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Comment by wxw

21 hours ago

> Open-sourcing is fundamentally coming from our desire to build a successful business. We are competing with other highly funded, closed-source competitors, and we think opening and providing the resources for the community to improve Warp is a smart way for us to accelerate product development. Yes, we are a VC funded startup, but we do not have the resources to compete on price or massively subsidize usage – we need to build our business by offering the best possible product to the most excited community.

Appreciate the candid take. Warp is great.

16 comments

wxw

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arionmiles  21 hours 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.

  • Bayart  29 minutes ago

    > Who are their highly funded closed-source competitors they claim Warp cannot beat on price?

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

  • SOLAR_FIELDS  5 hours ago

    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?

    • mkroman  2 hours ago

      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.

  • taupi  20 hours ago

    They see their competitors as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, not ghostty or something.