Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor • Hacker News Board

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#121

Post by SafeDusk » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #105

pseudopersonal wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love a vim plugin for this. Many LLM vim plugins started off beautifully minimal, but became too agentic in their chase of Cursor.

Maybe once all of this is a bit more mature we can just get down to the minimal subset of features that are really important. I’d love a nvim plugin that is more or less just a split chat window that makes it easy to paste code I’ve yanked (like yank to chat) add my commentary and maybe easily attach other files for context. That’s it really.

That is the dream! Would love someone to create a vim plugin for this, if not I'll do it myself if there is enough demand.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#122

Post by slowmovintarget » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

> ...So far, these futuristic tools have been accessible to programmers in one of three ways:

> ... 3. Baked into a closed-source fork of an open-source fork of a web browser

I laughed out loud at this one.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#123

Post by tiffanyh » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

Slightly OT: Why aren't AI coding assistants implemented as plugins (like through an LSP), rather than being a standalone AI-first editor (like Cursor)?

I might be missing the obvious, and I get no standard exists, but why aren't AI coding assistants just plugins?

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#124

Post by airstrike » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

duped wrote: post #54

volkk wrote: post #23

Zed is exactly how software should be made. Granted, I don't agree with all of their UX decisions (i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's), but good lord is the thing fast. These guys are the real deal. They built a rendering system (GPUI) in Rust before building Zed on top of it, and so it is one of the fastest (if not the fastest) pieces of software that resides on my computer. I can't wait until G…

Is it only fast on MacOS? I tried it on Linux and it was unusably slow. Seconds per frame instead of frames per second.

it's not even fast on macOS in my experience

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#125

Post by rice7th » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

volkk wrote: post #40

cies wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because the other Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great. Iced, being used by System76's COSMIC EPOCH, is not great in what regards? Serious question.

there's basically zero documentation for Iced as it stands. They even wrote that if you're not a great Rust dev, you're going to have a bad time and that all docs are basically "read the code" until their book is written. I'm glad System76 is able to build using Iced, but you need a great manual for a tool to be considered mature and useful. IMO Slint is milestones ahead and better. They've even built out solid exten…

Then you should try egui. It has a lot of examples and it is among the most mature libraries along with iced and slint, without the licensing problems

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#126

Post by airstrike » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

volkk wrote: post #40

cies wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because the other Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great. Iced, being used by System76's COSMIC EPOCH, is not great in what regards? Serious question.

there's basically zero documentation for Iced as it stands. They even wrote that if you're not a great Rust dev, you're going to have a bad time and that all docs are basically "read the code" until their book is written. I'm glad System76 is able to build using Iced, but you need a great manual for a tool to be considered mature and useful. IMO Slint is milestones ahead and better. They've even built out solid exten…

The crate is 100% documented. what specific documentation do you think are lacking? Tutorials? That's for users to write.

Calling iced not useful reads like an uninformed take

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#127

Post by SafeDusk » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

upcoming-sesame wrote: post #100

SafeDusk wrote: post #84

Tried Zed and Cursor, but they always felt too magical to me. I ended up building a minimal agent framework that only uses seven tools (even for code edits): read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and think. These simple, composable tools can be utilized well enough by increasingly powerful LLM(s), especially Gemini 2.5 pro to achieve most tasks in a consistent, understandable way. More importantly - I can just swi…

How do you run it in VSC using MCP?

Ideally, just start the server - which is a SSE based and supported by any MCP client out of the box.

Then, connect it using this line: `client = MCPClient(server_url=server_url)` (https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami/blob/e49d3797e6122fb54ddd...)

Happy to help further if you run into issues.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#128

Post by behnamoh » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

tiffanyh wrote: post #123

Slightly OT: Why aren't AI coding assistants implemented as plugins (like through an LSP), rather than being a standalone AI-first editor (like Cursor)? I might be missing the obvious, and I get no standard exists, but why aren't AI coding assistants just plugins?

Because it would be easier to get funded that way. VCs prefer a product rather than a plugin.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#129

Post by unshavedyak » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

volkk wrote: post #23

Zed is exactly how software should be made. Granted, I don't agree with all of their UX decisions (i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's), but good lord is the thing fast. These guys are the real deal. They built a rendering system (GPUI) in Rust before building Zed on top of it, and so it is one of the fastest (if not the fastest) pieces of software that resides on my computer. I can't wait until G…

> I can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit more mature/stable so I can build on top of it

Man, so true. I tried this out a while back and it was pretty miserable to find docs, apis, etc.

IIRC they even practice a lot of bulk reexports and glob imports and so it was super difficult to find where the hell things come from, and thus find docs/source to understand how to use something or achieve something.

Super frustrating because the UI of Zed was so damn good. I wanted to replicate hah.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#130

Post by deliriumchn » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

I hate the direction they're going to be honest with this giga focus on AI bullshit. Only good part added was zeta (their own predictive editing model that jumps across the file where it predicts you want to edit your typo etc AND have a "subtle" mode), but they price it at 20/month, which is absurd.