The Coding Mandate

Warp’s coding mandate: start every coding task with Warp

1. Every coding task should start with a prompt in Warp.
2. If the coding task succeeds, great! Share the success in #warped-it
3. If, after ten minutes, you feel like you are wasting time by prompting…
   1. Please share feedback with the relevant #feedback- channel on what failed
   2. Please also share your prompt, conversation id, and so on so we can learn where the issue was and possibly build an eval around it
   3. This is also a chance for folks to give each other tips on how best to use Warp to code
4. Next, you are encouraged to try another AI coding tool (e.g. Cursor, Claude) and see if you have more luck – if you do, please report what went well and what didn’t.
5. Finally, just code by hand…we need to actually ship software and if that’s still fastest, you should do it.

Warp’s coding mandate: the “why”

1. Coding in Warp by prompt is actually faster for many tasks and should increase our overall engineering output.
   1. it saves you time from having to handwrite code
   2. it allows for multi-threaded development
   3. it’s especially useful when working on areas of code you are less familiar with, which, as our codebase grows, is likely a lot – Warp can really help you learn these new parts of the codebase quickly
2. Dogfooding our product is the best way to improve it.
   1. A big part of the reasoning for the mandate is to use and give feedback on what we are building.
   2. We are asking our users to work this way and betting our business on it, so we had better believe enough in the workflow that we are willing to use it ourselves
3. Using competitor products builds our intuition on where our product might improve and what is possible.

Guidelines for coding with Warp

You are responsible for the code you submit for review

• You must understand all code that you submit for review at the same level as if you had written it by yourself
• Any code generated by agent mode must be at the same quality we expect for hand-written code…
  • It must be well-factored
  • It must be well-tested
  • It must follow our coding conventions wrt comments, apis, imports, test file location, etc
  • And so on…
• It is never an excuse for a bug or poor code quality to say “AI wrote this” – AI is a tool, not a responsible party on our software team
• All of the guidelines in our regular How We Code still apply when coding by prompt (small PRs, feature flags, and so on)

Don’t just tell the agent what outcome you want, tell the agent how to engineer the change

• In other words, if you just tell the agent “I want a feature that works like X” the agent is likely to produce code that isn’t up to our standards.
• Instead, tell the agent how to build the feature
  • What should the data model look like
  • What is the api we want
  • Where should the code live
  • What tests should it write