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Zed AI

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Re: Zed AI

#121

Post by cedws »

cube2222 wrote: post #54

As I’ve said in yesterday’s thread[0], contrary to many others I find the AI integration in Zed to be extremely smooth and pleasant to use, so I’m happy they’re doubling down on this. However, personally, I prefer to have it configured to talk directly to Anthropic, to limit the number of intermediaries seeing my code, but in general I can see myself using this in the future. More importantly, I’m happy that they mig…

>However, personally, I prefer to have it configured to talk directly to Anthropic, to limit the number of intermediaries seeing my code, but in general I can see myself using this in the future.

Same. I can kind of feel OK about my code going to Anthropic, but I can't have it going through another third party as well.

This is unfortunately IT/security's worst nightmare. Thousands of excitable developers are going to be pumping proprietary code through this without approval.

(I have been daily driving Zed for a few months now - I want to try this, I'm just sceptical for the reason above.)

Re: Zed AI

#122

Post by cube2222 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #116
cube2222 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I know some people say “just let me pay for the editor” but I don’t think that’s actually a viable path. The editor is open-source, and it being open-source is great. Others can contribute, it generally helps adoption, it will probably help with getting people to author plugins, and it means if they go in an undesirable way, the community will be able to fork. So without making it non-open-source, they’d need t…

I would like us as an industry to promote paying for things we use. Crazy idea, I know. Open source is great and fun and an incredible force multiplier for the world, but when you want to do this stuff for a living, you have to charge money for it somehow, and if you're a software business, and not just software adjacent, it means charging for software.

I’m not sure if that’s clear or not from my comments, but I completely agree (and pay for JetBrains editors, amongst other tools).

Though in the case of “fundamental / ecosystem center” tools like code editors which e.g. others will build plugins for I believe there’s immense value in it being open-source.

Thus, I’m rooting for them to find a business model where they get our money without making it non-open-source.

Re: Zed AI

#123

Post by jvmancuso »

swyx wrote: post #7

am Cursor main, dont really have any burning pains that make me want to change tools but open to what I dont know. Zed vs Cursor review anyone?

- open-source vs closed fork of vscode

- transparent assistant panel vs opaque composer. you control your own prompts (cf. [0])

- in Zed the assistant panel is "just another editor", which means you can inline-assist when writing prompts. super underrated feature imo

- Zed's assistant is pretty hackable as well, you can add slash commands via native Zed extensions [1] or non-native, language-agnostic Context Servers [2]

- Zed's /workflow is analogous to Cursor's composer. to be honest it's not quite as good yet, however it's only ~1 week old. we'll catch up in no time :)

- native rust vs electron slop. Zed itself is one of the larger Rust projects out there [3], can be hard to work with in VS Code/Cursor, but speedy in Zed itself :)

[0]: https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/prompt/

[1]: https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/slash-commands

[2]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/context-servers

[3]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2024/08/15/this-devel...

Re: Zed AI

#124

Post by SpaghettiCthulu »

acedTrex wrote: post #58

AI assistants just slow me down. Its a very rare case i find them actually useful. I am generally concerned by the amount of devs that seem to claim that it is useful. What on earth are yall accepting.

I find the only "AI" I need is really just "Intellisense". Just auto complete repetitive lines or symbol names intelligently, and that doesn't even require an AI model.

Re: Zed AI

#125

Post by iamnbutler »

simonw wrote: post #67
jmakov wrote: post #6

I wonder if there's already a solution that allows me to ask questions about local codebases. e.g. how does this subsystem work.

This feature does exactly that. You can open up the chat panel, run "/tab name-of-tab" or "/file path-to-file" and then start asking questions about the code.

Hey! I'm Nate from Zed. You can also use the /file command to drop entire directories, or even globs into the assistant.

For example, you can do /file *.rs to load all of the rust files in your project into context.

Here is a simple but real example I used a while back:

"/file zed/crates/gpui/src/text_system.rs

I have a font I want to check if it exists on the system. I currently have a &'static str.

Is there something in here that will help me do that?"

I haven't interfaced with the lower level TextSystem that much, so rather than dig through 800 lines of code, I was able to instantly find `is_font_available()` and do what I needed to do.

Re: Zed AI

#126

Post by impulser_ »

modernerd wrote: post #32

I just want a fast programmable text editor with a native GUI and good defaults. But that seems really tough to find, for some reason. Zed is so close, but I’d much rather see a focus on the “programmable” part and let the AI and collaboration features emerge later out of rich extensibility (i.e. as plugins, perhaps even paid plugins) than have them built-in behind a sign-in and unknown future pricing model.

To be fair, you can turn off all the AI stuff with a single config.

"assistant": { "enabled": false, }

Re: Zed AI

#127

Post by [deleted] »

bww wrote: post #30

Hmm. I was excited about Zed, but it now seems painfully clear they’re headed in a completely different direction than I’m interested in. Back to neovim, I guess…

[deleted]

Re: Zed AI

#128

Post by brigadier132 »

lupire wrote: post #69
brigadier132 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI autocomplete is just a toy I disagree, when I'm writing code and it just autocompletes the line for me with the correct type with the correct type params set for the generics it saves me the mental effort having to scroll around the file to find the exact type signature I needed. For these small edits it's always right if the information is in the file.

Why do you need an LLM for that? That basic type inference.

i dont know what statically typed language you are using that never requires specifying types. As far as i know only ocaml works this way.

Different languages support different levels of type inference. When im writing rust and typescript im often specifying types this way for structs and function signatures.

With llms what often happens is i write a parameter or variable name and it infers from the name what the type is because i have used the same name somewhere else in my codebase. This would not work without llm autocomplete

Re: Zed AI

#129

Post by [deleted] »

1a527dd5 wrote: post #90

I know I'm not the target market. I don't want my editor to have AI. I was really looking forward to trying Zed, but this just means I'll stick to VS/Code with the AI gung disabled. In general, if any product comes with "AI" I'm turned off by it.

[deleted]

Re: Zed AI

#130

Post by nsonha »

jcsnv wrote: post #85

What's the difference between VSCode (with co-pilot), Zed, & Cursor?

Cursor is a fork of VSCode with code AI that, in my oppinion, better than Zed and other competitor because they implement the MODIFYING existing code workflow better. Most other code AI products are only good at code generation or being a better stack overflow. I don't use Copilot to tell, does it show you diff like Cursor when modifying code?
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