[HN Gopher] Zed AI
___________________________________________________________________
Zed AI
Author : dahjelle
Score : 242 points
Date : 2024-08-20 18:47 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zed.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (zed.dev)
| mikkelam wrote:
| Ive been using Zed's assistant panel heavily and have really
| enjoyed the experience. The UI can be a bit frustrating.
| Sometimes, when you write it's hard to get it to send your query.
| The new /workflow seems to really bridge the last gap to
| effectively edit the parts that im asking for help with changes.
|
| I'm already paying for OpenAI API access, definitely gonna try
| this
| andrepd wrote:
| It's the opposite for me ahaha. I'm very excited for Zed as a
| performant and powerful text editor, an "updated + open-source
| sublime text" if you will. But I have absolutely no interest in
| AI and copilot and github integrations and whatnot.
|
| This is not a criticism of zed though, I simply have no
| interest. Much the contrary: I can only praise Zed as to how
| simple it is to disable all these integrations!
| CapeTheory wrote:
| 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.
| janice1999 wrote:
| 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...
| _joel wrote:
| Interesting, have you used it/found it to be usable? I use
| IntelliJ myself, but it's not known for being a lean beast.
| With the addition of stuff like test containers and a few
| plugins, I'd be suprised if my machine didn't melt adding a
| local LLM too.
| janice1999 wrote:
| 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.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| What it shows is that it can be done -- in a limited way. Other
| people might not like those limits and chose to go a different
| way. I am not sure what's worth lamenting here.
| janice1999 wrote:
| > 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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.
| nprateem wrote:
| Yeah but so is I sent a message to s random person about
| our business vs I sent a message to one of our suppliers
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Is Zed a supplier? Sounds like a random developer can
| sign up at will without any corporate NDAs or other
| established legal agreements. Will my employer hash out
| the NDAs for every developer tool that wants to
| incorporate cloud AI for the lulz?
| raincole wrote:
| I tried it with C#. It's not comparable to Copilot.
|
| If I've never used Copilot I might be slightly impressed.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| 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.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| The local compute problem is a cost problem, and most
| people do not have the hardware necessary and judging by
| trends this will continue for another ~decade.
| __loam wrote:
| Local compute is also getting progressively harder to make
| faster. I have a CPU from 6 years ago and checked some
| benchmarks to see if upgrades would be worth it. It's a 90%
| increase in performance with a 27% improvement in single
| threaded. Pretty substantial but not exponential. GPUs are
| advancing more quickly than CPUs right now but I wouldn't
| be surprised if they hit a wall soon.
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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.
| rileymichael wrote:
| 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.
| treesciencebot wrote:
| running a much worse model at a higher latency (since local GPU
| power is limited) is a worse experience for Zed.
| xemoka wrote:
| Zed will hook into ollama as well; so you can run your own
| locally; just not as part of the same process (yet?).
| vineyardmike wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| What's the impact on laptop battery life roughly, when you have
| a local LLM constantly running in the background of your text
| editor?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| nsonha wrote:
| 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.
| rty32 wrote:
| 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...
| lupire wrote:
| I don't see a comparison to Non-GenAI auto complete there.
|
| Eclipse wrote half my code characters 15 years ago.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| cjonas wrote:
| 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
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Why do you need an LLM for that? That basic type inference.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| i dont know what statically typed language you are using
| that never requires specifying types. As far as i know
| only ocaml works this way.
|
| Different languages support different levels of type
| inference. When im writing rust and typescript im often
| specifying types this way for structs and function
| signatures.
|
| With llms what often happens is i write a parameter or
| variable name and it infers from the name what the type
| is because i have used the same name somewhere else in my
| codebase. This would not work without llm autocomplete
| kilohotel wrote:
| sure, but if it was good more people was use it
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Maybe its because there's literally no point in using a local
| llm for code-completion. You'd be spending 90% of your time
| correcting it. Its barely worth it to use co-pilot.
| rkharsan64 wrote:
| I agree that the completions might not be that great, but for
| context: this is a 100M model, while most models that people
| compare this to are atleast 100x bigger.
|
| They also focus on single line completions, and ship different
| models per programming language. All these make it possible to
| ship a decent completion engine with a very small download
| size.
| heeton wrote:
| I'd be curious how this compares to supermaven, my current
| favourite AI autocomplete.
| jvmancuso wrote:
| Add `"features": {"inline_completion_provider": "supermaven"}`
| to your Zed settings and you can have the best of both worlds
| :D
| jmakov wrote:
| I wonder if there's already a solution that allows me to ask
| questions about local codebases. e.g. how does this subsystem
| work.
| simonw wrote:
| This feature does exactly that. You can open up the chat panel,
| run "/tab name-of-tab" or "/file path-to-file" and then start
| asking questions about the code.
| iamnbutler wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| 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?
| DevX101 wrote:
| They just launched it a few minutes ago. It's going to be a a
| while for a good review.
| diroussel wrote:
| Cursor is electron/vscode based. Zed uses a custom built rust
| UI and editor model that gives 120fps rendering. (Or was it
| 60fps)
|
| It is really smooth on a Mac with ProMotion.
| jvmancuso wrote:
| - 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 [2]
|
| - Zed's /workflow is analogous to Cursor's composer. to be
| honest it's not quite as good yet, however it's only ~1 week
| old. we'll catch up in no time :)
|
| - native rust vs electron slop. Zed itself is one of the larger
| Rust projects out there [3], can be hard to work with in VS
| Code/Cursor, but speedy in Zed itself :)
|
| [0]: https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/prompt/
|
| [1]: https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/slash-commands
|
| [2]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/context-servers
|
| [3]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2024/08/15/this-
| devel...
| iamnbutler wrote:
| 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 "context"[0]. That context can be used to have conversations,
| similar to any assistant chatbot, but can also be used to power
| transformations right in your code[1], in your terminal, when
| writing prompts in the Prompt Library...
|
| The goal is for context to be highly hackable. You can use the
| /prompt command to create nested prompts, use globs in the
| /file command to dynamically import files in a context or
| prompt... We even expose the underlying prompt templates that
| power things like the inline assistant so you can override
| them[2].
|
| This approach doesn't give us the _simplest_ or most
| approachable assistant, but we think it gives us and everyone
| else the tools to create the assistant experience that is
| actually useful to them. We try to build the things we want,
| then share it with everyone else.
|
| TL;DR: Everything is text because text is familiar and it puts
| you in control.
|
| [0]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/contexts.html
|
| [1]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/inline-assistant
|
| [2]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/prompting#overriding-
| template...
| siscia wrote:
| 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.
| teekert wrote:
| Sounds like you're better helped by something like codescene?
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| 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.
| siscia wrote:
| 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?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I get the frustration with this workflow too. This is where
| having all of your issues in Git would be great, but alas
| no one wants to collaborate in ticket comments via Git
| commits...
|
| Inevitably the issue tracker gets
| moved/replaced/deprecated, and so all of that context
| disappear into the void. The code however is eternal.
| golergka wrote:
| 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.
| siscia wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| There are a lot of tools that promise to help you understand
| existing code. However, it's a really hard problem and to me
| none of them is production ready.
|
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| No one should be submitting code that's difficult to
| understand, regardless of how it was 'written'. This problem
| exists just the same as a developer who's going to copy large
| blocks of StackOverflow without much thought.
| wnolens wrote:
| > No one should be submitting code that's difficult to
| understand
|
| what? ok. Nice ideals.
| s3tt3mbr1n1 wrote:
| Interesting that this seems to be the announcement of Anthropic's
| Copilot alternative:
|
| > A private beta of the Claude 3.5 Sonnet's new Fast Edit Mode,
| optimized for text editing. This upcoming mode achieves
| unprecedented speed in transforming existing text, enabling near-
| instantaneous code refactoring and document editing at scale.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| 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.
| marksomnian wrote:
| Seems like a non-sequitur? Why does LLM integration mean that
| Zed is less good of an editor for junior devs?
| simonw wrote:
| Right, LLM integration should be a huge boon for junior
| developers.
| retrofuturism wrote:
| Not sure if it's what GP is talking about - but haven't you
| noticed how many juniors seem to be shooting themselves in
| the foot with LLMs these days, becoming over-reliant on it
| and gaining expertise slower?
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| This is exactly what I'm talking about. Ever since LLMs
| took over, I've noticed an uptick in my fellow senior
| developers complain about the quality of work, but I've
| also seen a _huge_ increase in the poor quality of PRs to
| open source projects.
|
| Like, normally my primary complaint about LLMs is their
| copyright violating nature, and how it is hanging
| everyone who has ever published the output of an LLM out
| to dry, but unless LLM output improves, I think it may
| end up being a non-issue: their use will die out, and
| every AI startup will die, just like all the Alt-coin
| startups did.
|
| Want to change my mind on LLM quality? Have it produce
| code so good that I can't tell the difference between an
| inexperienced developer (the kind that would be hired
| into a junior role, not the kind that would be hired for
| an internship) and the output of this thing.
| simonw wrote:
| Here's one of my best documented examples:
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Apr/8/files-to-prompt/
|
| And a more recent example (writing me a Django app):
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/8/django-http-
| debug/#clau...
| simonw wrote:
| I've noticed the opposite: people who had never even
| started learning to program who are now getting stuck in
| because they don't have to wade through six months of
| weird error messages about missing semicolons to get
| started.
|
| But I guess I'm talking about complete newbie developers,
| which is a different category from junior developers.
|
| I have 25+ years experience at this point so I'm pretty
| far removed from truly understanding how this stuff
| benefits newcomers!
| TIPSIO wrote:
| Are you talking specifically about the general UX? On initial
| glance it does look a little like there is a bit more of a
| learning curve to navigate.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Not releasing a cross-platform code editor on the dominant OS
| seems quite weird in my opinion. (I know they plan to do it, but
| as someone who has built cross-platform apps, this is not rocket
| science to have Win32 support from the start.)
| ghh wrote:
| For those that want to try it, and have a rust development
| environment installed, the following runs Zed on Windows. (The
| editor part at least, I haven't tried the collaborative
| functions). git clone https://github.com/zed-
| industries/zed cargo run --release
| ksylvestre wrote:
| It's especially weird they released linux (with x11 AND wayland
| backends) before windows.
| zamalek wrote:
| * 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.
| koito17 wrote:
| Anecdotally, I have never seen Windows widely used for
| development, outside of .NET shops (but that shouldn't be a
| surprise).
|
| Moreover, there's plenty of quirks Windows has with respect to:
|
| - Unicode (UTF-16 whereas the world is UTF-8; even Java uses
| UTF-8 nowadays, so it's only Windows where UTF-8 is awkward to
| use)
|
| - filenames (lots of restrictions that don't exist on Mac or
| Linux)
|
| - text encoding (the data in the same string type changes
| depending on the user's locale)
|
| - UUIDs (stored in a mixed-endian format)
|
| - limit of open files (much lower than Mac and Linux; breaks
| tools like Git)
|
| If you write software in Java, Golang, or Node.js, you'll
| quickly encounter all of these issues and produce software with
| obscure bugs that only occur on Windows.
|
| I'm not sure about Rust, but using languages that claim cross-
| platform support isn't enough to hide the details of an OS.
|
| In every job I've had, the vast majority of devs were on Mac
| OS, with Linux coming in at a close second (usually senior
| devs). So I wasn't surprised Zed first supported Mac then
| Linux. Windows support is nice for students, game developers,
| and people maintaining legacy .NET software, but those people
| won't be paying for an editor.
| neonsunset wrote:
| 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/1ebf2cf63930072
| 8ffc02478...
| koito17 wrote:
| The _internals_ of OpenJDK may use either Latin1 or UTF-16,
| but the _Java API_ , as of Java 18, defaults to the UTF-8
| character set for string operations and text codecs.[1]
| Just like the standard APIs of Mac OS assume UTF-8 text
| even though CFString -- the underlying structure of string
| types in Objective-C and Swift -- internally uses various
| different representations to optimize memory usage.[2]
|
| [1] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/18/docs/api/java
| .base...()
|
| [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentati
| on/Co...
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| 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 concrete example I recently used Claude to help me write
| some Python matplotlib code. It took me roughly a dozen plus
| iterations. I had to use a separate diff tool so that I could
| understand what changes were being made. Blindly copy/pasting LLM
| code is insufficient.
| garbanz0 wrote:
| FWIW, that's what cursor does: https://www.trycursor.com/
| rtfeldman wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Zed does that - here's a clip of it on some Python code:
|
| https://youtu.be/6OdI6jYpw9M?t=66
| simonw wrote:
| "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...
| brewski wrote:
| Emacs + gptel supports this:
| https://github.com/karthink/gptel/tree/master?tab=readme-ov-...
| iamnbutler wrote:
| Hey, this is Nate from Zed. Give the inline assistant a try.
| Here is a little demo: https://share.cleanshot.com/F2mg2lXy
|
| You can even edit the prompt after the fact if the diff doesn't
| show what you want and regenerate without having to start all
| over.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| 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.
| iamnbutler wrote:
| Haha I actually agree - I always prefer them side by side.
|
| We don't have side-by-side diffs yet, but once we do I'll
| make sure it works here :)
| yencabulator wrote:
| I'm more in this camp:
|
| > Add build time options to disable ML/AI features
|
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6756
|
| Just give me a good editor.
| bww wrote:
| Hmm. I was excited about Zed, but it now seems painfully clear
| they're headed in a completely different direction than I'm
| interested in. Back to neovim, I guess...
| modernerd wrote:
| 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.
| lambdaops wrote:
| 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.
| jvmancuso wrote:
| 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
| modernerd wrote:
| > 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.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| Sublime Text is likely closer to what you're looking for.
| modernerd wrote:
| I retry it every now and then and miss the easy extensibility
| of Neovim. Can we build something that marries both worlds?
| meiraleal wrote:
| By we you mean anybody besides you? Complain-driven
| development.
| modernerd wrote:
| Happy to try building one to free you from complaint-
| driven motivation.
| throwaway74354 wrote:
| RIP Onivim 2, it was so close to this niche.
| jsheard wrote:
| In the case of Zed it was always inevitable, a _text editor_
| doesn 't raise >$10M in venture capital unless there's a plan
| to stuff it full of premium subscription features.
|
| Warp Terminal is a similar story, >$50M in funding for a
| terminal emulator of all things...
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Just look at Postman.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| What's your current text editor and what's wrong with it?
| kenjackson wrote:
| What does "native GUI" mean?
| lagniappe wrote:
| I understood it as not a wrapped web application, like
| Electron or Tauri based applications.
| modernerd wrote:
| 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".
| impulser_ wrote:
| To be fair, you can turn off all the AI stuff with a single
| config.
|
| "assistant": { "enabled": false, }
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I don't know of a single modern desktop application that is
| deploying front-ends simultaneously in WinUI 3, AppKit, and
| GTK.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Not Firefox?
| p4bl0 wrote:
| > I just want a fast programmable text editor with a native GUI
| and good defaults.
|
| What would that be for each OS?
|
| Linux: Kate (at least if using KDE; which one would it be for
| GTK / Gnome?)
|
| macOS: TextMate?
|
| Windows: Notepad++?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I use Kate on Windows as well.
|
| I really love the Documents Tree plugin and could never go
| back to old style tabs.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Can also recommend CotEditor for macOS as a Notepad++
| replacement. Don't know how "programmable" it is or what even
| falls under that label.
| m-s-y wrote:
| macOS: BBEdit now and forever.
| nichochar wrote:
| 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 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.
| marcelarie wrote:
| nvim has a really good cursor integration plugin
| https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim
| marcelarie wrote:
| nvim has a really good cursor integration plugin
| https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| 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.
| avarun wrote:
| Are you referring to cursor or zed here as really good? It's
| unclear to me as somebody that doesn't regularly use either.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Agreed about the AI, the last time I tried Zed I was also
| trying Cursor at the same time, and the Cursor AI integration
| vs what Zed offered was just night and day. So I got the Cursor
| subscription. But I haven't used it in 2 months (I don't get to
| code a lot in my job).
|
| This was maybe 3-4 months ago, so I'm excited to try Zed again.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Have you tried using Codeium in Neovim[0]? It may not have all
| the features shown in this post, but still quite good. I will
| admit though that I'm enticed to try out AI in Zed now.
|
| [0] https://github.com/Exafunction/codeium.nvim
| roland35 wrote:
| 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.
| jmull wrote:
| Just looking at the "inline transformations animation"...
|
| 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.)
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Can you plugin other LLMs Ala: https://dublog.net/blog/open-
| weight-copilots/
| simonw wrote:
| The Zed configuration panel includes tools for adding an
| Anthropic API key, a Google Gemini API key, an OpenAI API key
| or connecting to a local instance of ollama.
| cube2222 wrote:
| As I've said in yesterday's thread[0], contrary to many others I
| find the AI integration in Zed to be extremely smooth and
| pleasant to use, so I'm happy they're doubling down on this.
|
| However, personally, I prefer to have it configured to talk
| directly to Anthropic, to limit the number of intermediaries
| seeing my code, but in general I can see myself using this in the
| future.
|
| More importantly, I'm happy that they might be closing in on a
| good revenue stream. I don't yet see the viability of the
| collaboration feature as a business model, and I was worried
| they're gonna have trouble finding a way to sensibly monetize Zed
| and quit it at some point. This looks like a very sensible way,
| one that doesn't cannibalize the open-source offering, and one
| that I can imagine working.
|
| Fingers crossed, and good luck to them!
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41286612
| cube2222 wrote:
| 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 to do open-
| core, which is incredibly hard to pull off, as you usually end
| up cannibalizing features in the open-source version (even if
| you have contributors willing to contribute them, you block it
| to not sabotage your revenue stream).
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| 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.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's clear or not from my comments, but I
| completely agree (and pay for JetBrains editors, amongst
| other tools).
|
| Though in the case of "fundamental / ecosystem center"
| tools like code editors which e.g. others will build
| plugins for I believe there's immense value in it being
| open-source.
|
| Thus, I'm rooting for them to find a business model where
| they get our money without making it non-open-source.
| phero_cnstrcts wrote:
| As long as it is not via subscriptions...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Everyone goes to subscriptions, because trying to get new
| customers every month at a rate that pays everyone's
| salaries, at a typical engineering level, plus everyone
| else on the company, and office rental, doesn't scale,
| specially in developer tools where many prefer to suffer
| with lesser tooling than paying.
| Nathanba wrote:
| Subscriptions are only okay for me if it's done like
| Jetbrains does it, where you can keep the old versions
| permanently. Partly because it implies what has to be
| true for monthly payments to make sense: that the
| software keeps getting better and keeps getting support
| for various tech advances that happen and tools and
| databases. If I'm paying monthly for something that
| doesn't cost them anything then that feels illogical on
| my side. This should become a thing with online services
| too, at least let me keep some kind of upgraded version
| of your service after I stop paying. Something please,
| anything to make me feel less like a chump for having
| paid and then ending up with nothing in the end.
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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.
| cube2222 wrote:
| But then it wouldn't be open-source anymore, would it?
| Making the willingness of people to contribute likely much
| smaller. You don't really have the safety of having an easy
| way to fork either, if all you can fork is a 2-year old
| version (which plugins are likely not compatible with
| anymore).
|
| It would also (deservedly) likely anger a large part of the
| existing community, especially the ones most involved, like
| plugin authors, who put their time in assuming their
| contributing to an open-source ecosystem.
|
| Thus, I believe that ship has sailed the moment they made
| it open-source in the first place.
| cedws wrote:
| >However, personally, I prefer to have it configured to talk
| directly to Anthropic, to limit the number of intermediaries
| seeing my code, but in general I can see myself using this in
| the future.
|
| Same. I can kind of feel OK about my code going to Anthropic,
| but I can't have it going through another third party as well.
|
| This is unfortunately IT/security's worst nightmare. Thousands
| of excitable developers are going to be pumping proprietary
| code through this without approval.
|
| (I have been daily driving Zed for a few months now - I want to
| try this, I'm just sceptical for the reason above.)
| digging wrote:
| 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.
| swdunlop wrote:
| Add the following to your settings.json:
| "assistant": { "version": "2",
| "default_model": { "provider": "anthropic",
| "model": "claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620" } }
|
| Once this is done, you should be able to use Anthropic if you
| have an API key. (This was available before today's
| announcement and still works today as of Zed 0.149.3)
| maeil wrote:
| Let me be very direct - what's the strength over the competition,
| e.g. Cody? The fact that it's its own text editor? I'm seeing the
| assistant emphasized but that just looks like Cody to me.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Agreed and Cody has recently upped their free tier and Sonnet
| 3.5 can be used for free for completions and up to 200 chat
| messages per month. Plus you can use it in VS Code and IntelliJ
| - no need to learn a new text editor.
| mcpar-land wrote:
| I hope that in a few years we look back at this era of "prompt an
| LLM for a shell command and instantly run whatever it spits out
| by pressing enter" with collective embarrassment.
| yewenjie wrote:
| Has any long-term Emacs user delved into Zed and ported the cool
| features yet?
|
| Don't take it as sarcasm, I am genuinely interested. I think
| Emacs' malleability is what still keeps it alive.
| rgrmrts wrote:
| Long-term Emacs user here: I actually just switched entirely to
| Zed.
| acedTrex wrote:
| AI assistants just slow me down. Its a very rare case i find them
| actually useful. I am generally concerned by the amount of devs
| that seem to claim that it is useful. What on earth are yall
| accepting.
| nsonha wrote:
| Did Google make you less productive when looking up about code?
| If it did not then I dont see how looking up with AI can be
| worse.
| acedTrex wrote:
| > 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.
| ziml77 wrote:
| This is my experience with trying to use AI for coding
| tasks too. I've had back-and-forths with AI that involve me
| trying to get it to fix things to get a final working
| function, but since it doesn't actually understand the
| code, it fails to implement the fixes correctly.
|
| Meanwhile, the stuff you find through a traditional web
| search tends to either be from a blog post where someone is
| posting actual working code snippets, or from StackOverflow
| where the code tends to be untested initially but then gets
| comments, votes, and updates over time that help boost
| confidence in the code. It's far more reliable to do a web
| search.
| elicksaur wrote:
| 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.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| I find the only "AI" I need is really just "Intellisense". Just
| auto complete repetitive lines or symbol names intelligently,
| and that doesn't even require an AI model.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| I'm curious, what kind of work do you do? Does stack overflow
| slow you down?
| acedTrex wrote:
| 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.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Do you use stack overflow for every keystroke?
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| This looks cool!
|
| Feature requests: have something like aider's repo-map, where
| context always contains high level map of whole project, and then
| LLM can suggest specific things to add to context.
|
| Also, a big use case for me, is building up understanding of an
| unfamiliar code base, or part of a code base. "What the purpose
| of X module?", "How does X get turned into Y?".
|
| For those, its helpful to give the LLM a high level map of the
| repo, and let it request more files into the context until it can
| answer the question.
|
| ( Often I'm in learning mode, so I don't yet know what the right
| files to include are yet. )
| mcemilg wrote:
| 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.
| jcsnv wrote:
| What's the difference between VSCode (with co-pilot), Zed, &
| Cursor?
| nsonha wrote:
| Cursor is a fork of VSCode with code AI that, in my oppinion,
| better than Zed and other competitor because they implement the
| MODIFYING existing code workflow better. Most other code AI
| products are only good at code generation or being a better
| stack overflow. I don't use Copilot to tell, does it show you
| diff like Cursor when modifying code?
| dcchambers wrote:
| I've been trying to mainline Zed for the past few months...and
| overall I really do like it - but there are enough quirks/bugs
| that make me frustrated.
|
| A simple example: Something as simple as the hotkeys for opening
| or closing the project panel with the file tree isn't consistent
| and doesn't work all the time.
|
| To be clear: I am excited about this new addition. I understand
| there's a ton of value in these LLM "companions" for many
| developers and many use cases, and I know why Zed is adding
| it...but I really want to see the core editor become bullet proof
| before they build more features.
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| I know I'm not the target market. I don't want my editor to have
| AI.
|
| I was really looking forward to trying Zed, but this just means
| I'll stick to VS/Code with the AI gung disabled.
|
| In general, if any product comes with "AI" I'm turned off by it.
| elitan wrote:
| I hope all our competitors find your answer inspirational!
| icholy wrote:
| Yeah, I also don't want my editor to have syntax highlighting.
| I refuse to use any editor that has it. Don't even get me
| started on native vcs support. My rule of thumb is: "If it
| auto-completes then it gets the auto-yeet."
| elpocko wrote:
| It's "Find and replace" that makes my blood boil. I won't
| stand for it.
| icholy wrote:
| Amen brother.
| Ringz wrote:
| If I just use nvim and my own AI plugin ecosystem, is Zed AI
| worth trying?
|
| https://github.com/jackMort/ChatGPT.nvim
|
| https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim
|
| https://github.com/Robitx/gp.nvim
|
| https://github.com/frankroeder/parrot.nvim
| thekevan wrote:
| I had a brief processing error I was really confused for a moment
| about how quickly Xed had progressed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xed
| bearjaws wrote:
| You can do this with aider in any IDE:
|
| https://aider.chat/
|
| I think the focus on speed is great, but I don't feel my IDE's
| speed has held me back in a decade.
| bitbasher wrote:
| I like the idea of Zed, and I recently went editor hopping. I
| installed Zed but was immediately hit with "your gpu is not
| supported/ will run incredibly slow" message. Gah...
| hemantv wrote:
| Biggest thing missing is templates that are available in vscode.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Claude 3.5 Sonnet's new Fast Edit Mode, optimized for text
| editing. This upcoming mode achieves unprecedented speed in
| transforming existing text, enabling near-instantaneous code
| refactoring and document editing at scale
|
| I wonder what this is. Have they finetuned a version which is
| good at producing diffs rather than replacing an entire file at
| once? In benchmarks sonnet 3.5 is better than most models when it
| comes to producing diffs but still does worse than when it
| replaces the whole file.
| sunaookami wrote:
| It seems like it just "echoes" back the unchanged contents?
| https://x.com/zeddotdev/status/1825967818329731104
| owenpalmer wrote:
| Hey Zed team, just one little nitpick about the page. I love the
| keyboard shortcuts at the top for the download page and login.
| However, when I try to Ctrl-L and select the url, it triggers the
| login page shortcut.
|
| Brave Browser Windows 10
| asadm wrote:
| I just want a perplexity-style agentic integration that
| researches dozens of pages first, does internal brainstorming
| before printing output in my editor.
|
| I just had a many-hour long hacking session with Perplexity to
| generate a complex code module.
| arghwhat wrote:
| I don't mind them having AI features, but I wish they'd fix some
| of the most basic performance issues considering that their
| entire reason to exist was "performance".
|
| You know, things like not rerendering the entire UI on the
| smallest change (including just moving your mouse) without damage
| reporting.
| nrvn wrote:
| Until the AI means "system thinking capability that can analyze
| the codebase and give real suggestions" I don't buy it.
| Everything I have seen so far is waste of my time and resources
| and at best is useful for generating tests or docstrings.
| sharms wrote:
| Missing from this announcement is language around Privacy. Cursor
| for example has a Privacy Mode that promises not to store code,
| and this seems like a critical feature for any AI enhanced dev
| tools.
| benreesman wrote:
| TLDR: Zed is pretty sweet. Amodei doesn't have a next model on
| raw capability.
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