Today we are announcing a fundamental change in how we build Warp: the Warp client is now open-source, and the community can participate in building it using an agent-first workflow managed by Oz, our cloud agent orchestration platform. OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the new, open‑source Warp repository, and the new agentic management workflows are powered by GPT models.
Open-sourcing with an agent-powered repo is our vision of how software will be built in the future. Humans managing agents at scale to build production-grade software is the model, and implementing this model in the open will allow software to improve most quickly.
Put simply: we believe that a diverse collection of contributors with unique ideas + Oz agents with structured processes + a rich corpus of context and self-improvement loops will yield a magic product, beyond what we might build internally.
Why now
The primary reason is that we think we can ship a better Warp, more quickly, if we open source and work with our community to help supervise a fleet of agents. The biggest bottleneck to development is no longer writing code – it’s all the human-in-the-loop activities around the code: speccing the product and verifying behavior, and frankly, we are limited in what our internal team can do and the pace we want to move at.
We’ve found that agents can handle the implementation heavy lifting really well. That frees contributors to focus on the higher-leverage work: shaping what gets built and making sure it’s right.
Inviting our community into the process to help manage agents will be a big unlock. We now have a lot of confidence in code that is generated by Oz with our rules, context and verification, so anyone contributing should have a high chance of success coding a feature correctly. Moreover, leaning on agents creates pressure for us to nail orchestration, memory, handoff, and all of the other parts of agentic engineering that are core to our business. There’s a virtuous loop here.
The second reason is about giving developers a chance to shape the future. There isn’t a full-featured open agentic development environment on the market and we want to offer the community an alternative to closed-source options provided by more established companies. No one knows exactly what the future of agentic development will look like and we think the community ought to be able to participate in shaping it.
Warp is multi-model and multi-harness and we want to double down on that openness. Opening will allow us to be more responsive to users, working with them on the long tail of our backlog to make Warp the best ADE on the market.
In this spirit, we are coupling a few major product improvements with this launch to make Warp more open and customizable.
- First we are launching support for a much wider range of open source models in Warp today, including the latest models Kimi, MiniMax, and Qwen, along with a new “auto (open)” model-routed version that picks the best open model for a task.
- Second, we’ve made it much easier to customize your Warp experience however you’d like – from just a terminal, to having some minimal features for improving agentic development like a diff view and file tree, to a full fledged ADE with built-in agents.
- Finally, we are shipping a (long-overdue) settings file so that users and agents get programmatic control over settings and easy portability between devices.
How it works
Warp’s source code is now available at github.com/warpdotdev/warp with an AGPL license.
You can learn more about the contribution process in CONTRIBUTING.md, but the tl;dr is we want agents doing the heavy lifting (coding, planning, testing, etc.) and community members helping with ideas, direction and verification. The Warp team will help guide what gets built, when and how, but we see Warp fundamentally becoming a collaborative effort with our community. This is a cool opportunity for folks to contribute to a fast growing app that’s used by nearly a million active developers, working closely alongside the Warp team.
Warp’s new open-source agent workflows are powered by OpenAI models, with OpenAI supporting the next generation of collaborative software development. You’re free to use other coding agents as well to contribute, but our preference is using Oz since it has the correct skills and verification loops built-in.
“Open source has long been central to how developers learn, build, and push the field forward. We’re excited to support experiments that explore how AI can help maintainers and contributors collaborate more effectively at scale.”
— Thibault Sottiaux, Engineering Lead, OpenAI
Finally, as part of making this change, we are moving from a closed product development process to an open one. That means public GitHub issues will become the source of truth for tracking features. We will publicize our roadmap for the ADE, and have technical and product discussions for ADE issues in the open.
Closing thoughts
Open-sourcing is fundamentally coming from our desire to build a successful business. We are competing with other highly funded, closed-source competitors, and we think opening and providing the resources for the community to improve Warp is a smart way for us to accelerate product development. Yes, we are a VC funded startup, but we do not have the resources to compete on price or massively subsidize usage – we need to build our business by offering the best possible product to the most excited community.
Business goals aside, we also think there’s value in the community itself shaping the future. Warp is a unique product with five years of engineering behind it, and we hope it provides the community a compelling starting point for building the future of agentic development, beyond any other open alternative.
We could just keep going with our current model, privately guessing at the roadmap and scaling more and more agents to build internally, but that feels like a missed opportunity. It would be missing a chance for the community to shape the direction, to hack on the product, and to actually work with agents to build the best possible product.
When we first launched Warp as a terminal 5 years ago, the plan was always to open source the client. This is from the original Show HN post for Warp:
We’ve debated whether to open source every year, and for the first-time this year it became clear that the balance had shifted because of the rise of agents. I’ve been a developer for a long time and I’ve never seen a change like what’s happening now. Warp’s mission has always been to empower developers to ship better software more quickly and I hope by changing the way we are building it we get a little closer to achieving that mission.
