Zed AI

Add the following to your settings.json:

  "assistant": {
    "version": "2",
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "anthropic",
      "model": "claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620"
    }
  }
  

That was a part of the reasoning of open sourcing my AI assistant/software dev project. Companies like Google have strict procedures around access to customer data. The same can't always be said about a startup racing to not run out of cash.

I really wanted to try this out with a difficult bug, as I've had Zed installed for a while and haven't actually used it. But I have no idea if I'd get in trouble for that... even though our whole team uses VSCode which I'm sure has scanned all our codebases anyway.

I would like us as an industry to promote paying for things we use. Crazy idea, I know.

Open source is great and fun and an incredible force multiplier for the world, but when you want to do this stuff for a living, you have to charge money for it somehow, and if you're a software business, and not just software adjacent, it means charging for software.

A lot of Zed users are developers at medium-to-large businesses, so I think full source-available with licensing is very much something they could do.

They could put the code on GitHub, allowing contributions, with a license that turns into BSD or MIT after two years, and with the caveat that you can only run the (new) code if you purchase a license key first.

In companies of reasonable size, the deterent against piracy is the existence of a license itself, the actual copy protection and its strength aren't as important. The reason those companies (mostly) don't crack software isn't that the software is hard to crack, it's that their lawyers wouldn't let them.

Sure, this would make Zed somewhat easier to crack, but I think the subset of users who wouldn't use a Zed crack if Zed was binary-only but would use one if there was source code available is very small.

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.

What I'd give to have a look at the roadmaps to see how they hope to 10x/100x VC investments with a text editor and terminal.

The funny thing is Atom was the origin story of Zed, written in some C++ and a lot of Coffeescript exactly so it could be very programmable.

Also, Spacemacs? It's technically a terminal but definitely has a lot of UI features. Very programmable.

I retry it every now and then and miss the easy extensibility of Neovim. Can we build something that marries both worlds?

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.

For GNOME, the project's native text editor is: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-text-editor

It is significantly less featureful than Kate or your other apps though.

I use Kate on Windows as well.

I really love the Documents Tree plugin and could never go back to old style tabs.

notepad++ without plugins is there for linux

NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++ | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39854182

Can also recommend CotEditor for macOS as a Notepad++ replacement. Don't know how "programmable" it is or what even falls under that label.

macOS: BBEdit now and forever.

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

Neovim and Emacs extensibility are great!

Native GUIs offer far better accessibility (TUIs are not screen-reader accessible, and neither is Emacs' GUI currently), hugely improved UI flexibility and consistent developer APIs (Emacs GUI is inconsistent across platforms and tricky to work with, every Neovim plugin reinvents ways to draw modals/text input because there's no consistent API), reduced redraw quirks, better performance, better debugging (as a Neovim plugin dev I don't want to spend time debugging user reports that relate to the user's choice of terminal emulator this week and not to Neovim or my plugin code).

If a motivated solo dev thought there might be at least 10,000 people who would pay 100 USD a year for a text editor with better extensibility and performance than VS Code and better defaults/richer GUI APIs than vim/Emacs, I can see why it might be tempting for them to try.

I understood it as not a wrapped web application, like Electron or Tauri based applications.

Using the same platform-specific graphics API the OS vendor builds their GUI apps with, ideally, but I'll also settle for "not a TUI, not a web application shipped as a desktop app, even if the OS vendor currently builds their GUI apps as web applications shipped as desktop apps".

A GUI that uses native controls and platform UI conventions with the native behavior expected on the given platform, or a near-indistinguishable equivalent of that.

Not electron

Emacs? (I don't have any WinUI 3 machines so can't verify, but does support GTK and AppKit if built with such support).

Not Firefox?

> Extensions can add the following capabilities to Zed: Languages, Themes, Slash Commands

This is a great start but it's far from what most would accept as "programmable" or richly extensible.

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

Codeium works well but I really like the copilot chat plugin as well - it generally does a good job of explaining highlighted code, fixing errors, and other code interactions.

I tried codeium for 6 months and eventually went back to copilot. I think codeium is tier 2

I’ve been likewise surprised. The code part is fine; I’m impressed but not “worried it will take my job” impressed.

Where it really shines for me is repetitive crap I would usually put off. The other day I was working with an XML config and creating a class to store the config so it could be marshalled/unmarshalled.

It picked up on the sample config file in the repo and started auto-suggesting attributes from the config file, in the order they appear in the config file, even though the config was camel cased and my attributes were snake cased.

The only thing it didn’t do correctly was expand a certain acronym in variable names like I had done on other attributes. In fairness, the acronym is unclear, which is why I was expanding it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a human did the same.

Are you referring to cursor or zed here as really good? It’s unclear to me as somebody that doesn’t regularly use either.

second person to share this with me recently, will have to try it out. Looks pretty alpha, but interesting

its a bit more than that, you can clearly see that the decoding speed is super fast

Lots of golang kubernetes work these days.

Stackoverflow is used when im stuck and searching around for an answer. Its not attempting to do the work for me. At a code level I almost never copy paste from stackoverflow.

I also utilize claud and 4o at the same time while attempting to solve a problem but they are rarely able to help.

Not GP, but the kind of search I do mostly are:

- Does this language have X (function, methods,...) probably because I know X from another language and X is what I need. If it does not, I will code it.

- How do I write X again? Mostly when I'm coming back to a language I haven't touch for a while. Again I know what I want to do, just forgot the minutia about how to write it.

- Why is X happening? Where X is some cryptic error from the toolchain. Especially with proprietary stuff. There's also how to do X where X is a particular combination of steps and the documentation is lacking. I heard to forums in that case to know what's happening or get sample code.

I only need the manual/references for the first two. And the last one needs only be done once. Accuracy is a key thing for these use cases and I'd prefer snippets and scaffold (deterministic) instead of LLMs for basic code generation.

I'm just as baffled by the people who use stackoverflow daily. Its increasingly rare that I use it these days, to the point where I deleted my account a few years back and haven't missed it. Don't people read docs anymore? In many ways I feel lucky that I learned at a time when I only had offline docs, which forced me to become good at understanding documentation since its all I had.

Do you use stack overflow for every keystroke?

> If it did not then I dont see how looking up with AI can be worse

Looking up with AI is worse because its WRONG a lot more. Random rabbit holes, misdirection. Stuff that SOUNDS right but is not. It takes a lot of time and energy to discern the wheat from the chaff.

Sure you can find misleading or outdated blogposts or forum discussions with a google search but the information is far more grounded in correctness then anything from an LLM.

What’s the point of this argument? If the user you’re replying to has been on this site, they’ve probably seen this counterpoint before.

“Aha!” They say, “I only realized my folly after the 25th time someone pointed out googling also takes time!”

Maybe there’s some interesting difference in experiences that shouldn’t just be dismissed.

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 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?

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.

It isn't always the piece of code that is hard to read. It's about how it fits into the 200,000+ line application you're working with, what it was trying to solve, whether it solved the right problem, and whether there will be unexpected interactions.

> No one should be submitting code that's difficult to understand

what? ok. Nice ideals.

Ah interesting. I missed that when browsing the page.

Can you make the diff side-by-side? I’ve always hated the “inline” terminal style diff view. My brain just can’t parse it. I need the side-by-side view that lets me see what the actual before/after code is.

I was not telling about the credit card data obviously, they have much more data they can actually sell.

In my opinion, storing someone's credit card data online after purchase, without a clear option to delete it should be illegal.

People that don't like Bash|Zsh|... and are afraid of ImageMagick|ffmpeg|curl|...'s manuals and want AI to generate the perfect script for them.

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

Same here. If I found Zed now I would probably avoid it, but having tried it already I'm glad to have it, and will just turn off the intrusive bits.

This comment is not correct.

Java uses mixed Latin1/UTF-16 strings. The Latin1 mode is used for compact storage of alphanumeric text as the name suggests: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/1ebf2cf639300728ffc02478...

- 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.

Everywhere I've worked, most users (including devs) are on Windows. Windows is the major OS in enterprise environments, it's a huge mistake to not support it imo.

None of that matters in practice, because in this context it would be trivial to solve with a correctly built OS abstraction layer.

And Windows is by large the development platform of choice for any serious gamedev work.

* Both Linux and MacOS are unices, there is less effort.

* The framework they use supports X11 and Wayland out of the box, it wasn't as much effort as you'd think.

* They accept contributions.

For the kinds of devs they've hired, Windows is the third most common development or production environment. I've worked at startups like this for 20 years and haven't touched a windows system.

I realize yall are out there, but from where I'm sitting, this isn't odd at all. They're likely most familiar with and using Unixes.

In my case:

CPU: 12th Gen Intel i7-1255U (12) @ 4.700GHz

GPU: Intel Device 46a8

In my understanding Zed is "Figma for code". Huge focus on collaboration (hence the slogan "multiplayer code editor") and AI.

It's hard for me to understand what text editor itself has to do with LLM completions.

What made you switch?

Right, LLM integration should be a huge boon for junior developers.

Hey! I'm Nate from Zed. You can also use the /file command to drop entire directories, or even globs into the assistant.

For example, you can do /file *.rs to load all of the rust files in your project into context.

Here is a simple but real example I used a while back:

"/file zed/crates/gpui/src/text_system.rs

I have a font I want to check if it exists on the system. I currently have a &'static str.

Is there something in here that will help me do that?"

I haven't interfaced with the lower level TextSystem that much, so rather than dig through 800 lines of code, I was able to instantly find `is_font_available()` and do what I needed to do.

Yep fixed!

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.

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

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.

Hooking into standard APIs like Ollama is definitely preferred (at least to me) because it means it’s more composable and modular. Very Unix-y. Lets you use whatever works for you instead of the vendor.

You're right, it's not comparable. Jetbrain's code completion actually integrates with the IDE to guarantee the suggested code isn't entirely a hallucination -- for example it checks for unresolved references so that its suggestions don't reference non-existent variables/methods.

I've disabled Copilot as it produces garbage way too often. I found myself "pausing" to wait for the suggestion that I'd ultimately ignore because it was completely invalid. I've left Jetbrain's code completion on though because it's basically just a mildly "smarter" autocomplete that I'll occasionally use / I don't find myself relying on.

I don’t see programming getting exponentially harder. So eventually local compute will catch up with programming needs and offline AI will be pretty good.

For those who don't have the latitude of uploading their code to Microsoft servers, smaller, limited but fully local AI is better than nothing.

I mainly use PyCharm and I found the auto-complete to be good. It doesn't always kick in when I expect but some of the suggestions have been surprisingly complex and correct.

> AI autocomplete is just a toy

I disagree, when I'm writing code and it just autocompletes the line for me with the correct type with the correct type params set for the generics it saves me the mental effort having to scroll around the file to find the exact type signature I needed. For these small edits it's always right if the information is in the file.

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...

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 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.

Zed is trying to position itself as a next gen hackers editor. Text editing with lessons learned from the multitude of experiments in the space. A flagship feature that is online only and requires me to trust a third party is a deal breaker to many. For instance, my employer would not be pleased if I suddenly started sharing code with another.

Take the AI out of the conversation: if you told your employer you shared the codebase, that’s an insta-fire kind of move.

IntelliJ is an IDE, though, not a text editor. If you want a text editor with AI, you may need to wait for Microsoft to bring ChatGPT to notepad.

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.

It's "Find and replace" that makes my blood boil. I won't stand for it.