Warp asks you to switch terminals: it is a rebuilt, AI-native terminal with agents, natural-language input and its own agent platform. OpenCues adds AI to the terminal you already use: the shell integration wraps your existing shell, and a typed _ summons fills and command recall in place.
What Warp does well
A genuinely rethought terminal: agentic workflows, rich blocks, autosuggestions, voice input, and bring-your-own-key support. If you want a new terminal, it is the strongest candidate.
Where Warp struggles
Adopting it means replacing your terminal, prompt, and muscle memory wholesale. Even with your own keys, inference routes through Warp's backend, and pointing it at a local model requires tunneling that endpoint to a public URL, so there is no genuinely offline path. Outside its own window it offers nothing: the rest of your typing life is out of scope.
How OpenCues differs
Augment versus replace. OpenCues keeps your shell, your prompt and your muscle memory, and works the same way in Claude Code, OpenCode, Gemini CLI and Chrome. It runs on your own keys, your existing AI plan, or a fully local model. And OpenCues never wires model output to execution; everything lands as draft text you review.
Both do team sharing: Warp Drive workflows on Warp's side, project-level cues and blanks committed to your repo on OpenCues' side.
OpenCues is also extensible by design: cues and blanks are markdown files you write yourself, and blanks can bind shell scripts or runtime classes, all under an open standard anyone can implement. See write your own cue and write your own blank.
Related: Full comparison · AI in your terminal · Warp