Until the AI means “system thinking capability that can analyze the codebase and give real suggestions” I don’t buy it. Everything I have seen so far is waste of my time and resources and at best is useful for generating tests or docstrings.
Zed AI
151–160 of 299 posts
Re: Zed AI
#152I 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.
What's your current text editor and what's wrong with it?
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Re: Zed AI
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I also don't want my editor to have syntax highlighting. I refuse to use any editor that has it. Don't even get me started on native vcs support. My rule of thumb is: "If it auto-completes then it gets the auto-yeet."
It's "Find and replace" that makes my blood boil. I won't stand for it.
Amen brother.
Re: Zed AI
#154I 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.
What does “native GUI” mean?
Using the same platform-specific graphics API the OS vendor builds their GUI apps with, ideally, but I'll also settle for "not a TUI, not a web application shipped as a desktop app, even if the OS vendor currently builds their GUI apps as web applications shipped as desktop apps".
Re: Zed AI
#155AI 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?
Lots of golang kubernetes work these days.
Stackoverflow is used when im stuck and searching around for an answer. Its not attempting to do the work for me. At a code level I almost never copy paste from stackoverflow.
I also utilize claud and 4o at the same time while attempting to solve a problem but they are rarely able to help.
Re: Zed AI
#156AI 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.
Did Google make you less productive when looking up about code? If it did not then I dont see how looking up with AI can be worse.
> If it did not then I dont see how looking up with AI can be worse
Looking up with AI is worse because its WRONG a lot more. Random rabbit holes, misdirection. Stuff that SOUNDS right but is not. It takes a lot of time and energy to discern the wheat from the chaff.
Sure you can find misleading or outdated blogposts or forum discussions with a google search but the information is far more grounded in correctness then anything from an LLM.
Re: Zed AI
#157Missing from this announcement is language around Privacy. Cursor for example has a Privacy Mode that promises not to store code, and this seems like a critical feature for any AI enhanced dev tools.
Re: Zed AI
#158am 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?
Hey! I'm Nate from Zed. There are a lot of questions about this, here are some quick thoughts...
Cursor is great – We explored an alternate approach to our assistant similar to theirs as well, but in the end we found we wanted to lean into what we think our super power is: Transforming text.
So we leaned into it heavily. Zed's assistant is completely designed around retrieving, editing and managing text to create a "context"[0]. That context can be used to have conversations, similar to any assistant chatbot, but can also be used to power transformations right in your code[1], in your terminal, when writing prompts in the Prompt Library...
The goal is for context to be highly hackable. You can use the /prompt command to create nested prompts, use globs in the /file command to dynamically import files in a context or prompt... We even expose the underlying prompt templates that power things like the inline assistant so you can override them[2].
This approach doesn't give us the _simplest_ or most approachable assistant, but we think it gives us and everyone else the tools to create the assistant experience that is actually useful to them. We try to build the things we want, then share it with everyone else.
TL;DR: Everything is text because text is familiar and it puts you in control.
[0]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/contexts.html
[1]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/inline-assistant
[2]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/prompting#overriding-template...
Re: Zed AI
#159I 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.
Sublime Text is likely closer to what you're looking for.
I retry it every now and then and miss the easy extensibility of Neovim. Can we build something that marries both worlds?
Re: Zed AI
#160As 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…
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…
A lot of Zed users are developers at medium-to-large businesses, so I think full source-available with licensing is very much something they could do.
They could put the code on GitHub, allowing contributions, with a license that turns into BSD or MIT after two years, and with the caveat that you can only run the (new) code if you purchase a license key first.
In companies of reasonable size, the deterent against piracy is the existence of a license itself, the actual copy protection and its strength aren't as important. The reason those companies (mostly) don't crack software isn't that the software is hard to crack, it's that their lawyers wouldn't let them.
Sure, this would make Zed somewhat easier to crack, but I think the subset of users who wouldn't use a Zed crack if Zed was binary-only but would use one if there was source code available is very small.