My problem with AI in Zed is not that it's there, but that it feels like it's always behind in AI code editor paradigms. They were pretty late to the party to add edit predictions, and their agent UX is pretty behind the game. Recently, Cursor added background agents which I feel is a game changer and I now feel it's a deal breaker when choosing an editor.
It makes me wonder if choosing to build their own GUI framework in Rust was the right move. Zed is a great code editor, but for me, it's not a great AI code editor.
You can now disable all AI features in Zed
51–60 of 277 posts
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#52Sadly, I came back to using VS Code recently. There's a lot to like in Zed but imo that decision to write their own rendering framework is unfortunate, because of ridiculous problems in Linux still not resolved like poor font rendering, especially on low-DPI screens, or visible lags of UI which is being developed to be blazingly fast. So far, VS Code is faster for me.
Doing their own rendering is one of the most attractive things about it imo. I am on macos though.
Even on a mac the text rendering is wonky though, like it isn’t processing the metrics correctly or something.
At least it is noticeably fast.
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#53Something tells me that disabling AI is going to age about as well as disabling JavaScript. Even so, I like what Zed is doing here.
Disabling JS is incredibly beneficial for browser performance, battery life, privacy/tracking protection. As an added bonus, it protects you from malware from all the vulnerabilities in Javascript engines.
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#54I did 4 months of Cursor. Figured I’d try 4 months of Zed, and see from there. I’m about 3 months in and so far might stick with it. I’ve generally been pleased with it. My only issues really have been
a) all the settings are just in a file, not even a commented skeleton, and with a decent change rate, hard to invest in learning them; I’d love something like the jetbrains settings dialog
b) the stupid placement of the burn mode button; it’s so easy to accidentally turn this on and not realize (done it twice now). Would love an option to just remove said button
c) I wish there was more panel control; I’d like to place outline and project views BOTH in a panel, but you only get two full height tools in the left/right panels.
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#55My problem with AI in Zed is not that it's there, but that it feels like it's always behind in AI code editor paradigms. They were pretty late to the party to add edit predictions, and their agent UX is pretty behind the game. Recently, Cursor added background agents which I feel is a game changer and I now feel it's a deal breaker when choosing an editor. It makes me wonder if choosing to build their own GUI framewo…
I haven't used background tasks/agents in cursor. Could you provide an example for stuff that you use it for?
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#56Something tells me that disabling AI is going to age about as well as disabling JavaScript. Even so, I like what Zed is doing here.
Disagree. The tab completion is very annoying when you’re trying to type. I know, I know, AI hipsters think typing code is so 15 minutes ago. Get off my lawn/keyboard.
Its agent AI assistant isn’t bad but sadly the restore points button in the AI panel seemed to be broken.
The fact it reminds me of sublime text is a big plus for me.
The rust evangelism is annoying. Really. No one cares what language a program is written it.
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#57{
"disable_ai": true
}
That creates a system with a potential double negative (disable is false) which is unclear.
It's cleaner to do:
{ "enable_ai": false }
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#58I am really, really starting to like Zed. I noticed recently that it now respects my EditorConfig files, which was one of my biggest gripes before recently. In general almost everything that I didn't love about Zed has been fixed. I have only tried it a couple of times, but Zed's AI assistant view indeed works as promised, doing about as well as Cursor does. Now there's just one thing that is a bit annoying... It's k…
> I don't know if there's anything we can do to make sure Zed succeeds sustainably and doesn't eventually get enshittified, but I'm crossing my fingers that for once we can have nice things. This is a good conversation to have. We can start by pointing this out and encouraging broader interest. Zed has been my daily driver for over a year. I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the incentives are not pointe…
> I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the incentives are not pointed in the right direction. Unless developers are paying directly for the functionality they want, that's misalignment. So enshittification seems probable, maybe inevitable, unless something structural changes.
Exactly.
AI autocomplete I just don't care about. OK, but they do offer an AI subscription service. I'm using LLMs almost not at all currently, but at least right now this does seem like a viable path to getting a lot of money. I worry, though, that in the long run, the margins will just get squeezed by competition here, especially when a lot of deep-pocketed competitors can charge nearly nothing and get away with it. Zed also very nicely offers the ability to drop in an API key for their AI agent features... which is awesome and the right thing to do, but not good for profitability.
Obviously, the issue with simply charging money like Jetbrains is that Jetbrains already has built a world where they have a super complete IDE package and even then they only really charge a relatively small amount per month for the privilege. It works because for software the development costs for a given piece of software is relatively "fixed" (not entirely, but close enough) whereas the revenue you get grows as you acquire users. But now that the market is saturated, it's going to be hard for someone to jump in and try to be like Jetbrains in any way, and if you're charging money it's even harder to compete with most of the other code editors that are ~free.
Worse, it's hard to charge money and remain completely open source. Linux users will mostly not even realize you're doing it because the packages will just keep working for free since the software is open source. And Zed really does benefit from being open source, maybe more than many other open source offerings; it really seems like the community did a lot of work on making Zed work well on Linux. (By the way, if any of you who worked on the Wayland support for GPUI happens to read this, thank you very much for the excellent work.) So it's hard to say "just go closed source!"
I hope Zed Industries got a good deal on whatever funding they received and are being somewhat conservative with their funding too. Even though it's hard to compete in this market, they've built something that is very hard to build and basically not paralleled as far as I'm concerned. There's clearly something here and finding a less shitty path to monetizing it would be very, very good for us all.
(And I am willing to pay, though I know they need to find something that will make a lot of people want to pay, not just people like me.)
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#59Zed has everything I want out of an editor, the AI stuff wasn't really a concern to me since its always been optional, but I fully appreciate where they're coming from. I think Zed is one of the good gems of our time. I have been looking for a decent spiritual successor to Sublime, and Zed to me is really good at it.
Re: You can now disable all AI features in Zed
#60This gives me hope they might fix collaboration too. Unfortunately had to switch to VSCode Liveshare (which has its own problems) a few times because Zeds collaboration was so broken.