from Hacker News

Zed AI

by dahjelle on 8/20/24, 6:47 PM with 280 comments

  • by cube2222 on 8/20/24, 7:35 PM

    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

  • by modernerd on 8/20/24, 7:24 PM

    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.

  • by nichochar on 8/20/24, 7:25 PM

    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.

  • by s3tt3mbr1n1 on 8/20/24, 7:13 PM

    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.

  • by acedTrex on 8/20/24, 7:36 PM

    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.

  • by siscia on 8/20/24, 7:11 PM

    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.

  • by forrestthewoods on 8/20/24, 7:18 PM

    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.

  • by yencabulator on 8/20/24, 7:20 PM

    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.

  • by gloosx on 8/21/24, 4:25 AM

    Anthropic is an evil company. I wanted to try their subscription for a month, now they are storing my credit card info forever without an option to remove it, yet a single click of a button will instantly resubscribe me. I don't understand how one can seriously think they will not sell all your data at the first opportunity to make money, cause with such shady subscription/payment practices it instantly gives a money-before-all vibes for the whole product and the company.

  • by adamgordonbell on 8/20/24, 7:37 PM

    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. )

  • by Ringz on 8/20/24, 7:46 PM

  • by mcpar-land on 8/20/24, 7:36 PM

    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.

  • by jmull on 8/20/24, 7:27 PM

    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.)

  • by mikkelam on 8/20/24, 6:52 PM

    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

  • by sebzim4500 on 8/20/24, 8:01 PM

    >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.

  • by stephc_int13 on 8/20/24, 7:17 PM

    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.)

  • by bitbasher on 8/20/24, 7:52 PM

    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...

  • by arghwhat on 8/20/24, 8:31 PM

    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.

  • by nilsherzig on 8/24/24, 9:37 AM

    Sorry if this comes off as entitled, I'm honestly just a bit confused by the following.

    I have no experience using (current) vscode, but I've used neovim on a daily basis for a couple of years. I think the thing which makes an editor a "better editor" are the small things, things which solve problems which might cause a little friction while using the editor. Having a lot of these little points of friction results in a (for me) annoying experience.

    Zed has a lot of these (from the outside) simple issues and I don't see them working on them. Again, I understand that they have to prioritize. But this doesn't result in me feeling comfortable spending time adopting this editor. I'm "scared" that issues like https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6843 might be very low on the list of work being done and always will be, while the next big (maybe honestly great) feature gets all the attention.

  • by Janymos on 8/21/24, 4:58 PM

    Tried Zed AI for a bit as a heavy user of Cursor, a few thoughts - I like that they are trying something different with the assistant panel view by providing end users full control of the context as opposed to Cursor's "magic" approach. There is a huge tradeoff between the granularity of control and efficiency however. The friction for manually filling in context for the assistant window might repel devs from using it constantly. - Zed AI is still missing a lot of UX details in terms of their inline assistant capabilities. e.g. pressing ctrl+? for inline assist only selects the current line, and users will have to manually select a block of code for inline assist, which is really annoying. In cursor, cmd+k automatically selects the surrounding code block - Definitely a huge plus that we get to choose our own LLM providers with Zed AI.

  • by kamaal on 8/21/24, 2:44 AM

    At some point an AI first programming language will have to come along which will integrate well with the AI models, Editor and Programmer input seamlessly.

    Im not sure what that is, but Im guessing it will be something along the lines of Prolog.

    You will basically give it some test cases, and it will write code that passes those test cases.

  • by asadm on 8/20/24, 8:29 PM

    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.

  • by dcchambers on 8/20/24, 7:44 PM

    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.

  • by bearjaws on 8/20/24, 7:48 PM

    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.

  • by maeil on 8/20/24, 7:36 PM

    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.

  • by sharms on 8/20/24, 8:57 PM

    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.

  • by mcemilg on 8/20/24, 7:42 PM

    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.

  • by yewenjie on 8/20/24, 7:36 PM

    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.

  • by DiabloD3 on 8/20/24, 7:16 PM

    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.

  • by CrimsonCape on 8/20/24, 11:23 PM

    Is all the overhead required to use the AI features easily disabled with a feature flag such that zero CPU cost and zero network transmission occurs?

  • by jmakov on 8/20/24, 7:10 PM

    I wonder if there's already a solution that allows me to ask questions about local codebases. e.g. how does this subsystem work.

  • by poetril on 8/21/24, 1:02 PM

    Meanwhile html tags in JSX/TSX files still do not autocomplete/close. Speaking as someone who used Zed for nearly 7 months, it seems like should be prioritizing features that will make the editor more usable. I’d be excited to go back to Zed, but the issues drove me to Neovim.

  • by nrvn on 8/20/24, 8:47 PM

    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.

  • by owenpalmer on 8/20/24, 8:24 PM

    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

  • by LarsDu88 on 8/20/24, 7:31 PM

    Can you plugin other LLMs Ala: https://dublog.net/blog/open-weight-copilots/

  • by conradludgate on 8/21/24, 6:12 AM

    I found zed to be pretty unusable. I don't use AI features but I'd love to replace vscode anyway. I just need an editor that actually works first

  • by heeton on 8/20/24, 7:08 PM

    I’d be curious how this compares to supermaven, my current favourite AI autocomplete.

  • by jcsnv on 8/20/24, 7:44 PM

    What's the difference between VSCode (with co-pilot), Zed, & Cursor?

  • by hemantv on 8/20/24, 7:54 PM

    Biggest thing missing is templates that are available in vscode.

  • by xinayder on 8/21/24, 11:22 AM

    First the unsolicited package installation controversy now they jumped onto the AI bandwagon. Is this a speedrun attempt at crashing a newly created company?

    What's next? Web3 integration? Blockchain?

  • by swyx on 8/20/24, 7:10 PM

    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?

  • by eksu on 8/20/24, 11:19 PM

    excited to use zed, but the AI chat panel does not work on a Mac host connected to a Linux guest.

  • by marcus_holmes on 8/21/24, 3:18 AM

    I've been playing with it this morning, and fuck me this is awesome. I finally feel that an LLM is being actually useful for coding. I still have to check everything, but it's like having a talented junior helping me.

  • by bartekpacia on 8/21/24, 1:37 AM

    Oh, they changed their website. It's stunning!

  • by janice1999 on 8/20/24, 7:06 PM

    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...

  • by bww on 8/20/24, 7:22 PM

    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…

  • by 1a527dd5 on 8/20/24, 7:45 PM

    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.

  • by benreesman on 8/20/24, 10:18 PM

    TLDR: Zed is pretty sweet. Amodei doesn’t have a next model on raw capability.

  • by thekevan on 8/20/24, 7:48 PM

    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