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Zed AI

zed.dev

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Re: Zed AI

#141

Post by roland35 »

xwowsersx wrote: post #131
nichochar wrote: post #35

I recently switched from neovim to zed, and I overall like Zed. I miss telescope, and think some vim navigation was better, but I suspect that it has to do with how much effort I put into configuring one over the other, so time will tell. My biggest gripe was how bad the AI was. I really want a heavy and well-crafter AI in my editor, like Cursor, but I don't want a fork of the (hugely bloated and slow) vscode, and I…

Have you tried using Codeium in Neovim[0]? It may not have all the features shown in this post, but still quite good. I will admit though that I'm enticed to try out AI in Zed now. [0] https://github.com/Exafunction/codeium.nvim

Codeium works well but I really like the copilot chat plugin as well - it generally does a good job of explaining highlighted code, fixing errors, and other code interactions.

Re: Zed AI

#142

Post by koito17 »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #17

Not releasing a cross-platform code editor on the dominant OS seems quite weird in my opinion. (I know they plan to do it, but as someone who has built cross-platform apps, this is not rocket science to have Win32 support from the start.)

Anecdotally, I have never seen Windows widely used for development, outside of .NET shops (but that shouldn't be a surprise).

Moreover, there's plenty of quirks Windows has with respect to:

- Unicode (UTF-16 whereas the world is UTF-8; even Java uses UTF-8 nowadays, so it's only Windows where UTF-8 is awkward to use)

- filenames (lots of restrictions that don't exist on Mac or Linux)

- text encoding (the data in the same string type changes depending on the user's locale)

- UUIDs (stored in a mixed-endian format)

- limit of open files (much lower than Mac and Linux; breaks tools like Git)

If you write software in Java, Golang, or Node.js, you'll quickly encounter all of these issues and produce software with obscure bugs that only occur on Windows.

I'm not sure about Rust, but using languages that claim cross-platform support isn't enough to hide the details of an OS.

In every job I've had, the vast majority of devs were on Mac OS, with Linux coming in at a close second (usually senior devs). So I wasn't surprised Zed first supported Mac then Linux. Windows support is nice for students, game developers, and people maintaining legacy .NET software, but those people won't be paying for an editor.

Re: Zed AI

#143

Post by simonw »

retrofuturism wrote: post #98
simonw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, LLM integration should be a huge boon for junior developers.

Not sure if it's what GP is talking about - but haven't you noticed how many juniors seem to be shooting themselves in the foot with LLMs these days, becoming over-reliant on it and gaining expertise slower?

I've noticed the opposite: people who had never even started learning to program who are now getting stuck in because they don't have to wade through six months of weird error messages about missing semicolons to get started.

But I guess I'm talking about complete newbie developers, which is a different category from junior developers.

I have 25+ years experience at this point so I'm pretty far removed from truly understanding how this stuff benefits newcomers!

Re: Zed AI

#144

Post by asadm »

I just want a perplexity-style agentic integration that researches dozens of pages first, does internal brainstorming before printing output in my editor.

I just had a many-hour long hacking session with Perplexity to generate a complex code module.

Re: Zed AI

#145

Post by simonw »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #137
retrofuturism wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if it's what GP is talking about - but haven't you noticed how many juniors seem to be shooting themselves in the foot with LLMs these days, becoming over-reliant on it and gaining expertise slower?

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Ever since LLMs took over, I've noticed an uptick in my fellow senior developers complain about the quality of work, but I've also seen a huge increase in the poor quality of PRs to open source projects. Like, normally my primary complaint about LLMs is their copyright violating nature, and how it is hanging everyone who has ever published the output of an LLM out to dry, but u…

Here's one of my best documented examples: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Apr/8/files-to-prompt/

And a more recent example (writing me a Django app): https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/8/django-http-debug/#clau...

Re: Zed AI

#146

Post by phero_cnstrcts »

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.

As long as it is not via subscriptions…

Re: Zed AI

#147

Post by arghwhat »

I don't mind them having AI features, but I wish they'd fix some of the most basic performance issues considering that their entire reason to exist was "performance".

You know, things like not rerendering the entire UI on the smallest change (including just moving your mouse) without damage reporting.

Re: Zed AI

#148

Post by iamnbutler »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #138
iamnbutler wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, this is Nate from Zed. Give the inline assistant a try. Here is a little demo: https://share.cleanshot.com/F2mg2lXy You can even edit the prompt after the fact if the diff doesn't show what you want and regenerate without having to start all over.

Ah interesting. I missed that when browsing the page. Can you make the diff side-by-side? I’ve always hated the “inline” terminal style diff view. My brain just can’t parse it. I need the side-by-side view that lets me see what the actual before/after code is.

Haha I actually agree – I always prefer them side by side.

We don't have side-by-side diffs yet, but once we do I'll make sure it works here :)

Re: Zed AI

#149

Post by owenpalmer »

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'm curious, what kind of work do you do? Does stack overflow slow you down?

Re: Zed AI

#150

Post by rgrmrts »

yewenjie wrote: post #57

Has any long-term Emacs user delved into Zed and ported the cool features yet? Don't take it as sarcasm, I am genuinely interested. I think Emacs' malleability is what still keeps it alive.

Long-term Emacs user here: I actually just switched entirely to Zed.
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