Zed AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Zed AI

#271

Post by dualogy » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:07 PM UTC

lenkite wrote: post #243

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.

For a text editor UI, it really isn't quite so challenging: see Sublime Text, or TextAdept, and others mentioned across this sub-thread.

Re: Zed AI

#272

Post by stemlord » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 4:19 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #237

stemlord wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? What do you see wrong with having gpt spit out a complicated ffmpeg filter chain and explaining every step of the output, which you can then look up in the docs and unit test before implementing? I find verifying the gpt output is still quicker than consulting giant wall of text man pages

Fish and learning to fish. The latter widens your perspective and give you more options, especially if there are a lot of rivers nearby!

You are saying one should learn to fish with a spear not a fishing rod

Re: Zed AI

#273

Post by Janymos » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 4:58 PM UTC

Tried Zed AI for a bit as a heavy user of Cursor, a few thoughts - I like that they are trying something different with the assistant panel view by providing end users full control of the context as opposed to Cursor's "magic" approach. There is a huge tradeoff between the granularity of control and efficiency however. The friction for manually filling in context for the assistant window might repel devs from using it constantly. - Zed AI is still missing a lot of UX details in terms of their inline assistant capabilities. e.g. pressing ctrl+? for inline assist only selects the current line, and users will have to manually select a block of code for inline assist, which is really annoying. In cursor, cmd+k automatically selects the surrounding code block - Definitely a huge plus that we get to choose our own LLM providers with Zed AI.

Re: Zed AI

#274

Post by jmloop » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 7:35 PM UTC

impulser_ wrote: post #126

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.

To be fair, you can turn off all the AI stuff with a single config. "assistant": { "enabled": false, }

It doesn't mean your code is NOT being uploaded somewhere. They could add an easy switch to use the editor 'offline', not that they have to. I'll go back to Helix.

Re: Zed AI

#275

Post by amkkma » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

Janymos wrote: post #273

Tried Zed AI for a bit as a heavy user of Cursor, a few thoughts - I like that they are trying something different with the assistant panel view by providing end users full control of the context as opposed to Cursor's "magic" approach. There is a huge tradeoff between the granularity of control and efficiency however. The friction for manually filling in context for the assistant window might repel devs from using i…

I think Zed is starting with a more transparent elegant foundations and then they'll build in more optional magic from there. For example, they're working on automatic codebase RAG

Re: Zed AI

#276

Post by amkkma » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:24 PM UTC

jvmancuso wrote: post #123

swyx wrote: post #7

am 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?

- open-source vs closed fork of vscode - transparent assistant panel vs opaque composer. you control your own prompts (cf. [0]) - in Zed the assistant panel is "just another editor", which means you can inline-assist when writing prompts. super underrated feature imo - Zed's assistant is pretty hackable as well, you can add slash commands via native Zed extensions [1] or non-native, language-agnostic Context Servers…

Two areas where I think Zed might fall behind: Cursor Tab is REALLY good and probably requires some finetuning/ML chops and some boutique training data.

For composer, there's going to be more use of "shadow workspace" https://www.cursor.com/blog/shadow-workspace to create an agentic feedback loop/ objective function for codegen along with an ability to navigate the language server and look up definitions and just generally have full context like an engineer. Are there plans for the same in zed?

Also, cursor has a model agnostic apply model, whereas you all are leaning on claude.

Re: Zed AI

#277

Post by amkkma » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

iamnbutler wrote: post #158

swyx wrote: post #7

am 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 "…

Hey! I really see the power in Zed and the extensibility and simplicity. Great approach.

I posted this above, but want you to see it:

Two areas where I think Zed might fall behind: Cursor Tab is REALLY good and probably requires some finetuning/ML chops and some boutique training data.

For composer, there's going to be more use of "shadow workspace" https://www.cursor.com/blog/shadow-workspace to create an agentic feedback loop/ objective function for codegen, along with an ability to navigate the language server and look up definitions and just generally have full context like an engineer

Also, cursor has a model agnostic apply model, whereas you all are leaning on claude.

Any plans to address this from the core team or more of a community thing? I think some of this might be a heavy lift

I really like the shared context idea, and the transparency and building primitives for an ecosystem

Re: Zed AI

#278

Post by dartos » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 2:32 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #205

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…

Leave it open source exactly as it is now, do not put convenient downloadable binaries up on Github. Allow me to either compile it myself or pay for the binaries? There must be some other way to monetize open source.

Selling support or consulting services.

It just takes time to grow that.

Re: Zed AI

#279

Post by fastball » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 2:59 AM UTC

gloosx wrote: post #236

Anthropic is an evil company. I wanted to try their subscription for a month, now they are storing my credit card info forever without an option to remove it, yet a single click of a button will instantly resubscribe me. I don't understand how one can seriously think they will not sell all your data at the first opportunity to make money, cause with such shady subscription/payment practices it instantly gives a money…

Fairly certain selling people's credit card data is illegal and something Anthropic will not be doing.

Re: Zed AI

#280

Post by fastball » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 3:00 AM UTC

tdomhan wrote: post #232

thm76 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I enable Zed AI? I'm logged in, using Zed Preview, and selecting the model does nothing. In the configuration it says I "must accept the terms of service to use this provider" but I don't see where and how I can do that.

I'm having the same problem.

Ditto.

EDIT: figured it out. My Zed settings was broken, because it tries to create a settings file in "~/.config/zed", and my entire "~/.config" directory is symlinked somewhere else, so macOS permissions broke Zed's ability to create that config file. So I gave Zed full-disk access in the macOS "Privacy & Security" settings, Zed is now able to make a config file (which is where the model is set when you choose one), and everything is hunky dory.