Build Warp's input with Warp

Speaker: Dave, Product Design Lead at Warp

The challenge

Redesigning the input was tricky because it’s the primary interface developers use all day, every day.
Everyone had opinions — and expectations — about how it should look and behave.

So, Peter (a product designer on my team) and I iterated on multiple designs using Figma.

Once we landed on a version we liked, we shared it internally.
Most people were excited, but engineering resources were stretched thin — focused on improving Agent Mode quality and prepping the Agentic Development Environment.

So I thought: “What if I just Warp it?”

1. Locating the Git diff chip code

Inside Warp's input, there’s a small Git Diff chip — it shows your current branch and open changes. It was one pixel too tall. That tiny visual bug drove me nuts, so I used Warp to find where it lived.

Warp searched across the entire codebase and found references inside:

• displaychip.rs
• Related render and configuration files

It used a combination of semantic search, code indexing, and traditional grep to pinpoint the exact implementation.

2. Modifying the font size

Once Warp located the implementation, I asked it to reduce the font size by 1 pixel.

Warp automatically edited the relevant lines:

• Found the current setting (system_font_size - 1)
• Adjusted it to (system_font_size - 2)

I reviewed the diffs to confirm everything looked good.

3. Building and testing the change

Next, I rebuilt the app using:

cargo run