Hacker News Reader

Comment by corytheboyd | Hacker News Reader

Warp is still a development tool run by a VC backed company, and history tells us how this will end, despite positive intentions and promises of “we won’t be evil, seriously”.

Other terminals are free, open, and more than good enough, why would I use Warp? I’ll pay for good development tools, it’s not about that at all, it’s just that Warp is a… terminal. I pay for JetBrains because it’s that much better than the free options (my opinion). Is warp that much better than iterm?

I do have an open mind, convince me that warp is worth it, that it is irreplaceable. Convince that I need it even though it will be enshitified like Postman.

View on HN

I like it. I pay for it. I expect it’ll go to shit when the money tap is turned off but I’m enjoying it while I can. I’d rather see a bunch of VC money subsidise destined-to-fail developer tool businesses than… not, because the technical founders of these companies are typically using VC money to pay for things they want to make and at least some of it is open-source.

Warp is good, it’s a step up from iterm for people who spend a bunch of time in the terminal but don’t want to invest their brain power into emacs or vim or whatever is real nerd software nowadays. $25/month is basically free for the amount of time I use it. I’d pay $25/month for anything that makes my life marginally easier.

$25/month is “basically free”?

Exactly. Not to me. Fuck subscriptions for every little thing without ownership. If BMW want to sell a license for heated seats or automatic headlight wipers, more power to them, but count me out.

in the context of software engineering, yes.

It's more than I pay for IDEA Ultimate.

From the absurdly CPU-intensive landing page it seems the novelty is mainly some network storage and an LLM-integration, things I already have several of in my terminals on my work computer. I switch over to them in the blink of an eye because my window manager is extremely responsive and keeping their output localised and not split up in a single pseudo-conversation in my current main terminal is a perk, not a bug.

I... it's a terminal. Free and completely functional alternatives have existed since xTerm hit public release back in the '80s.

Am I going insane? Why would you pay for this unless you have a workplace humiliation fetish?

There is free furniture on Craigslist.

I don’t care if a tool is free or paid, I care if it is going to make my life better. You can sit in the office laughing at me for paying to use software, I’m not bothered, because I won’t be in the office to hear the laughter, as I’ll be using all the time I’ve saved to do something I want to do.

Pay me $250k/year to write code and I’ll spend $5k of that on a paid for editor and a paid for terminal and a paid for git client and a paid for database client and a paid for rest client and a paid for shortcut app so that I can go home at 3pm every day and spend my remaining $245k on the things I care about instead of being stuck in the office micromanaging my vim configuration so that the nerds will respect me.

It's the Starbucks over-commodification of features, apps, and ordinary products to extract money from a sliver of rich people and an increasingly impoverished nation where wages for the bottom 75% have been flat for 40 years while real costs as proportion of income have skyrocketed, including education and housing. There's a ~60% chance of recession around Feb 2025 and that means lots more tech layoffs and pullback in dev tool spending. The point is that such a controversial, narrow rented service in a crowded category competing with FOSS apps for such a small addressable market appears risky and unreasonable.

Look at their landing page. Instead of switching to a web browser or LLM-shell when you want to query out how to generate some boilerplate you can just type it into your terminal and you'll get responses there without having to resort to Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, like we troglodytes do.

Note: it does seem at least some development happens in the open https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp

> We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client codebase. The server portion of Warp will remain closed-source for now.

https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400

None of the server bits will be open, ever, but some of the UI code will be? Better than nothing.

I like it and enjoy it right now. I don't have anything locked into it so if it goes to hell, I can go back to iTerm.

Totally fair, Postman used to be good too. Postman still is a Pretty Good HTTP Client to be fair, it’s just that it is very clearly being used to extract cash from orgs that will pay for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com