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Zed AI

zed.dev

71–80 of 299 posts

Re: Zed AI

#71

I recently switched from neovim to zed, and I overall like Zed. I miss telescope, and think some vim navigation was better, but I suspect that it has to do with how much effort I put into configuring one over the other, so time will tell. 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…

After using Cursor for some hobby stuff, it's really good. I was surprised at how well it managed the context, and the quick suggestions as you're refactoring really add up since they're generally exactly what I was about to do.

Re: Zed AI

#72
post #28

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?

[deleted]

Re: Zed AI

#73
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 was trying to express exactly what you say!

Sorry if it wasn't clear.

Not only the intention, but also the reason behind it.

Re: Zed AI

#74

[flagged]

I love AI and think Zed is dropping the ball big time here. How can they focus their limited resources into developing shitty AI extensions when they should be focusing on absolute deal-breakers, like cross-platform support?

Nobody cares that they can't use Claude on Zed. Everyone cares that they can't use Zed on Windows.

Re: Zed AI

#75

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…

"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."

That's exactly what this new set of Zed features lets you do.

Here's an animated GIF demo: https://gist.github.com/simonw/520fcd8ad5580e538ad16ed2d8b87...

Re: Zed AI

#76

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.

There's two ways to make extensions to Zed, providing context for AI. In the post they show off making a Rust -> WASM based extension and also mention a server based model. There's also a third option -- Zed is open source. You don't have to use their auth, it just makes collaboration easy.

we call the latter a "Context Server", basically any process that communicates via JSON-RPC over stdio can do it. documentation for that is here: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/context-servers

Re: Zed AI

#77
post #49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI autocomplete is just a toy, it has been there since the begining of AI code and I find it pretty useless. I prefer making a proper prompt to get better answers. Also most of the time engineers (use AI to) modify existing codebases rather than making new code.

What programming languages do you mostly work in? I've been wondering if the benefits of AI-autocomplete are more material to people who work in languages like Python and JavaScript that are harder to provide IDE-based autocomplete for. If you're a Java or TypeScript developer maybe the impact is reduced because you already have great autocomplete by default.

I think typescript benefits even more than JavaScript because the type signatures add so much context. After defining the types and signatures copilot will often complete the body within a few changes of perfect

Re: Zed AI

#78

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…

Emacs + gptel supports this: https://github.com/karthink/gptel/tree/master?tab=readme-ov-...

Re: Zed AI

#79
It’s great news that they provide it for free. It’s hard to subscribe to all the LLM providers. Even with a pro subscription, you need to buy credits to be able to use with the editors, which gets very expensive if you use them a lot.

On another side, I really like the experience of coding with GitHub Copilot. It suggests code directly in your editor without needing to switch tabs or ask separately. It feels much more natural and faster than having to switch tabs and request changes from an AI, which can slow down the coding process.

Re: Zed AI

#80
post #47
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI autocomplete is just a toy, it has been there since the begining of AI code and I find it pretty useless. I prefer making a proper prompt to get better answers. Also most of the time engineers (use AI to) modify existing codebases rather than making new code.

Google's systematic, quantitative evaluation of AI coding assistance tools disagrees with your personal and anecdotal findings (which agrees with many other similar studies): https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-g...

I don't see a comparison to Non-GenAI auto complete there.

Eclipse wrote half my code characters 15 years ago.

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