No Priors Ep. 137 | With Warp Co-Founder & CEO Zach Lloyd

1. 0:00 – 0:32

   Zach Lloyd Introduction

   1. EGElad Gil0:05

      Today on No Priors, I'm joined by Zach Lloyd, the co-founder and CEO of Warp, a terminal product and AI tool for developers that allows you to do different sorts of coding applications. Prior to Warp, Zach was at Google, and he also started another company called Self-Made. We talk about AI dev tooling, but we also end up talking about human consciousness and how can you tell if an AI is actually sentient. Zach, welcome to No Priors.

   2. ZLZach Lloyd0:30

      I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

2. 0:32 – 6:55

   AI, Intelligence, and Consciousness

   1. ZLZach Lloyd0:32

   2. EGElad Gil0:32

      So, you have a, a master's degree in the philosophy of science.

   3. ZLZach Lloyd0:34

      Yeah.

   4. EGElad Gil0:34

      And if you were to take a very different lens and abstract out of the, you know, coding world and all the things that we tend to think about every day-

   5. ZLZach Lloyd0:41

      Yeah.

   6. EGElad Gil0:41

      ... how do you think about it societally in terms of the big wave of AI that's hitting us right now, and wh- wh- where do you think some of these really big societal impacts will be?

   7. ZLZach Lloyd0:49

      The way I think about, like, the advances are it's kinda like we are distilling intelligence.

   8. EGElad Gil0:55

      Mm-hmm.

   9. ZLZach Lloyd0:55

      And so, there are, I think, people who consider what's happening, it's like they're like, "Are we recreating people in some way? Are we recreating consciousness?" But it's not that. It's actually, what's fascinating to me is how much intelligence you can get out of just, like-

   10. EGElad Gil1:13

       Mm-hmm.

   11. ZLZach Lloyd1:13

       ... next token prediction. (laughs)

   12. EGElad Gil1:16

       Yeah.

   13. ZLZach Lloyd1:16

       And, like, what does that say about the way that our minds-

   14. EGElad Gil1:19

       Mm-hmm.

   15. ZLZach Lloyd1:19

       ... work?

   16. EGElad Gil1:19

       Mm-hmm.

   17. ZLZach Lloyd1:20

       Something I'm always thinking about is, like, is this how our brains are working? Are we-

   18. EGElad Gil1:23

       Yeah.

   19. ZLZach Lloyd1:23

       ... are we doing next token prediction? And I don't think so. Like, I think that there's gonna be some further AI unlock.

   20. EGElad Gil1:32

       There's actually a book about this that I think is really interesting called Blindsight.

   21. ZLZach Lloyd1:35

       Okay.

   22. EGElad Gil1:36

       It's like a sci-fi book where they separate consciousness from intelligence.

   23. ZLZach Lloyd1:39

       Yeah.

   24. EGElad Gil1:39

       And basically, humanity meets a space-faring civilization, or civilization is overstating it, a space-faring intelligent being that's not conscious.

   25. ZLZach Lloyd1:49

       Yep.

   26. EGElad Gil1:50

       And what are the implications of that and how do you think about that and how do you communicate with that? Are you basically saying that that's kind of your view of AI right now?

   27. ZLZach Lloyd1:55

       I, I think that's what it is at the moment, is like we've distilled intelligence or something that, like, from, like, an instrumentalist or, like, functional perspective is able to do things that we recognize as intelligence, but it's totally mechanistic, and I don't think anyone who's looking at this thinks that there's any aspect of consciousness-

   28. EGElad Gil2:14

       Mm-hmm.

   29. ZLZach Lloyd2:15

       ... to it. I think that's, like, a, a very confusing thing for people.

   30. EGElad Gil2:20

       Yeah.
3. 6:55 – 7:38

   What Warp Does

   1. ZLZach Lloyd6:55

   2. EGElad Gil6:55

      You've worked at Google, you've run companies before, you've started companies before. You're now working on Warp. Can you describe what Warp does and how is it different from other tools or companies in the, in the world?

   3. ZLZach Lloyd7:05

      Yep. So Warp is what we call an agentic development environment. It's grown out of the terminal. The basic concept of the app at this point is it's a platform for telling your computer what to do. You can sort of tell it in terminal commands, which is Warp's original product, or you can tell it in English, and if you tell it in English, it launches an agent, and the agents can do all manner of development tasks, whether it's coding or setting up a project or debugging while your server's crashing. And so it's a very like horizontal general purpose, and I think unique interface for developing with agents.

4. 7:38 – 8:27

   Benefits of the Terminal as a Launchpoint

   1. ZLZach Lloyd7:38

   2. EGElad Gil7:38

      And so a lot of the other coding tools out there are either just kind of a web interface-

   3. ZLZach Lloyd7:43

      Yep.

   4. EGElad Gil7:43

      ... or they'll do like a cognition, or there's things like Cursor and others where they're like an IDE as a starting point.

   5. ZLZach Lloyd7:49

      Yep.

   6. EGElad Gil7:49

      Obviously Anthropic and Cloud have their own approach. What do you, what do you think is the benefit of doing the terminal and starting there as sort of the launch point for a lot of these products?

   7. ZLZach Lloyd7:56

      The competitors are typically like VS Code clones. They all have a sort of IDE-centric approach, or if you're taking a terminal centric approach like Cloud Code, the most common thing is it's just like a pure text-based terminal app. The advantage of being at Warp's layer is like you get the command line interface, but we're the outer app. And so we can do things with the developer experience and the UX, like we can have editing features where we think it's appropriate. We can build like a code review interface, and so we have complete control, but still the terminal first approach.

5. 8:27 – 9:12

   Features Driving Warp’s Adoption

   1. ZLZach Lloyd8:27

   2. EGElad Gil8:27

      Yeah. And y- you folks have been growing really well. Like, so you're close to a million MAUs, you're doing something like a million in new revenue every seven to 10 days.

   3. ZLZach Lloyd8:35

      Yeah.

   4. EGElad Gil8:35

      I mean, like ou- outstanding growth.

   5. ZLZach Lloyd8:37

      It's cool.

   6. EGElad Gil8:37

      Um, are there specific features or use cases or things that are really driving this adoption?

   7. ZLZach Lloyd8:42

      Yeah. I, I think the biggest thing was moving into the coding market, to be honest. Like for a long time in Warp's history, we were kind of known as the AI terminal, which is cool and like we supported terminal use cases really well. Like how do I do this thing with Docker or Git? But the action is in coding and like most development activity one way or the other is touching a code base. And so we really started to inflect when we launched a great coding agent.

   8. EGElad Gil9:07

      Mm-hmm.

   9. ZLZach Lloyd9:08

      Which was like three, four months ago, honestly. So that's been the biggest change.

6. 9:12 – 10:27

   Zach’s View of the Coding Market

   1. ZLZach Lloyd9:12

   2. EGElad Gil9:12

      And how do you think about the different parts of the coding market? There's vibe coding-

   3. ZLZach Lloyd9:15

      Yeah.

   4. EGElad Gil9:15

      ... there's professional code, like are there all, are those all just one thing? Is it, are these separable things or-

   5. ZLZach Lloyd9:20

      I think it's pretty separable. So for Warp, our target is pro developers building like software that's economically meaningful. So we, we really wanna like focus on actually people who are using agents to build kind of hard apps, uh, apps that might like go into your Mac doc or be pinned as a Chrome tab, as opposed to vibe coded apps where I think it's more of a long tail play. And so I do think, by the way, it's, it's awesome that anyone can code at this point, but I think if you look at where most of the value is in the software market, it's, it's not in those long tail apps. It's in like a relatively small number of apps that are super heavily used. And that's my background. Like I, you know, I've worked on one of those apps, Google Sheets, and just like I have a lot of passion in terms of helping people build real apps. It's much harder, by the way.

   6. EGElad Gil10:11

      Mm-hmm.

   7. ZLZach Lloyd10:11

      Like I think it's relatively straightforward at this point for a good agent to like, you know, with relatively few prompts build like a web app. It's much harder to apply these agents successfully to pro code bases. Um, so that's where we're focused.

7. 10:27 – 12:45

   Evolution of Coding Development

   1. ZLZach Lloyd10:27

   2. EGElad Gil10:27

      So I guess one really interesting macro question for me is where is all this heading?

   3. ZLZach Lloyd10:30

      Yep.

   4. EGElad Gil10:31

      And if you look at it, ChatGPT launched in November of '25, excuse me, November of '22.

   5. ZLZach Lloyd10:35

      (laughs)

   6. EGElad Gil10:36

      So, um, three years ago or so.

   7. ZLZach Lloyd10:38

      Yep.

   8. EGElad Gil10:38

      At the time, there was predictions that AI would take over the world and we'd be running down the light cone, and within five years, like everything will change and, you know, human activity would be subsumed by AI. And, you know, there's the old saying in technology that less happens than you think in three years and more happens than you think in five years.

   9. ZLZach Lloyd10:55

      Yeah.

   10. EGElad Gil10:55

       And as you think forward and forward in terms of all these different tools and all these different use cases and vibe coding versus professional coding and the, the role of a software developer, where do you think we are in two, three years?

   11. ZLZach Lloyd11:06

       Yeah. So the, the way that I'm thinking of it is there's sort of three phases here. For most of my career, we were in like the world of developed by hand, is how I talk about it.

   12. EGElad Gil11:15

       Yeah.

   13. ZLZach Lloyd11:15

       So my workflow then was like I would open up a code editor, I would find files I wanna change, I would type some code, uh, I'd have some assistive features, and then I would go back to the terminal and I would type commands to build that code. And I think we're switching away from that to something like developed by prompt, where I start most of the coding tasks that I do right now by prompting an agent and that agent does some work. And I think there's a third phase, which is like automated development. Honestly, I think that's like kind of the bigger market here and why people are so excited about this space is you can actually use these agents to automate some parts of the software development process. And so that's like, you know, cognition does that, we're moving into this space. Cursor has background agents. Um-

   14. EGElad Gil11:58

       Mm-hmm.

   15. ZLZach Lloyd11:59

       The rate at which this stuff will happen is like not super clear to me, actually. Like the, the most recent iterations of the models, in my opinion, were not as big of a step change as like-... for instance, when like Sonnet 4 came out, that was a really big step change in coding capability. I think there's gonna be a mix of interactive and automated pieces of development for a while. I, I would guess, like, I don't know, it's so hard to know. Like w- I think within a couple of years, you'll have everyone working by prompt.

   16. EGElad Gil12:31

       Mm-hmm.

   17. ZLZach Lloyd12:32

       And you'll have some slice of development tasks that are just, like, in the background, like a server comes in or a new ticket, a user report comes in. Something, something is automatically done, but I don't think it's gonna be everything. I'd be very

8. 12:45 – 14:11

   Importance of Senior Engineer Expertise

   1. ZLZach Lloyd12:45

      surprised.

   2. EGElad Gil12:45

      So you, you don't think there's a point at which, you know, all of coding activity just becomes, uh, agents doing it, and then there's like a human who's kind of giving high level directions, like a product manager kind of thing and... Or a, or a eng manager and...

   3. ZLZach Lloyd12:57

      Maybe.

   4. EGElad Gil12:58

      Yeah.

   5. ZLZach Lloyd12:58

      I mean, honestly, maybe.

   6. EGElad Gil12:59

      Yeah.

   7. ZLZach Lloyd12:59

      Like, I, I think that... I think it'd be silly for us not to, like, build the infrastructure to enable that. I just don't... I don't know the timeframe, but I do think we're going towards something like that. What I, what I really don't think though is, like, engineering expertise is gonna become devalued.

   8. EGElad Gil13:16

      Sure.

   9. ZLZach Lloyd13:16

      So I think it's actually, in the short term at least, it's more important to know what you're doing as an engineer-

   10. EGElad Gil13:21

       Yeah.

   11. ZLZach Lloyd13:21

       ... than it ever has been.

   12. EGElad Gil13:23

       And why do you say that? Is it because you need to correct errors that the agents are making? Is it because things may be architected in a way that isn't scalable? Is it something else now?

   13. ZLZach Lloyd13:31

       Totally. So it's like, it's like the agents, you can think of them kind of as junior engineers. So if you didn't have someone who was senior watching them, you end up in a situation where these agents will make code that creates bugs, it could create s- security issues.

   14. EGElad Gil13:45

       Yeah.

   15. ZLZach Lloyd13:45

       It could cause your codebase to become really unmaintainable.

   16. EGElad Gil13:48

       Mm-hmm.

   17. ZLZach Lloyd13:48

       And so there's actually, like, a premium right now-

   18. EGElad Gil13:51

       Mm-hmm.

   19. ZLZach Lloyd13:51

       ... on these senior engineering skills where you can architect, where you can review code-

   20. EGElad Gil13:56

       Mm-hmm.

   21. ZLZach Lloyd13:56

       ... you can make sure the system doesn't degrade.

   22. EGElad Gil13:58

       Mm-hmm.

   23. ZLZach Lloyd13:58

       And so again, I would be... If I were, like, early in my CS career-

   24. EGElad Gil14:02

       Mm-hmm.

   25. ZLZach Lloyd14:02

       ... I would be racing towards building that expertise.

   26. EGElad Gil14:04

       Mm-hmm.

   27. ZLZach Lloyd14:04

       Where you don't wanna be, I think, is like someone who is just, like, perpetually in the junior engineer state, because I do think that's at risk.

9. 14:11 – 22:22

   Future of Security and Other Dev Tools

   1. ZLZach Lloyd14:11

      Yeah.

   2. EGElad Gil14:11

      And then how do you think about different security tools? Does that... So for example, um, there's tools like Socket or Snyk or others who are, are basically looking at, you know, whether code has... or, uh, open source packets or other things have vulnerabilities in them.

   3. ZLZach Lloyd14:24

      Yeah.

   4. EGElad Gil14:24

      Or they're looking at different aspects of, um, security holes for code-

   5. ZLZach Lloyd14:29

      Yeah.

   6. EGElad Gil14:29

      ... in general. Do you think that just becomes part of these quoting tools, or do you think there will always be those tr- sort of standalone companies? I'm just sort of curious how the overall...

   7. ZLZach Lloyd14:36

      It's, it's a, an awesome question. So I think tools like that become more important. I think anything that does, like, either automatic security analysis or automatic verification, I think actually, like, languages like Rust, things that have stronger guarantees around safety by default, where you don't need to rely on, like, a human reviewer, become more valuable. Whether those things, like, get integrated or bundled into the coding agents, I actually don't have a strong take on. I'm curious if you have a take, but no, I, I think that the actual fundamental problem becomes more important.

   8. EGElad Gil15:11

      Yeah.

   9. ZLZach Lloyd15:11

      Yeah.

   10. EGElad Gil15:11

       What do you think gets bundled? And what-

   11. ZLZach Lloyd15:13

       What's that?

   12. EGElad Gil15:13

       What do you think gets bundled? Like, what sorts of tools do you think? Because there's this whole world of dev tools.

   13. ZLZach Lloyd15:18

       Yeah.

   14. EGElad Gil15:19

       And there's a security aspect of it, but there's lots of others. There's design related things, there's... There, you know, there's a huge spectrum.

   15. ZLZach Lloyd15:26

       Yeah.

   16. EGElad Gil15:26

       What do you think just gets... just becomes part of coding tooling?

   17. ZLZach Lloyd15:30

       I think there's gonna be a class of tools where you sort of start from the front end. This would be things like Lovable or Bolt or Replit or maybe even Figma Make if you're coming from the design side, and you'll have, like, an all-in-one platform for build an app or even, like, honestly, like build a business.

   18. EGElad Gil15:46

       Mm-hmm.

   19. ZLZach Lloyd15:46

       Like put payments in it.

   20. EGElad Gil15:47

       Uh-huh.

   21. ZLZach Lloyd15:47

       It's like, it's kind of like the evolution of, like, either a Shopify storefront or, like, WordPress-

   22. EGElad Gil15:52

       Yeah.

   23. ZLZach Lloyd15:52

       ... or Squarespace or something like that. So I think that's all gonna be bundled. More on, like, the core pro developer side, I can't tell if it's gonna be a world of, like, MCPs and integrations and, like, all these tools' sort of interplay. That's one approach. Or it's gonna be more, like, there's enough alpha and, like, you put all of these things together, and I think Warp is a little bit more like this. Like, we're trying to build a single pane of glass, for instance, for doing, like, local agents and remote agents.

   24. EGElad Gil16:22

       Mm-hmm. Yeah.

   25. ZLZach Lloyd16:23

       And if you get a way better developer experience through the bundling, I think that that approach could win. But I don't know. Like MCP, I think is a pretty valuable approach as well, but it's not perfect because you end up, like, with this, this sort of secondhand data coming into all these tools.

   26. EGElad Gil16:38

       Yeah. It's really interesting because if you look at different industries, early in the industry, things tend to be fragmented often, not always.

   27. ZLZach Lloyd16:43

       Okay.

   28. EGElad Gil16:43

       And then late in the evolution of an industry, things get bundled.

   29. ZLZach Lloyd16:46

       Yeah.

   30. EGElad Gil16:46

       And then when there's a technology disruption, things debundle again and you have point apps and then they start bundling them.
10. 22:22 – 23:52

    Why Zach Focused on the Terminal

    1. ZLZach Lloyd22:22

    2. EGElad Gil22:22

       What made you decide to focus on Terminal? So, you know, we've-

    3. ZLZach Lloyd22:25

       Yeah.

    4. EGElad Gil22:25

       We started talking years ago when you first started doing Warp.

    5. ZLZach Lloyd22:28

       Yep.

    6. EGElad Gil22:29

       And even then, I think you had really interesting ideas about how to rethink the Terminal and how to use that as a launching point for all sorts of things.

    7. ZLZach Lloyd22:34

       Yeah.

    8. EGElad Gil22:35

       Could you explain that thinking and how it's evolved over time?

    9. ZLZach Lloyd22:37

       Yeah, so the, the basic insight or thing that got me excited about Warp to begin with is like, you have this tool that is pretty much a daily use tool for every developer. It's that and the code editor, and the Terminal itself is something that, you know, really hadn't changed much in the last 40 years. It's a tool also where it's like if you get good at it, you can really get a lot done. If you use it, it like works across all these different parts of software development, not just code writing. On the flip side, from my perspective, not a good product, just like hard to learn, hard to use, hard to remember commands, super intimidating, and just like kind of like a gatekeeping vibe around it as well, in my opinion. And so the original concept with Warp was like, let's build a better product there-

    10. EGElad Gil23:25

        Yeah.

    11. ZLZach Lloyd23:25

        ... and see if people will like using it. The business concept has evolved a ton, like the original business concept was like building a collaboration platform, which-

    12. EGElad Gil23:34

        Mm-hmm.

    13. ZLZach Lloyd23:35

        ... is like we've, we've just changed our model to be an agent platform, because it's, it's like m- way more demand for that than a collaboration platform around the Terminal. But the, the sort of core insight that this is an important tool, it's crazy. It's actually kind of been validated through all these agentic things that are very Terminal first.

11. 23:52 – 25:36

    The Future of the Model Layer

    1. ZLZach Lloyd23:52

    2. EGElad Gil23:52

       You know, one thing that I, that you mentioned I thought was interesting is that at some point, the model layer may commoditize in terms of its coding abilities.

    3. ZLZach Lloyd23:59

       Yeah.

    4. EGElad Gil24:00

       How far on that asymptote do you think we are? How close to that do you think we are?

    5. ZLZach Lloyd24:04

       God, I, I don't know. I think that the... Increasingly, the limit that we see is context.

    6. EGElad Gil24:11

       Mm-hmm.

    7. ZLZach Lloyd24:12

       And like the, the reasoning capabilities of the models are pretty impressive. The problem is like understanding an entire code base or understanding sources outside of the code or literally just understanding user intent are challenging problems. I still think there's probably much more to do on the model side, but...I don't know is, is the short answer.

    8. EGElad Gil24:33

       And do you think that, um, from a model capabilities perspective, we've hit a point where, to your point, it feels like certain aspects of the models are slowing down in terms of the benefits or outcomes of further investment of certain types, at least?

    9. ZLZach Lloyd24:45

       I, I think so. Like, if you take, like, Sonnet 4 to 4.5, and we're big partners with Anthropic, they have great models, like, that was, like, a few percentage point increase on SWE Bench for us-

    10. EGElad Gil24:58

        Mm-hmm, yeah.

    11. ZLZach Lloyd24:59

        ... and we invest, you know, we've invested a decent amount to be one of the top agents on SWE Bench. And when we went from 3.7 to 4, it was a much more significant-

    12. EGElad Gil25:10

        Yeah.

    13. ZLZach Lloyd25:10

        ... boost. So I, again, that's, like, not, I don't know what that means about the total underlying trends. I think something with GPT-5 was somewhat similar, like, certainly an upgrade, and GPT-5, I think, is actually pretty much on par, has different, like, feel to it and higher latency, but it didn't feel to me, like, as much of a step change as some of the upgrades before.

    14. EGElad Gil25:34

        Mm-hmm, yeah, makes sense.

12. 25:36 – 27:18

    What Zach’s Excited About in the AI Dev World

    1. EGElad Gil25:36

       What other areas of the AI dev world are you excited about?

    2. ZLZach Lloyd25:39

       I am, um... So I'm really excited about not just, like, the interactive piece of agents, the way most people are working today, but what can you do if you can program against these agents? And so for instance, it's like, if you have, uh, a version of Warp that's, like, headless, for instance, you can put it in CI and you can start to do crazy things where it's like, okay, every time someone updates the code, make sure the documentation stays up to date. It's like, that's very annoying for a developer-

    3. EGElad Gil26:08

       Yeah.

    4. ZLZach Lloyd26:08

       ... and so allowing developers to automate parts of their job that they don't like doing, I think is, like, a big capability. And then from a business perspective, just, like, automation is a better place to be than productivity enhancement. Like, one of the challenges with our business, I think with a lot of the coding businesses is just, like, proving the ROI. Like, and there have been these studies that show like, you know, you deploy this stuff on real code bases, it's kind of unclear if it's actually having an impact, whereas if you get something that's more outcome-oriented or more just like an automation, I think it's easier to prove the ROI, and then you're also not limited by time spent behind keyboard for doing this type of stuff. So from a business perspective, I'm, I'm very excited about, like, what's unlocked if developers can program these agents.

    5. EGElad Gil26:55

       Well, Zach, fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us at No Priors.

    6. ZLZach Lloyd26:58

       Thank you for having me. This was great. (instrumental music)

    7. NANarrator27:02

       Find us on Twitter @nopriorspod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you wanna see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way, you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.

Episode duration: 27:18