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You can now disable all AI features in Zed

zed.dev

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Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#131

Post by andoando »

kjksf wrote: post #110
senbrow wrote: post #90

Total nitpick, but: Why would you name an option "disable_ai" with a default value of false instead of calling it "enable_ai" with a default value of true? Are there some mechanical semantics I'm missing here that make this beneficial? Negative booleans (ie that remove or suppress something when true) are generally a source of confusion and bugs and should be avoided like the plague in my experience.

It makes sense, historically. They had AI features that were always on. Some people complained so they introduced a flag to, wait for it, disable the ai features. So they didn't think too deeply about it and named the flag "disable_ai" because it mapped into how they were thinking about it. You overstate the problem with negative booleans. It's trivial for them to add a function: fn isAiEnabled() { return !disable_ai…

I mean you may equally want

if(disable_ai) { //disable shit }

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#132

Post by christophilus »

paraboul wrote: post #44
neoden wrote: post #24

Sadly, I came back to using VS Code recently. There's a lot to like in Zed but imo that decision to write their own rendering framework is unfortunate, because of ridiculous problems in Linux still not resolved like poor font rendering, especially on low-DPI screens, or visible lags of UI which is being developed to be blazingly fast. So far, VS Code is faster for me.

Remember that Zed hasn't reached 1.0. On other platform, it is much faster and consume much less battery. Just like ghostty, to me the most attracting feature is knowing my editor/term is not backed by a browser engine.

Ghostty is an apt comparison, because it is a slow-launching memory hog compared to foot on Linux.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#133

Post by vouaobrasil »

shafyy wrote: post #114
vouaobrasil wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I still code and write with Sublime Text!

I fucking love Sublime!

Yeah! Fast, good looking, no AI integration, ability to turn off blinking cursor and customize, and paying for it supports a small company in Australia rather than a huge, soulless megacorp.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#134

Post by koito17 »

Started using Zed about a year ago and, besides Magit, it has managed to completely replace Emacs for me. I was missing a good debugger for a long time, but that also went GA a month ago or so.

One thing that goes underappreciated is the input latency and how light on resources the editor is overall. Whenever I switch tabs to a web browser (or any web app), I can feel the lag in typing now, despite the fact I use an M3 Max MacBook Pro. Zed's built-in terminal used to feel high-latency too, but they recently shipped a bunch of performance improvements, and it's just amazing how clunky inputs feel in web apps feel after using Zed for a long time.

Two things I find interesting about this development.

1. This is a long-standing feature request ever since Zed added any AI capability. Adding AI-related functionality at all was a very controversial move at the time. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782

2. Text threads in Zed came out only 11 months ago. At the time, it felt revolutionary being able to effortlessly paste terminal output and entire folders into context. Additionally, being able to stop the LLM, correct part of its output, and have it continue code generation. Around 4 months ago, agentic coding released, and now this once-revolutionary workflow feels quite primitive. In the meantime, Zed also added screensharing, Linux support for collaboration, a Git UI, a debugger, and performance improvements to the editor.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#135

Post by johnfn »

criticalfault wrote: post #105
johnfn wrote: post #49

Zed seems really nice, and the usability has come a really long way in the last couple of months. That being said, I have one issue, and I hesitate to even bring it up because it seems so shallow: I hate all the themes! They all look so ugly and amateur. I know this is a really trivial thing, it's like complaining I don't like Python because it uses whitespace for indent or something, but I just can't get over it. VS…

Push through it. You get used to it. Then start to like simplicity of it. And then, due to speed, there is no going back to the lag infested chromium derivative made by Microsoft.

Believe me, I am trying! I have Zed open and I try frequently to get used to it, but it drives me nuts - the autocomplete in particular.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#136

Post by Rexxar »

wanderingstan wrote: post #92
senbrow wrote: post #90

Total nitpick, but: Why would you name an option "disable_ai" with a default value of false instead of calling it "enable_ai" with a default value of true? Are there some mechanical semantics I'm missing here that make this beneficial? Negative booleans (ie that remove or suppress something when true) are generally a source of confusion and bugs and should be avoided like the plague in my experience.

I concur. Same thing in many UI frameworks where you’ll have a Boolean “isHidden” to control visibility. Makes it so hard to reason about.

IMHO, in this case it should not even be a boolean but an enum {Visible, Hidden}.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#137

Post by jaredcwhite »

Why is a code editor negging me?

"Even if you're skeptical [of genAI], these tools are quickly becoming part of how software gets built."

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

I am thankful Zed added this feature and most of the post seems reasonable, but it's still the height of weird that they feel compelled to say this—obviously it's not how software gets built by the people who are avoiding these tools intentionally and for good reason!

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#138

Post by whilenot-dev »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #94
senbrow wrote: post #90

Total nitpick, but: Why would you name an option "disable_ai" with a default value of false instead of calling it "enable_ai" with a default value of true? Are there some mechanical semantics I'm missing here that make this beneficial? Negative booleans (ie that remove or suppress something when true) are generally a source of confusion and bugs and should be avoided like the plague in my experience.

Technically, "enable_ai" doesn't imply that all AI features are really turned off. Without context, it might imply that some basic AI features exist and "enable_ai" just enables further features. "disable_ai" is unambiguous.

Enable/disable are the only two dichotomies in the whole of all possible states regarding this AI feature, so I'll have to bite: What's your "Technically," referring to here?

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#139

Post by ajkjk »

"Some developers have fundamental objections to AI in their coding process—whether it's concerns about training data, environmental impact, or philosophical reasons about machine-generated code."

not only that, there's the "jesus christ fuck off" angle. Stop bullying me into using AI when it serves you, not me. Every goddamn surface wants me to click on their "write your email like a fake idiot" button because they get to report X% WAU uptick which is supposed to vaguely correlate with revenue/growth somehow according to some stupid metric. But no matter how much you can twist reality to justify it financially the fact remains that shoving features in your users' face is not the best user experience you could have made, because you could have not done it. Good designers (...picture your platonic ideal of Jobs-era Apple, not that it was actually perfect but it was better than this shit...) would never do that. If only we lived in a world where there was enough market pressure to annihilate a company for designing things badly---unfortunately no one is competing on that angle yet (big opportunity, imo). In the meantime we just have to ask, nicely and then angrily: please, god, fuck off. It should not take angrily asking, or finding leverage, in order to get you to be respectful. You should be respectful by default.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#140

Post by cardanome »

echelon wrote: post #116
senbrow wrote: post #90

Total nitpick, but: Why would you name an option "disable_ai" with a default value of false instead of calling it "enable_ai" with a default value of true? Are there some mechanical semantics I'm missing here that make this beneficial? Negative booleans (ie that remove or suppress something when true) are generally a source of confusion and bugs and should be avoided like the plague in my experience.

I think AI-enabled is going to be the default for all future code development. Autocomplete is just so good, and I never want to go back. I spent 20 years without it. That's enough for one lifetime.

How long did it take for you to get used to the autocomplete?

I completely hated it when I tried it out. It breaks my flow. Those weird pauses are so painful. Feels like someone grabbing the steering wheel while I am driving.

I heavily use the agent mode but I don't understand the appeal of the autocomplete feature but maybe I am missing something.

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