Dec 19, 2025

The CEOs of Graphite & Warp on Building for Engineers

by Taylor Majewski
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News! Graphite was acquired by Cursor today. We caught up with Graphite CEO and co-founder Merrill Lutsky a few weeks ago at TheGP’s studio, where he sat down with Zach Lloyd, the CEO and founder of Warp.

Zach and Merrill go way back—they worked together on Zach’s previous company. In this conversation, they get candid about what it takes to build core infrastructure for modern engineering teams, and swap notes on facing the same challenges from different sides of development.

In this episode, you’ll hear what’s actually changing inside engineering orgs right now: why code review is becoming the real bottleneck as agents generate more code, why ‘vibe coding’ doesn’t work on production code, and why humans still have to stay accountable for agent-written code. Zach and Merrill also get into the business side of developer tools - why power users break flat pricing, why ‘cheap AI’ creates a winner’s curse, and what it really takes to market to famously skeptical developers (controversial billboards and a launch video on a horse).

Enjoy!

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