The General Podcast Merrill Lutsky (Graphite) x Zach Lloyd (Warp) on building for engineers
Merrill Lutsky is the co-founder and CEO of Graphite, a modern code review platform built for the AI era that was just acquired by Cursor. Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the terminal with agents built in.
Zach and Merrill go way back—they worked together on Zach’s previous company. Now they’re each building core infrastructure for modern engineering teams, and running into many of the same challenges from different sides of development.
They talk about 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.
They’re also candid about 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).
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Zach and Merrill’s shared history and how it shaped their perspectives
- Why AI has shifted the engineering bottleneck from writing code to understanding it
- Why “vibe coding” works for demos but fails in real production environments
- What human accountability actually means in an agent-driven codebase
- Why code review is emerging as the new leverage point for engineering productivity
- How power users quietly destroy flat-pricing models in developer tools
- The “winner’s curse” of underpricing AI-native products
- Marketing to developers without losing credibility
Where to find our guests:
- Graphite.com
- Warp.dev