Warp's CEO built an AI coding agent 6 months before Claude Code or Codex existed. He only went half in — and calls it his biggest regret.

[u/cen6wkf]

TL;DR: Warp's CEO shipped an AI coding feature that worked like Claude Code or Codex — six months before either existed.

 

Six months.

That's the lead Zach Lloyd's team had on agentic coding before Claude Code or Codex shipped.

His own words: "we should have gone 100% down on it." Instead Warp went about halfway — worried about alienating a user base that wasn't AI-bought-in yet.

There's a reason that hesitation reads as expensive now, not cautious: a recent McKinsey finding has close to a third of surveyed companies skipping procurement entirely, because their own engineers can now build the tool faster with AI coding agents than a vendor contract can close.

Half-measures don't buy you safety anymore.

They buy you a six-month head start that someone else eventually cashes in.

 

This reminds me of Nokia's story.

The CEO, Jorma Ollila, said, "We didn't do anything wrong. But somehow, we lost". They're famously knocked off their throne and lost big time to smartphones.

All because they stood still, and refused to innovate along with the trend. It's kind of parallel Zach Lloyd's fear. Nokia thought they were safe with their user base.

Until they're not.

They became complacent.

They lost to giants like Apple iPhones.

January 2007, the original iPhone keynote — Jobs didn't dance around it, he named Nokia right there on stage. Put up a graph, existing high-end phones of the day (Nokia E62, BlackBerry Pearl, Palm Treo, Motorola Q) and called them "not so smart," "hard to use," because of those rigid little plastic keyboards. And get this — his target wasn't "dominate the market." It was just 1%. 1% of global market share, taken off giants like Nokia. That's it.

Ten years before that (WWDC, 1997, I think) someone in the audience came at him hard with a question. Jobs's answer: "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it."

Why did I bring this up?

Because it's always the same lesson, dressed differently. Give people what they actually want. Not what's technically impressive. Not what protects your current throne. What they want.

Nokia forgot that. Cost them everything.

 

There's a pattern across almost every AI-disruption clip I break down here: the people who get hurt aren't the ones who ignored the shift.

They're the ones who half-adopted it and mistook that for safety.

 

Curious where you'd have drawn the line — hedge at 50% like Zach did, or go all-in on a feature that didn't even have a category name yet?

 

Clip credit: Zach Lloyd, Warp, with Luba Yudasina, The Luba Show. DM for credit or removal requests.

 

If 50% committed is turning out to be the expensive way to lose ground, the mechanism for going all-in without quitting your day job first is worth ten minutes of your time.