You can now disable all AI features in Zed • Hacker News Board

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#171

Post by vouaobrasil » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #164

vouaobrasil wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, enable/disable is a dichotomy, and is not a set of two dichotomies. Second, imagine an editor that has AI running in the background, scanning your files. "Enable_AI" could just mean enable the visibility of the feature to actually use the results. On the other hand, it would sound more suspicious if there were some background AI tasks running, even for training purposes, if "disable_AI" were "True" as c…

I don't buy your argument. > ==== Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the background, but AI_Disable is TRUE? Defendent: But Disable_AI just means disabling the use of the output

Well, I guess we'll see then. Or not.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#172

Post by bheadmaster » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

vouaobrasil wrote: post #150

whilenot-dev wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

First of all, enable/disable is a dichotomy, and is not a set of two dichotomies. Second, imagine an editor that has AI running in the background, scanning your files. "Enable_AI" could just mean enable the visibility of the feature to actually use the results. On the other hand, it would sound more suspicious if there were some background AI tasks running, even for training purposes, if "disable_AI" were "True" as c…

> Enable_AI COULD have the connotation (to some) of just enabling the visibility of the feature, whereas Disable_AI gives more of a sense of shutting it off.

Personally, I don't feel much difference between the two. I doubt that an average reasonable person would either.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#173

Post by bobajeff » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

I'm glad they decided to add this. I still want the ability to disable all the account login stuff part of the UI. So i hope they make that as an option too. Since, I don't like signing into my software.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#174

Post by loeg » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

Weird that it wasn't optional before, right? Not sure if this is related to the recent stories of AI agents nuking people's code, but that's just one more reason to make it optional.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#175

Post by ivanjermakov » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

leafmeal wrote: post #98

The thing that's so sticky for me with JetBrains IDEs is their run configurations. Being able to configure all of the environment variables etc. for the actual code that I need to run, especially when connecting to a debugger or tests integrated with the IDE. I haven't seen anyone else complain about this so I figure I must be missing something. Does Zed let you set up run configurations like this? If not, how do use…

For personal projects I just use npm scripts or make

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#176

Post by whilenot-dev » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:25 PM UTC

vouaobrasil wrote: post #150

whilenot-dev wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

First of all, enable/disable is a dichotomy, and is not a set of two dichotomies. Second, imagine an editor that has AI running in the background, scanning your files. "Enable_AI" could just mean enable the visibility of the feature to actually use the results. On the other hand, it would sound more suspicious if there were some background AI tasks running, even for training purposes, if "disable_AI" were "True" as c…

======= Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the background but AI_Disable is set to true?

Defendent: But Disable_AI just means disabling the use of the output! ====

==== Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the background, but AI_Enable is FALSE?

Defendent: Uh.... ====

...it cuts both ways, sorry.

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#177

Post by vouaobrasil » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:27 PM UTC

bheadmaster wrote: post #172

vouaobrasil wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, enable/disable is a dichotomy, and is not a set of two dichotomies. Second, imagine an editor that has AI running in the background, scanning your files. "Enable_AI" could just mean enable the visibility of the feature to actually use the results. On the other hand, it would sound more suspicious if there were some background AI tasks running, even for training purposes, if "disable_AI" were "True" as c…

> Enable_AI COULD have the connotation (to some) of just enabling the visibility of the feature, whereas Disable_AI gives more of a sense of shutting it off. Personally, I don't feel much difference between the two. I doubt that an average reasonable person would either.

Well, I do feel a distinct connotational difference, but then again, I could be the only one I suppose. And if the average person doesn't care, then why argue about it at all? And how many average people will be using Zed anyway?

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#178

Post by vouaobrasil » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:27 PM UTC

whilenot-dev wrote: post #176

vouaobrasil wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, enable/disable is a dichotomy, and is not a set of two dichotomies. Second, imagine an editor that has AI running in the background, scanning your files. "Enable_AI" could just mean enable the visibility of the feature to actually use the results. On the other hand, it would sound more suspicious if there were some background AI tasks running, even for training purposes, if "disable_AI" were "True" as c…

======= Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the background but AI_Disable is set to true? Defendent: But Disable_AI just means disabling the use of the output! ==== ==== Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the background, but AI_Enable is FALSE? Defendent: Uh.... ==== ...it cuts both ways, sorry.

Perhaps. I could be the only one that senses a difference, but for those that hate AI like I do, "disable" sounds better than "enable".

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#179

Post by mikaylamaki » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:29 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #117

vishalmullur wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a year ago (or couple of months ago, I can’t recall) but I found out about Zed and since I was learning Rust, I wanted to contribute. But then I saw that they have a CLA. So while it won’t be easy to go closed source and not upset their users, it definitely is possible. Any contributions, no matter how important, are already covered by the CLA. I did not contribute anymore after seeing the CLA

Ah yeah, they have a CLA that forces you to give them a carte blanche copyright license to contributions and they also restrict dependencies to be ones with permissive licensing too. Pretty obvious what's going on here. I hate seeing it happen, though.

FWIW, we plan to sell "enterprise" builds of Zed with SSO, centralized plugin repositories, business-hosted infra, etc. etc. The sorts of features developers don't care about but businesses do. To do that, we have to be able to re-license the codebase and apply these changes. We have a lot of other ideas for business sustainability but the core, offline code editing experience will always be freely available and open source though :)

Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed

#180

Post by whilenot-dev » Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 7:39 PM UTC

scbrg wrote: post #160

anttiharju wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet peeve is CGO_ENABLED compiler option in Go. It's set to 0 or 1 to enable/disable (can never remember which mapa to which) If it was just CGO=true or CGO=false I think so much confusion could have been avoided. I think similar thinking applies here. It's convoluted to disable something by setting ai_disable=true because I read it like: setting false true instead of just setting boolean.

This follows a convention that was well established and felt pretty ancient when I learned about environment variables in the nineties (i.e. 30 years ago). Variables that are flags enabling/disabling something use 1 to enable, and 0 to disable. I'd not be surprised if this has been pretty much standard behavior since the seventies. This is not unique to Go.

I always thought that an unset boolean env var should define the default behavior for a production environment and any of these set with a value of length>0 will flip it (AUTH_DISABLED, MOCK_ENABLED, etc.). I thought env vars are always considered optional by convention.