Warp’s Agent Mode: Natural Language for Terminal Commands

Michelle Lim, writing for the Warp blog (Warp, I’ll note, has previously sponsored DF):

Agent Mode raises the level of abstraction in the terminal. Using natural language, you can ask the terminal to accomplish any high level task without worrying about the specific commands you need.

Agent Mode knows when it needs more information to help you complete a task. It will ask permission to run commands on your machine and use the outputs to guide you, step-by-step. It’s also self-correcting when it runs into errors.

Because Agent Mode executes tasks through the CLI, it integrates with practically any service with zero configuration. If the service has a CLI, an API, or publicly available docs, you can use Agent Mode for the task. Agent Mode has inherent knowledge of most public CLIs, and you can easily teach it how to use internal CLIs by asking it to read their help content.

Man (no pun intended?), is this cool. I just tried “How do I generate a random number between 0000 and 9999?” and got:

You can generate a random number between 0000 and 9999 using the following shell command in the Fish shell:

  printf "%04d\n" (random 0 9999)

And when I followed up with “How can I use jot to generate a random number between 0000 and 9999?” I got:

You can use the jot command to generate a random number between 0000 and 9999 using the following command:

  jot -w "%04d" -r 1 0 9999

Both of which answers are correct. For jot — a tool I first learned about, of course, from the inimitable Dr. Drang — I think a simpler, and thus better, answer is:

jot -r 1 0000 9999

but Warp’s Agent Mode suggestion is certainly good enough.

★ Thursday, 20 June 2024