Marco Casalaina: Warp is pretty magical, but you can add to the magic and make it work more smoothly.

Clarvo: You're talking about setting up little micro agents that do little tasks for you, either one off ones like we saw in warp or recurring and triggered ones. And then this is making your life just easier.

Marco Casalaina: As soon as I started using it for certain things like managing Azure, giving Azure subscriptions and stuff like that, then I was hooked. I was like, man, alive this is a really capable tool. until you start working with these agents, you don't really discover all the things that you can do with command lines. But I think once you start to test those, then it kind of opens up your mind to what is really possible.

Clarvo: Welcome back to how I AI. I'm Clarvo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have Marco Castellania, VP of core AI products and AI futurist at Microsoft. Marco is going to speedrun through five AI use cases where microaggents can reduce the friction of getting little tasks done, whether they're technical or not so technical. Let's get to it. Meet Rovo, your AI teammate. Connecting knowledge, people, and workflows so teams can work smarter and move faster... Marco, thanks for joining How I AI. I am excited because we're going to see a tool, Warp, that we haven't yet seen on the podcast, and we're going to see you use it for maybe not its primary pitched use case, which is kind of a coding, but for some sort of more ancillary support use cases that you found to be really useful. So before we get into them, like why have you hooked so deeply into Warp in particular?

Marco Casalaina: I started using Warp uh ironically because our own one of our own teams here at Microsoft tuned me into it. They it was our PowerShell team and they were like you should try this Warp thing. It automates PowerShell really well. And so I tried it and as soon as I started using it for certain things like uh managing Azure and you know giving Azure subscriptions and stuff like that then I was hooked. I was like man alive this is a really capable tool.

Clarvo: And if you're looking for the sexiest episode of how I AI, it is this because we are going to show you how to manage Azure resources with AI. Which actually I'm making a joke cuz I think it's so funny. But these are the kinds of things that if you are a software engineer or an engineering leader or just building something you are spending so much time on DevOps admin configuration IAM all that kind of stuff takes all your time and you don't actually get to the fun part of coding with AI. So, you know, show us maybe that specific use case and why you think Warp was such a good fit for that and what the pain was before you had a tool like this.

Marco Casalaina: Yeah, let's do this. So, I was working with my colleague Goind the other day and I needed to assign him access to a number of Azure resources and you know, you give them granular roles... Now to do this, it's actually not that easy to be honest to do this in in Azure, you know, and especially if I do it with a web interface... So instead, I do stuff like this. This is my prompt. I say, you know, I I found Go's email address in here to begin with. And then I'm like, okay, now uh give him Azure AI user and Azure AI project manager on this subscription that I'm looking at. And here it it does it right. So it will call a AZ this command line interface. And this is Warp's superpower... whenever there's a command line interface, a CLI that can do something, uh, warp is freaking great at that... I have also used this to administer GCP work just as well with G-Cloud the G-Cloud CLI so it's it's great at this stuff.

Clarvo: I was going to say if you have been victimized by AWS Azure or GCP admin interfaces for assigning roles tools. This is exactly the kind of workflow you want to see... And what I love about AI having access to CLI tools, APIs, MCPs, all these ways to more programmatically access these capabilities is you can actually abstract away all of that front-end stuff and just let a user kind of query the system and get what needs to get done... And what I love about these more agentic processes that have access to the terminal and the command line is you can just do that allin-one allin-one interface.

Marco Casalaina: Totally. Yeah. Exactly. Now, I will tell you though that it there's a trick to making this stuff work... I do connect this to the Microsoft Docs MCP server when I'm doing like Azure administration... Another piece of this and we'll see it in a moment is is the rules... I make warp remind me and warp will be like so hey did you activate your owner access before I start doing this because otherwise it's going to fail.

Clarvo: Well, and what I will call out, and this is no shade, but this is not the most sophisticated prompting I've ever received in my life. It's just like, "Hey, when you're trying to do this, remind me to do that..." And I think people get like wrapped around the axle on like my prompts have to be in this specific format... So, you want to walk us through how you did how you did that with your your daughter's homework?

Marco Casalaina: Yeah, let's talk about that. My daughter is studying for a math test right now... I'll scan it in and then I feed it to Chat GPT and I'm like make me variance of these problems... So, I needed to scan this in. Now, my scanner has a feeder, and so it sucks in the pages, but this was a two-sided uh practice test. And so, I needed to scan the odd pages, and then I needed to scan the even pages. Then, I needed to put it together. So, what do I do? I go to warp here and I say it exactly. Scan the documents from the feeder and save it to this directory as this file name. And it does. It totally does do that.

Clarvo: Wait, can I can I pause you really quickly? Did this activate the scanner?

Marco Casalaina: Absolutely it does... I would do this again and you would see my scanner would wake right up and start scanning... all I had to do was put the sheets in the feeder and as soon as I typed this thing in, boom, there it goes.

Clarvo: So for for the youths listening and watching this show, as a as a parent, you spend a lot of time with a scanner and a printer... this is peak peak efficiency if efficiency for me is being able to just uh remotely start the scanner um from from my AI coding tool.

Marco Casalaina: And I'm not going to lie, like I scan like her birthday cards... Then I type this in here and now there it is... I scanned one side. Now, uh, warp is kind of biodal... So you see the second time I did this, it had generated this command line here. Oh, and when I pressed up, it just go we'll go go straight to this command line... But then I wanted to put it together. So I said, now put together the odd pages and the even pages and just make the math practice test out of it. And so now it wrote some Python to do this... created a unified thing.

Clarvo: Now I have to give um these AI coding tools and idees etc. a little product feedback which is I want like a time to task little timer here and I want it to say hey you did this in 112 seconds and give me like confetti... And instead you get to sit where we all want to live right now which is in the terminal in the terminal in dark mode and just ask it to do this thing... And until you start working with these agents, you don't really discover all the things that you can do with command lines.

Marco Casalaina: Well, what's interesting is it caused me to look for ways that I could do things with a command line. So this scanner thing, this wasn't magical... not a way in Windows to CLI invoke a scanner unless you install NAPS 2... and I what I said is when you're in Windows and I tell you to scan something, use Naps 2 to do it... Knowing that I scan things so frequently that this would save me a vast amount of time. Uh, so, you know, again, like it's magic, but it's not entirely magic. You do have to do a little preparation for this trick to work.

Clarvo: and then you have one more use case which is I do as somebody who who does a podcast and works with a lot of videos is really useful um that I thought maybe you could walk us through.

Marco Casalaina: So, I record a lot of videos myself actually... Well, for 10 minutes of video, this thing recorded a 1.7 gigabyte file. I don't know what it was doing, but I mean it was insane... As you can see in my prompt here, I say, why is this file so big? Use ffmpeg to re-encode it. Still keeping it at 1080p because I didn't want it to like nestify the resolution and make it more normal size... It ran FFmpeg with whatever the switches were to re-encode this thing. And it did re-encode this down to 13 megabytes, which is what you would expect for like a 10-minute video of a screen share.

Clarvo: Yeah. And so again like I think this is one of those things that in an alternative world somebody would have like gone to search and say like video compression software... and instead in just a couple seconds you can use this more technical tool and get a lot of stuff done and also sort of understand the root cause.

Marco Casalaina: if you think about what I'm really doing with warp the way that I'm using warp I characterize it in a certain way I call this an ad hoc agent because effectively each one of these things that I'm doing... I'm kind of creating a little mini agent, an unnamed agent on the fly to do something for me.

Clarvo: And what I would say is also what I love about AI and what I would recommend to people with AI is like just get used to ephemeral stuff... Just next time do it over do it over again. Maybe save a rule so you're not rediscovering the steps, right?

Marco Casalaina: And that's that's exactly the right idea, right? So when it you know, for example, like it happened once that it tried to call naps 2, the scanner thingy, and failed because it couldn't figure out what the path to naps 2 was... And now that it has that rule, it has never done it wrong since then, right?

Clarvo: Well, let's switch over to maybe some less technical use cases, but ones I think are really interesting... how you're using sort of more administrative taskbased workflow based things to kind of be prepped for the work you need to do in a day.

Marco Casalaina: Yeah. Well, I mean here I am in M365 Copilot... but what's happening now is that this and many general purpose agents like it are becoming agent builders. The line between consuming an agent and building an agent is blurring. So this is the new workflows agent. And this is an agent that builds an agent... What it has built is an agent. It's a triggered agent. It's an email triggered agent. And so an email comes from you and it will extract the time from it... it will check my calendar and it'll create the meeting invite.

Clarvo: I'm not going to abuse it. But I do I do love it. Um, what I would say is really interesting here is the ability to set up synchronous response to asynchronous um, requests... Meaning, you know, if you can get yourself out of the critical path of doing a task and get AI into that path instead, you can be highly responsive and and not drop stuff.

Clarvo: What is your tactic when AI is not listening? When it is not giving you the output you want, what do you do?

Marco Casalaina: I mean, I sort of am in which I will often be like, "You boron. I specifically told you not to check in myv file and you did it anyway."... Now again, in Warp, there are rules. You might have noticed in my warp rules, if you look closely, there's a rule there that says never check in thev file... I also will pre-program certain types of prompts and so here let's say uh MB5... Answer from the perspective of Microsoft in 500 characters or less with no bullets or formatting... That is by the way auto hotkey that I have running there.

Clarvo: Marco, this has been so great. I just I love the idea of again just solving these minor minor points of friction with our, you know, genius large language models and supporting tools. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

Marco Casalaina: Well, find me on LinkedIn. And that's probably the easiest place... you can see my new blog post and video there on my LinkedIn channel.