Agentic Engineering is the Future of Coding

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]So, I want to talk about Warp, but tell me very quickly, what was your reaction to the to the SpaceX cursor deal, announcement, uh, partnership, whatever we want to call it at this point.

[00:00:11]>> Uh, I mean, a couple things I guess one, it really speaks to just like how AI coding has taken off as a market. That's a incredible price for a AI coding company. And I mean, cursor makes sense.

[00:00:23]Very, very big. From like my perspective, it's interesting to see another one of these um AI coding companies sort of partner or maybe be acquired by a model lab. So it's it's you see sort of consolidation amongst the model labs as as the big players in the space right now.

[00:00:42]>> And so explain to us a little bit about how Warp fits into the AI coding ecosystem. Are you a direct competitor of Cursor? Do you guys use each other's technology? How does it all work?

[00:00:53]So we are in a sense we're a competitor but what Warp is doing at this point is trying to position itself as like a great place to run any coding agent. So we're complimentary in a lot of ways. So you can use uh you can use cursor, you can use codeex, you can use cloud code, you can use warp's own agent within uh within warp. And the way that I think about our company and our positioning is like a you know we're trying to sit one level above any particular coding agent and be a great place for people to run any of them which matters because every I don't know month the what is the state-of-the-art here is changing and people really want flexibility for how they do that. So this is a tool where people can can use this platform and they can use both codeex and claude and cursor uh cla code I should say they they can use all these tools inside the warp platform they can use all of them and where this really uh it's nice for individual developers it really matters for companies uh as they are trying to figure out like how do you set up systems for deploying especially cloud agents at scale you don't necessarily want to be locked in to one model or one provider. And so what we're trying to do is provide optionality to companies where they can adopt sort of one piece of infrastructure that lets them sort of switch between those different providers and optimize things like costs which are an increasingly big concern for companies, get governance around like how those agents are working, audit trails, secure them all. And so we think that the best position for us is to be something that cuts across them, which is one reason. And so last week we open sourced warp and it's a big part of this strategy of trying to be like a neutral ecosystem player in what is a very very competitive market where you know we're going against XAI and you know anthropic and open AI we would rather not compete with them. We would rather be something that enables them.

[00:02:47]>> Why did you make the change to open source?

[00:02:50]Yeah, the the general philosophy here is like um we thought we could actually move faster and build a better product if the community was participating. The other really really big thing like why now of it is that the agents and agents are doing most of the heavy lifting in our repo. They're actually like writing the code and doing the planning and verifying the changes. agents have become so powerful and so good that we felt like we could uh actually sort of accelerate the product development meaningfully by bringing the community in and having them do a bunch of the sort of like provide like what's what's the right features to build and are they working right so it's it's kind of a new way um of working where there's humans but if you look at the repo it's all being built by agents it's very cool >> you know I want to ask you about the the vibe coding craze at large and the current state of it. I mean on one hand we have uh companies like Apple that are sending their coders uh back to boot camp uh you know to relearn the latest and greatest ways in which uh software engineers should be doing their job.

[00:03:58]You also have the whole token maxing movement, right, where companies will encourage uh their employees to basically use AI as much as they can and and I imagine vibe coding is at the center of that. But on the flip side of that, you know, you have these uh security flaws and you know, I'm sure Chuck and Maxing now, >> we saw that tide turn as well. you know, uh I think it was Uber's CTO that said, uh you know, we've kind of gone through our our budget for it and you know, now we we we don't have any budget left for um you know, our AI endeavors in certain pockets. Anyway, the details are what they are. Do you think vibe coding, you know, it's had its moment. Do you think there might be a pullback at all at these bigger tech companies where they say, "Well, maybe we should actually do things the oldfashioned way because it's a little safer in some cases."

[00:04:50]>> So, I don't think there's going to be a pull back to manually like writing code by hand. I think that those days have come and gone. I think vibe coding, the way that I think of it is like you're just sort of like, you know, driving in the back seat while the agent does all of the coding. You don't know what's going on. I don't think that's a good strategy either. So I would say those are the two extremes and what you're going to see at companies is something in the middle which I would call like agentic engineering where you know you really have to reimagine what is the right way to build software in this world of new agentic capabilities and it's it's not by hand and it's not by like totally like closing your eyes and let the agent do it. It's by adopting a new set of best practices and controls and securing it. And so I I think you're going to see a middle ground. And I do think actually costs, security, um centralized auditing and governance.

[00:05:44]This is like how you're going to do this at scale. And we're moving past the point where real companies are going to just be like go nuts on some coding tool on your laptop. They don't like that era is going to end pretty rapidly. Hm. Now I want to ask you very quickly about open-source models actually given that you are now firmly in the in the source ecosystem.

[00:06:05]>> So one of the questions I've had is you know we've seen for example uh meta traditionally their models have been uh open source um and we've seen a lot of success with open source models broadly speaking uh especially I'm thinking about the models from from China. Um, >> is it at all more difficult to assess the effectiveness on of open source models on these benchmarking leaderboards compared to closed source models? I mean, I'm not as close to to the ground as you are in this space, but is there any more challenge evaluating the effectiveness there?

[00:06:42]>> Not really. Yeah, I mean there is just general challenge with these public benchmarks and that the sort of training sets have um kind of absorbed all of the benchmarks and so you see these models kind of overfitting to the benchmarks at this point. But you can you can generally see um how openwave models are doing compared to the frontier. It looks something like they're 3 to 6 months behind is kind of like what I would how I would characterize it. The interesting question is like is there going to be a point where 3 to 6 months behind is like good enough. And what I think will happen is that it will depend on what you're doing which kind of sounds obvious but like for some tasks you will need to be at the frontier. You'll need to pay the frontier token rate which is like you know 100x the open weight token uh token rate and for some tasks you won't. And so I see that happening and it it leads me to believe there is going to be a future where it's a mixed bag where optimizing the cost of how you're using these models really matters a lot and you know I expect the open wave models to continue to sort of trail a little bit behind the frontier but generally kind of keep pace three to six months behind. And and last question for you. I mean remind us then with your pivot to open source. This is y a playbook that that many companies have used throughout the history of Silicon Valley. Um there obviously is a way to build uh very viable businesses while still uh building open source technology. But tell me a little bit about how you're thinking about your own business model then in this era of open source and um how how you're planning to really scale uh with this technology.

[00:08:21]>> Great question. So the the idea behind open source like I said earlier was it's going to improve the product. The the other thing that it will do for us is help build the ecosystem and help us grow um grow our user base. The part though of warp that revenue generates for us is is like on our server and it's really about like agent orchestration and cloud infrastructure for agents and and also like our own agent harness. All of that is >> bring bring that down a level for bring it down just just a level for us. So, so harness orchestration what does all >> so let me uh more simply our business is really around um deploying agents for businesses to do like long hard tasks to do automations and to um uh like have a agent that works super well like a premium version of the agent. All of that stuff is still uh proprietary for us right now. Whether it will be forever, I'm not sure. But the part that we open sourced was actually always free. It's like the the app that developers download and use every day.

[00:09:30]And so open sourcing us uh open sourcing that just helps get the community more excited. It'll help uh let them improve the product. And you know it's cool because they can actually build into it now so easily with agents. And so for us it's it doesn't feel like a huge risk.

[00:09:48]It feels like something with ton of potential benefit for increasing distribution and ecosystem which are I think two of the ways that in a world where software doesn't cost anything to build you can actually build a lasting advantage as a software company.

[00:10:03]>> Right. Well Zach I want to thank you for coming on. That is Zack Lloyd from Warp here on TITV.