The Terminal as an Agentic Interface

The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zack Lloyd is the cofounder and CEO of Warp and a former principal engineer at Google, where he led engineering on the Google Docs Suite. In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Van to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more. Gregor Vand is a security focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn. Hello and welcome to software engineering daily. My guest today is Zach Lloyd who's returning after four years. So we've already had Zack on in 2022. Yeah. Welcome, Zack. It's good to be here. Thanks for having me back. Yeah. We're gonna be talking all about Warp which some of our listener base will be quite familiar with, I think. Before we get into Warp itself, we normally sort of go through a story of our guest. I suggest our listeners go back to the 2022 episode if you wanna get the the full version, but what's a kind of, like, TLDR of how you ended up building WARP? Yeah. So my my background, I've been a software engineer for most of my career. I was at Google for a really long time. I helped build a lot of Google Sheets, and then I led engineering on the whole Google Docs suite. I was principal engineer there. I've been out of Google though for a while as well. I've I've been founding companies. Warp's like my second venture backed startup that I've done. First one, totally totally different space, pretty interesting learning experience. But, fundamentally, I would say I'm someone who I really, really like building stuff. It's really fun for me. My goal has been to build, like, useful software sometimes for knowledge workers, like with Google Docs. With Warp, I'm really trying to build something that's very useful for developers. And honestly, increasingly, like, since anyone can be a developer, it's really useful for a lot of knowledge workers as well. It's like a crazy changing space to be in, but that's like me in a nutshell. Yeah. Nice. So I think sort of thinking about what you might have been talking about in the in the episode back in 2022, but I guess …