Warp brings an AI bot to its terminal

1 year ago 91

Warp, a fast-growing startup that is working on building a better terminal, today announced that it has added a new chat feature (unsurprisingly based on ChatGPT) that will help its user with using the command line and troubleshooting errors.

We’ve obviously seen a flood of ChatGPT-enabled services lately, with some more interesting than others, but this feels like a legitimately useful application of the technology. The command line is, after all, isn’t necessarily the most user friendly of interfaces — and that means that even experienced users often have to resort to troubleshooting by searching for answers on Stack Overflow.

“The terminal is a notoriously difficult tool. It’s difficult to know how to do workflows. It’s difficult to understand errors. It’s difficult to write scripts,” Warp co-founder and CEO Zach Lloyd explained. “We think that there’s a pretty significant opportunity to put AI in the core of the app in a way that makes it so that it can do most of these things for you.” He also noted that this is a good way for new users to learn how to use the terminal.

Image Credits: Warp

As you would expect, Warp is exposing the chat interface, dubbed Warp AI, as a sidebar in the terminal, but the team did some nifty things here that make it easy to copy and paste commands back and forth. “What wouldn’t make sense to me is if we just had a bolted on ChatGPT in a way that didn’t integrate with the terminal,” said Lloyd.

At any point during a terminal session, users can bring up the new Warp AI features and start chatting away. And while the team tuned the bot so you won’t be able to talk about anything that ChatGPT knows about, it will happily talk about Bash scripts, Python errors and more.

As Lloyd noted, one of the issues with ChatGPT is that its information isn’t always the freshest. That’s less of a problem here, given that most of these command line tools don’t change all that quickly, but it’s something the team hopes to change over time.

For now, Warp AI is available free of charge, with a limit of 100 requests per day. Over time, it will become a paid feature. Warp does have to pay for access to the OpenAI API, after all.

Interestingly, this is actually Warp’s second AI integration. The company previously launched a “natural language to command” feature that — no surprise — translates a user’s query in natural language to a terminal command.