31–40 of 299 posts
I had hope Zed would be a good editor for junior developers, but that ship apparently has sailed, and it's destination isn't where we need to go.
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.
The main issue with these set of tools is that I mostly read and understand code more than writing it myself. Not enough attention is been given to this imbalance. It is impressive having an AI that can write code for you, but an AI that helps me understand which code we (as a team) should write would be much more useful.
Personally, I think the problem is that if the AI got it wrong, it would waste you a lot of time trying to figure out whether it's wrong or not. It's similar to outdated comments.
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 trust the Zed engineering team much more to nail this.
I am very excited about this announcement. I hope they shift focus from the real-time features (make no sense to me) to AI.
JetBrains ships a local, offline AI auto-complete in PyCharm. Sure it's limited, but it shows it can be done. It's a pity other companies aren't trying the same, especially this one that boasts about millisecond editing times. Edit: JetBrains, not IntelliJ. Auto-complete details - https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/04/04/full-line-code-co...
How is typing "Add the WhileExpression struct here" better or easier than copy/pasting it with keyboard and/or mouse?
I want something that more quickly and directly follows my intent, not makes me play a word game. (I'm also worried it will turn into an iterative guessing game, where I have to find the right prompt to get it to do what I want, and check it for errors at every step.)
JetBrains ships a local, offline AI auto-complete in PyCharm. Sure it's limited, but it shows it can be done. It's a pity other companies aren't trying the same, especially this one that boasts about millisecond editing times. Edit: JetBrains, not IntelliJ. Auto-complete details - https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/04/04/full-line-code-co...
What's the impact on laptop battery life roughly, when you have a local LLM constantly running in the background of your text editor?
It seems to be limited to a single CPU core at a time, so depending on your CPU boosting settings, some but not too much.
It's quite snappy despite not using a lot of resources. I tried replicating the effect using a CUDA-based alternative but I could get neither the snappiness nor the quality out of that.
The main issue with these set of tools is that I mostly read and understand code more than writing it myself. Not enough attention is been given to this imbalance. It is impressive having an AI that can write code for you, but an AI that helps me understand which code we (as a team) should write would be much more useful.
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.
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 we do today instead, etc...
And similarly when designing new code that needs to integrate on existing piece of code... Why there are such constraints in place? Why was it done like that? Who in the team know best?
Hrm. Still not quite what I crave. Here's roughly what I want. I want to be able to highlight some block of code, ask the AI to modify it in some way, and then I want to see a diff view of before/after that lets me accept or reject changes. LLMs often get code slightly wrong. That's fine! Doesn't bother me at all. What I need is an interface that allows me to iterate on code AND helps me understand the changes. As a…