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Zed AI

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Re: Zed AI

#241

Post by Cu3PO42 »

golergka wrote: post #62
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My immediate instinct was to agree with you whole-heartedly. Then I remembered that Copilot has an "Explain this" button that I never click. Maybe this is because I'm just not used to it, maybe the workflow isn't good enough, or maybe it's because I don't trust the model enough to summarize things correctly. I do agree that this is an area that could use improvement and I see a lot of utility there.

This is great feature, but targeted mostly at junior developers who don't yet understand how particular library or framework work. But when I read the code, I spend most of my effort trying to understand what did original developer meant by this, and LLMs are not yet very helpful in that regard.

I partially agree with you: not knowing what particular functions etc. do is one use case, another for me would be to detangle complicated control flow.

Even if I can reason about each line individually, sometimes code is just complicated and maintains invariants that are never specified anywhere. Some of that can come down to "what were the constraints at the time and what did we agree on", but sometimes it's just complicated even if it doesn't have to be. The latter is something I would love for a LLM to simplify, but I just don't trust it to do that consistently correct.

Re: Zed AI

#243

Post by lenkite »

modernerd wrote: post #32

I 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.

> with a native GUI

This means 100x more effort in the long run for a cross platform editor. Maybe if developers lived for 200 years, this could be possible. Will need to solve human ageing problem before the cross platform "native GUI" problem.

Re: Zed AI

#244

Post by jstummbillig »

janice1999 wrote: post #22
jstummbillig wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it shows is that it can be done — in a limited way. Other people might not like those limits and chose to go a different way. I am not sure what's worth lamenting here.

> I am not sure what's worth lamenting here. The normalisation of surrendering all our code to remove AI cloud gods maybe? The other being a super responsive IDE now having major features have network requests delaying them, although HW requirements likely make that faster for most people.

That sounds a little too spooky for my taste, but you do you. What anything beyond that means, in effect, is that you (not necessarily you) want to chose my values for me (not necessarily me).

I don't see why I should care to have you do that.

Re: Zed AI

#245

Post by onel »

modernerd wrote: post #32

I 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.

I would also cast my vote for sublime text. The performance is amazing, the defaults are great and the extensions cover a lot of the use cases

Re: Zed AI

#246

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

siscia wrote: post #39
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My immediate instinct was to agree with you whole-heartedly. Then I remembered that Copilot has an "Explain this" button that I never click. Maybe this is because I'm just not used to it, maybe the workflow isn't good enough, or maybe it's because I don't trust the model enough to summarize things correctly. I do agree that this is an area that could use improvement and I see a lot of utility there.

My issue is not explaining how the code work. My issue is understanding why the code exists at all. The default workflow is to follow the commit history until I don't get to where and when the code in it's current shape was introduced. Then trying reading the commit message that generally link to a ticket and then acquire from tribal knowledge of the team why it was done like that. If it is still necessary, what can…

AI could help with this. It could pull the version history for a chunk of code you have highlighted, pull up the related tickets, sift through them, and then try to summarize from commit messages and comments on the ticket why this was added.

What I could have used the other day was "find the commit where this variable became unused". I wanted to know if the line that used it was intentionally deleted or if it got lost in a refactor. I eventually found it but I had to click through dozens of commits to find the right one.

Re: Zed AI

#247

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

andrepd wrote: post #5
mikkelam wrote: post #2

Ive been using Zed's assistant panel heavily and have really enjoyed the experience. The UI can be a bit frustrating. Sometimes, when you write it's hard to get it to send your query. The new /workflow seems to really bridge the last gap to effectively edit the parts that im asking for help with changes. I'm already paying for OpenAI API access, definitely gonna try this

It's the opposite for me ahaha. I'm very excited for Zed as a performant and powerful text editor, an "updated + open-source sublime text" if you will. But I have absolutely no interest in AI and copilot and github integrations and whatnot. This is not a criticism of zed though, I simply have no interest. Much the contrary: I can only praise Zed as to how simple it is to disable all these integrations!

Is it simple? https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6756

Re: Zed AI

#248

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

koito17 wrote: post #142
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…

- Why is unicode an issue? The editor should use UTF-8. I don't think its forced to follow the Windows standard if they have their own font rendering? - Filenames is an issue, but it shouldn't be too hard to pull in a path library to do most of that for you. Which is why you should code for Windows from the start because you will quickly realize, oh yeah, maybe I couldn't hardcode forward slashes everywhere because it's going to be a pain to refactor later. And oh yeah, maybe case-insensitivity is a thing that exists. - Text encoding..? Just don't do that. Encode it the same way. Every modern editor, including Notepad, can handle \n instead of \r\n now. You needn't be re-encoding code that was pulled down from Git or whatever. - Also don't see why UUIDs are relevant - Limit on open files is probably a legit issue. But can be worked around of course.

Anyway, none of these sound like major hurdles. I think the bigger hurdles are going to be low-level APIs that Rust probably doesn't have nice wrappers for. File change notifications and... I don't know what. Managing windows. Drivers.

Re: Zed AI

#250

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

bearjaws wrote: post #97

You can do this with aider in any IDE: https://aider.chat/ I think the focus on speed is great, but I don't feel my IDE's speed has held me back in a decade.

What has slowed me down is all the garbage pop ups and things that get in my way. Every time I open VSCode it tries reconnecting to some SSH I had open before it lets me do anything. And god forbid I have two different workspaces. The constant "what's new" and "please update me now"s don't help either.

I love IntelliJ but it does not start up quickly, which is a problem if I just want to look at a little code snippet.

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