach yeah so
To find out more, and actually I am going to check out the Granola tool because I'm a freaking mess man. I'm just out of control. So where can folks go to learn more? Is it just warp.dev still? Just go to warp.dev, yeah. Okay, and I should tell you all, you guys missed the boat. If you signed up for their early access, they give you a sweet hat and t-shirt. So there's my corruption showing right there.
All this dude had to do was send me a hat and t-shirt. We paid you off with swag. Paid me off, that's right. Still works. I was walking around, you know, the swamps of Florida here, bare-chested until I got my Warped t-shirt. That was terrible. My head was burning. My scalp sunburned. All right. Well, Zach, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome. This was awesome. Have a great day. You too. Bye.