The Zed Debugger Is Here

To be honest, I'm happy with running neovim in a terminal emulator so I'm not that far away from just wanting tools that "do nothing new". But there have been monumental changes in my time as a programmer that I've liked: language servers have been huge and are an essential part of my programming experience now, as one example.

But I think you're under-estimating the value of just being a really good version of something that already exists. There was a potential path where Zed would've been more or less something like VSCode, but actually open source, with less jank, with a smaller footprint and better performance, with excellent out-of-the-box support for a selection of programming languages without needing extensions. That, to me, would have been revolutionary, not because it would've had a list of features that's larger than other offerings, but because it would've done everything better than existing software.

Besides, it's not like "AI" is some new thing that nobody has done before. Every single new text editor that's coming out seems to be selling itself as "AI-powered". Zed is now a follower in that crowded space.

Leaning on community support seems ideal because it means you've built a powerful plugin API and people can implement features.

As opposed to having a weak plugin API where all progress depends on the tiny internal team.

The latter suffers more than the first if popularity wanes.

In Atom's case, its lunch was eaten by VSCode which was similar but just better. Based on web tech but with better performance and just as powerful of a plugin API. It wasn't the fact that they let people implement plugins that killed Atom, and they would have been in an even worse situation had they not had a good plugin API.

I really want to switch to Zed from Cursor but the battery usage for my Python project with Pyright is unjustifiable. There are issues for this on GitHub and I'm just sad that the team isn't prioritising this more.

If be surprised if Zed aren't dogfooding their own AI agents to help writing some of the Zed code. The AI often put a lot of comments on the generated code, and sometimes needs a lot of comments to produce the right code.

The Network was a good idea fifty years ago, and it was still a good idea by the time the Internet was definitely the next network which was a few years before the DotCom bubble, both actual large language models and the "What if all human conversations in a box?" thought experiment (this definitely passes the Turing test, but, it's clearly not a person is it) are also good ideas, distinct from present "AI in everything" LLM craziness.

Just because tulips are nice doesn't make Tulip Madness a good idea. At the height of the DotCom boom consumers were buying stock at IPO prices for companies which made no sense whatsoever, because they said "Internet" or, (hence the naming) ".com"

For example Be Inc. was a vehicle for a failed Apple exec to "prove" he was the right person to run Apple, not Steve Jobs. After their runway ran out and institutions wanted nothing further to do with it, Be Inc. went IPO. They do this by saying they were an "Internet appliance" company and taking an OS with terrible networking but pretending it's good. In normal times this would attract laughter - they're offering a worse product, most likely it just tanks or never comes to market, and in the extreme case that Apple wants the CEO they're going to cut a deal with the man, not save the dead weight company. His most senior people might get parachutes but Apple has no reason to pay ordinary stock owners a penny. Sure enough those who bought at IPO rescued the institutions but were wiped out.