I'm trying to think about why this bothers me so much. I'm a happy (I think?) user of Warp The Terminal (eg their product with all of the AI features turned off), and it's a really nice terminal.
I think it bugs me because it feels like a company with a product in search of a problem, trying to maximize returns for their investors, cashing in the AI hype, instead of just trying to build a Really Good Product.
Their terminal is Really Good! And in fact an AI-enabled terminal could even be Really Good - but they won't of course let you use your own API keys (because $markup$), and now they're pitching this whole "ADE" thing which just screams to me "Hey Cursor got a huge valuation so what's our secret sauce?".
And look, I can't fault them -- they're doing exactly what VC-backed companies are built to do. I would probably be doing precisely the same thing if I were CEO.
I've been using Warp for quite a while, initially just for the fact that its text input is like a normal text input field like the rest of my operating system, so I can use my normal shortcuts and not worry about it putting some weird character code in instead.
The AI they added was pretty handy, where you can just describe in English the command you want. No more cobbling together ffmpeg commands from Stack Overflow posts, hooray!
But yeah, being VC backed, I know it's just gonna get worse and worse until I'm forced to leave and find something else.
I was interested in this back when it was a next gen terminal, now not so much. From the marketing I can't even tell if this is still a terminal? I was quite confused for a while wondering if I was looking at the right "Warp" or if this was something new using the same name.
I think it bugs me because it feels like a company with a product in search of a problem, trying to maximize returns for their investors, cashing in the AI hype, instead of just trying to build a Really Good Product.
Their terminal is Really Good! And in fact an AI-enabled terminal could even be Really Good - but they won't of course let you use your own API keys (because $markup$), and now they're pitching this whole "ADE" thing which just screams to me "Hey Cursor got a huge valuation so what's our secret sauce?".
And look, I can't fault them -- they're doing exactly what VC-backed companies are built to do. I would probably be doing precisely the same thing if I were CEO.
But it still bugs me.