Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:00:00 · S0
[00:00:00] S0: Hey, it's me again. I have heard a lot of positive feedback about our episode intros, so I'm gonna keep trying to do them as far as time allows. Today, we're gonna dive into Warp with Zach Lloyd. Zach has been working on Warp for a while, and it's pivoted into what it is today, which is basically the definitive software factory that is also open source. And he has this whole definition, I think, which has done really well. Basically his talk at AIE has been going viral as one of the top talks of all time. And I think effectively everyone is trying to set this up for themselves. They have a solution for you, but it's also, you know, kind of an open spec that is becoming table stakes for what you're gonna want. And I think you are gonna want cloud, you're gonna want a control plane, you're gonna want some other sort of basic security features and team features that are... You take for granted. So we're releasing this episode as part of a preview for AIE Code. AIE Code is the last AIE flagship of the year. It's gonna be in San Francisco, where we're gathering all the top agentic engineers and talking about software factories, among other things. System one models, Diogo is coming back and raising your ambitions. So Tarik and Jason and Brandon from Art Craft is doing his first conference talk ever. So if you're interested, Zach will also be giving a great keynote on software factories and sort of recapping the year and previewing what's next. Join us, and it'll be lots of fun. See you.
00:01:35 · S1, Zach Lloyd
[00:01:35] S1: We're in the remote studio, catching up with Zach Lloyd for more. Welcome. It's good to be here. [00:01:39] S2: Thanks for having me. [00:01:40] S1: Zach, you've been going viral in AIE. What's up? What's the what's you've hit a nerve. You've hit a nerve. [00:01:45] S2: People are really interested in software factories, and that is a area that I've been focusing on, that Warp has been focusing on. I think we have some, you know, strong kinda interesting takes on what a software factory actually is and what it means for being a software developer. So, yeah, that's... And that's... People have been into it. [00:02:05] S1: Your h one on the landing page says open infrastructure for cloud software factories. I think maybe if... Since you spend more time than I do talking about... Telling people about factories, what do people think is a software factory, and what do they actually need?
00:02:05 · S1, Zach Lloyd
[00:02:05] S1: Your h one on the landing page says open infrastructure for cloud software factories. I think maybe if... Since you spend more time than I do talking about... Telling people about factories, what do people think is a software factory, and what do they actually need? [00:02:23] S2: When I talk to companies or developers, most of the world is trying to build some sort of internal software factory or set of software factories. What what I think it means, or maybe I'll just define what it means to me is, like, a agentic system in the cloud where you're defining what are the roles of various agents across building software for your team or for your product, and there's a certain amount of autonomy in that system. So it's like the agents can do things on their own, and that system to me should be something that's very measurable, very closed loop, which over time, you as a team can, like, tune, measure, benchmark, and just ultimately get confidence that as people switch to this way of doing agentic development, that they're doing it in the most scalable and efficient way. And what what do people [00:03:09] S1: come to you with that perhaps is a common misconception? Right? Like, they're like, okay. If I if I do whatever, if I buy whatever, I'm gonna come out the other end with, like, this amazing money machine.
00:03:21 · Zach Lloyd
[00:03:21] S2: Yeah. So so when people come to us and they're trying to build their own software factory, like, often they'll be, like, stringing together different automations. Sometimes people are conceiving of software factories as just like just like a not a not a specific thing, but it's just like we're using agents a lot to ship software, and we're calling that our internal software factory. And what we try to to do to make that more concrete is be like, no. No. No. You should actually think of a software factory as a very specific thing. Like, you should define your factory in code. You should make sure that the factory has all the workflows, skills, MCPs. Everything is like... It's like a concrete thing that you should be able to run at some point in time and measure how it's doing. Because people have all sorts of kinda random ideas around what these factories are. And so for for Warp factories, which is our platform, it's like, well, we say, no. No. It's actually... It's a real thing. You can orchestrate it. You can measure it. You have one factory per product surface. And we try to, like, take it out of the realm of just being, like, this nebulous. It's a collection of, like, arbitrary automations and interactive agents into a a thing that's an actual... Well, the way to think about a software factory or the way that we think about it, what you're looking at here is is Warp software factory platform, is a factory operates on some product surface. So imagine you're building, like, your mobile app or you're building, you know, your server app or whatever, and the factory itself is operating on a set of repos and has a set of skills it needs, a set of MCPs, and then it has like a a workflow associated with it. And this workflow, you know, roughly matches what, you know, your team is probably already doing to make changes to that code base. So there could be a step where you're doing triage, it could be where you're doing specking, implementation. The important thing is, like, there's some kinda defined workflow, and that that workflow itself is defined in code. So for us, we basically have a YAML file, which says, okay, these are all the repos that you could be using. These are all the MCPs, all of the integrations that are hooked up. So you basically have this whole thing defined someplace.
00:05:37 · Zach Lloyd, S0
The way to think about using the factory is that there's actually sort of two personas. So there's someone who is building the product, they're doing product engineering, they're shipping features through a factory. And for those people, the way they use the factory or the way that... Is through their existing tools. So they could be slacking the factory to put work into it. They could be using a task tracker like linear or Jira. They could be interacting with the factory through GitHub. They could be calling it via API or MCP. And the metaphor is like you're putting a work item into the factory. And when it goes into the factory, that starts like a predefined workflow, and that workflow is defined in code. That makes sense so far? [00:06:20] S0: I love defining things in code.
00:06:22 · Zach Lloyd
[00:06:22] S2: Yes. So... Okay. So you have this whole thing set up in code, and then once you have that in place, and so the... Again, metaphor is like someone starts a task in Slack, or in linear, or through an automation, like, you know, there's a server error, it all goes through one system is the kind of key thing. And once you have that working, you basically get a whole bunch of benefits that flow out of it. And so one of the big benefits is that wherever these agents are running, and you're sort of seeing a real time view across Warp's internal team, how are we using our own factories, you get a full trace of what everyone is doing with coding agents across any product that has a factory for it. And this is cool not just for, like, oh, I wanna see what people are doing, like, I wanna see what Safik is doing, which is cool, But it also starts centralizing all of the agent conversations and agent artifacts in all of the work that are... Is being done by coding agents across your team. And so when I talk about, like, having a closed loop system, these agent conversations, these agent traces are, like, the key aspect of how this system improves. And so for instance, just to look at one of these agent traces, Satvik is working on our mobile app here. Satvik was doing this in Slack, so I could pull this up in Slack if I wanted to. But, like, the thing is actually generating it. It has a full record of the conversation, has a full record of all of the these are computer use screenshots that are coming out of building this thing. You can see a full record of exactly what the different pieces of the orchestration agent were doing. And so you have this, but you have it not just for one thing, you have it for every single thing. So on your team today, what we... When I talk to companies, for the most part, they don't have something like this because most of their engineers are, like, individually using Claude Code in their terminal or Codex, the Codex app or something like that in their own local setups, but they wanna get to a world where they have this centralization. When you have the centralization, you can basically get all this interesting data on how your agentic coding is working across your company. And you could think of this data along different dimensions.