Last Tuesday, something unusual happened on GitHub. A project called Warp hit 35,000 stars in less than 24 hours after going open-source. By the weekend, it had passed 50,000. Not bad for a terminal emulator — something most of us have taken for granted since the 1970s.
Warp isn’t your dad’s terminal. Built from scratch in Rust, it’s what the team calls an “Agentic Development Environment.” Earlier this year, TIME named it one of the best inventions of 2025. OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the open-source repo. And it already has over 700,000 monthly active developers. But what makes people actually switch?
What’s wrong with every terminal you’ve used
Let’s be honest: terminals haven’t changed much since the days of teletypes. You type a command, get a firehose of output, and scroll until your eyes glaze over. Need to find something you ran ten minutes ago? Hope you remember which line it was. Copy-pasting is a drag-select guessing game. And if a long build fails mid-way? Good luck catching the error message before it scrolls off screen.
We all got used to this. But “used to” doesn’t mean “good.”
Warp replaces the endless scroll with something called Block mode. Each command and its output live in a self-contained block — with metadata: what you ran, when, which directory, the exit code. You can search blocks, filter them, share them. If a build fails, you send a colleague the exact block. They see the full context — no screenshots, no “wait, lemme scroll up.”
Once you work with blocks, going back feels like using a flip phone.
AI-native, not AI-bolted-on
Here’s the big difference: most terminals try to add AI as an afterthought — a plugin, a sidebar, a sticker. Warp was designed from day one around AI workflows.
You can invoke a built-in AI agent directly in the terminal to write code, debug, refactor. It uses GPT models under the hood. But more interestingly, Warp acts as a hub for external CLI agents: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Opencode. You manage them all from one place. The open-source release also added support for Kimi, MiniMax, Qwen, and an auto-routing feature that picks the best model for the task.
Here’s a concrete example that made me go “huh”: interactive code review. Normally, when an AI agent finishes writing code, you switch to your IDE, review the diff, leave comments, then switch back. Warp lets you review line by line right there in the terminal, add annotations, and toss it back to the agent for fixes. That’s the difference between an 80% done agent and a 100% done one — without leaving your window.
The secret sauce: a GPU-accelerated UI built in Rust
Warp doesn’t use Electron, Qt, or any standard UI framework. Instead, the team wrote their own GPU-accelerated renderer from scratch — entirely in Rust — called WarpUI. The entire codebase has over 60 crates, 98% Rust. The result? Invisible input latency. No stuttering, no tearing when you’re hammering commands.
And here’s a nice touch: WarpUI is MIT-licensed, so you can take it and use it in your own Rust projects. This is not just a terminal — it’s a toolkit.
Why go open-source? Three reasons from the founder
Zach Lloyd, the founder, wrote a blog post explaining the decision. Let me paraphrase what he actually said (not the usual corporate fluff):
First, the nature of software development has changed. AI can now write most of the code. The human job is to figure out what to build and whether it’s right. Open-source lets the community push that forward together.
Second — and this is the honest one — he’s competing against better-funded, closed-source rivals. He can’t win a price war. But he can build a better product, faster, with the community. Open-source is his competitive advantage.
Third, he made a promise five years ago when he first posted Warp on Hacker News. He said it would eventually be open-source. This is him keeping that promise.
I don’t know about you, but I appreciate that last point most. Promises in tech are cheap. Keeping one after five years — that counts.
Some pushback (because nothing’s perfect)
Of course, not everyone is thrilled. I’ve seen comments from developers who say “I don’t need AI in my terminal, I just want it to be fast and reliable.” Fair point. And frankly, if you’re a minimalist who uses vi, grep, and make, you might not need blocks or AI agents.
But consider this: the terminal has remained largely unchanged for 50 years. The way we interact with computers has evolved everywhere else — GUIs, mobile, voice — except that black rectangle. Warp is one of the first serious attempts to rethink it from the ground up. Whether it’s for you depends on whether you believe the terminal should stay frozen in amber.
How to get it
The easiest way is to download the binary from warp.dev/download — it supports macOS, Linux, and Windows. If you want to build from source:
git clone https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp.git cd warp ./script/bootstrap # handles platform-specific dependencies ./script/run # compiles and runs The bootstrap script takes care of the rest. External contributors get the warp-oss community edition by default. For daily use, just download. If you want to contribute or customize, build from source.
One more thing: the GitHub repo (warpdotdev/warp) now has over 50k stars — and it’s growing. If you’re curious why so many developers are jumping on this, try it for a day. You might find yourself saying what I said: “I can’t believe I waited this long.”