I'm glad to see this. I'm happy to plan to pay for Zed - its not there yet but its well on its way - But I don't want essentially _any_ of the AI and telemetry features.
The fact of the matter is, I am not even using AI features much in my editor anymore. I've tried Copilot and friends over and over and it's just not _there_. It needs to be in a different location in the software development pipeline (Probably code reviews and RAG'ing up for documentation).
- I can kick out some money for a settings sync service.
- I can kick out some money to essentially "subscribe" for maintenance.
I don't personally think that an editor is going to return the kinds of ROI VCs look for. So.... yeah. I might be back to Emacs in a year with IntelliJ for powerful IDE needs....
dilDDoS · 1h ago
I'm happy to finally see this take. I've been feeling pretty left out with everyone singing the praises of AI-assisted editors while I struggle to understand the hype. I've tried a few and it's never felt like an improvement to my workflow. At least for my team, the actual writing of code has never been the problem or bottleneck. Getting code reviewed by someone else in a timely manner has been a problem though, so we're considering AI code reviews to at least take some burden out of the process.
Aurornis · 1h ago
AI code reviews are the worst place to introduce AI, in my experience. They can find a few things quickly, but they can also send people down unnecessary paths or be easily persuaded by comments or even the slightest pushback from someone. They're fast to cave in and agree with any input.
It can also encourage laziness: If the AI reviewer didn't spot anything, it's easier to justify skimming the commit. Everyone says they won't do it, but it happens.
For anything AI related, having manual human review as the final step is key.
pnathan · 1h ago
That's a fantastic counterpoint. I've found AI reviewers to be useful on a first pass, at a small-pieces level. But I hear your opinion!
chuckadams · 30m ago
I find the summary that copilot generates is more useful than the review comments most of the time. That said, I have seen it make some good catches. It’s a matter of expectations: the AI is not going to have hurt feelings if you reject all its suggestions, so I feel even more free to reject it feedback with the briefest of dismissals.
aozgaa · 1h ago
Agreed.
LLM’s are fundamentally text generators, not verifiers.
They might spot some typos and stylistic discrepancies based on their corpus, but they do not reason. It’s just not what the basic building blocks of the architecture do.
In my experience you need to do a lot of coaxing and setting up guardrails to keep them even roughly on track. (And maybe the LLM companies will build this into the products they sell, but it’s demonstrably not there today)
kstrauser · 1h ago
IMO, the AI bits are the least interesting parts of Zed. I hardly use them. For me, Zed is a blazing fast, lightweight editor with a large community supporting plugins and themes and all that. It's not exactly Sublime Text, but to me it's the nearest spiritual successor while being fully GPL'ed Free Software.
I don't mind the AI stuff. It's been nice when I used it, but I have a different workflow for those things right now. But all the stuff besides AI? It's freaking great.
dns_snek · 59m ago
> while being fully GPL'ed Free Software
I wouldn't sing them praises for being FOSS. All contributions are signed away under their CLA which will allow them to pull the plug when their VCs come knocking and the FOSS angle is no longer convenient.
bigfudge · 22m ago
How is this true if it’s actually GPL as gp claimed?
therealpygon · 8m ago
Because when you sign away copyright, the software can be relicensed and taken closed source for all future improvements. Sure, people can still use the last open version, maybe fork it to try to keep going, but that simply doesn’t work out most times. I refuse to contribute to any project that requires me to give them copyright instead of contributing under copyleft; it’s just free contractors until the VCs come along and want to get their returns.
carey · 14m ago
The FSF also typically requires a copyright assignment for their GPL code. Nobody thinks that they’ll ever relicense Emacs, though.
tkz1312 · 34m ago
why not just use sublime text?
No comments yet
skrtskrt · 1h ago
AI is solid for kicking off learning a language or framework you've never touched before.
But in my day to day I'm just writing pure Go, highly concurrent and performance-sensitive distributed systems, and AI is just so wrong on everything that actually matters that I have stopped using it.
skydhash · 54m ago
But so is a good book. And it costs way less. Even though searching may be quicker, having a good digest of a feature is worth the half hour I can spend browsing a chapter. It’s directly picking an expert brains. Then you take notes, compare what you found online and the updated documentation and soon you develop a real understanding of the language/tool abstraction.
stouset · 43m ago
I'm the opposite. I held out this view for a long, long time. About two months ago, I gave Zed's agentic sidebar a try.
I'm blown away.
I'm a very senior engineer. I have extremely high standards. I know a lot of technologies top to bottom. And I have immediately found it insanely helpful.
There are a few hugely valuable use-cases for me. The first is writing tests. Agentic AI right now is shockingly good at figuring out what your code should be doing and writing tests that test the behavior, all the verbose and annoying edge cases, and even find bugs in your implementation. It's goddamn near magic. That's not to say they're perfect, sometimes they do get confused and assume your implementation is correct when the test doesn't pass. Sometimes they do misunderstand. But the overall improvement for me has been enormous. They also generally write good tests. Refactoring never breaks the tests they've written unless an actually-visible behavior change has happened.
Second is trying to figure out the answer to really thorny problems. I'm extremely good at doing this, but agentic AI has made me faster. It can prototype approaches that I want to try faster than I can and we can see if the approach works extremely quickly. I might not use the code it wrote, but the ability to rapidly give four or five alternatives a go versus the one or two I would personally have time for is massively helpful. I've even had them find approaches I never would have considered that ended up being my clear favorite. They're not always better than me at choosing which one to go with (I often ask for their summarized recommendations), but the sheer speed in which they get them done is a godsend.
Finding the source of tricky bugs is one more case that they excel in. I can do this work too, but again, they're faster. They'll write multiple tests with debugging output that leads to the answer in barely more time than it takes to just run the tests. A bug that might take me an hour to track down can take them five minutes. Even for a really hard one, I can set them on the task while I go make coffee or take the dog for a walk. They'll figure it out while I'm gone.
Lastly, when I have some spare time, I love asking them what areas of a code base could use some love and what are the biggest reward-to-effort ratio wins. They are great at finding those places and helping me constantly make things just a little bit better, one place at a time.
Overall, it's like having an extremely eager and prolific junior assistant with an encyclopedic brain. You have to give them guidance, you have to take some of their work with a grain of salt, but used correctly they're insanely productive. And as a bonus, unlike a real human, you don't ever have to feel guilty about throwing away their work if it doesn't make the grade.
jama211 · 1h ago
Highlighting code and having cursor show the recommended changes and make them for me with one click is just a time saver over me copying and pasting back and forth to an external chat window. I don’t find the autocomplete particularly useful, but the inbuilt chat is a useful feature honestly.
aDyslecticCrow · 54m ago
zed was just a fast and simple replacement for Atom (R.I.P) or vscode. Then they put AI on top when that showed up. I don't care for it, and appreciate a project like this to return the program to its core.
Can't you just not use / disable AI and telemetry? It's not shoved in your face.
I would prefer an off-by-default telemetry, but if there's a simple opt-out, that's fine?
asadm · 1h ago
I think you and I are having very different experiences with these copilot/agents. So I have questions for you, how do you:
- generate new modules/classes in your projects
- integrate module A into module B or entire codebase A into codebase B?
- get someones github project up and running on your machine, do you manually fiddle with cmakes and npms?
- convert an idea or plan.md or a paper into working code?
- Fix flakes, fix test<->code discrepancies or increase coverage etc
If you do all this manually, why?
pnathan · 55m ago
I'm pretty fast coding and know what I'm doing. My ideas are too complex for claude to just crap out. If I'm really tired I'll use claude to write tests. Mostly they aren't really good though.
AI doesn't really help me code vs me doing it myself.
AI is better doing other things...
asadm · 22m ago
> AI is better doing other things...
I agree. For me the other things are non-business logic, build details, duplicate/bootstrap code that isn't exciting.
frakt0x90 · 29m ago
To me, using AI to convert an idea or paper into working code is outsourcing the only enjoyable part of programming to a machine. Do we not appreciate problem solving anymore? Wild times.
mackeye · 28m ago
i'm an undergrad, so when i need to implement a paper, the idea is that i'm supposed to learn something from implementing it. i feel fortunate in that ai is not yet effective enough to let me be lazy and skip that process, lol
craftkiller · 16m ago
When I was younger, we all had to memorize phone numbers. I still remember those numbers (even the defunct ones) but I haven't learned a single new number since getting a cellphone.
When I was younger, I had to memorize how to drive to work/the grocery store/new jersey. I still remember those routes but I haven't learned a single new route since getting a smartphone.
Are we ready to stop learning as programmers? I certainly am not and it sounds like you aren't either. I'll let myself plateau when I retire or move into management. Until then, every night debugging and experimenting has been building upon every previous night debugging and experimenting, ceaselessly progressing towards mastery.
skydhash · 36m ago
> generate new modules/classes in your projects
If it's formulaic enough, I will use the editor templates/snippets generator. Or write a code generator (if it involves a bunch of files). If it's not, I probably have another class I can copy and strip out (especially in UI and CRUD).
> integrate module A into module B
If it's cannot be done easily, that's the sign of a less than optimal API.
> entire codebase A into codebase B
Is that a real need?
> get someones github project up and running on your machine, do you manually fiddle with cmakes and npms
If the person can't be bothered to give proper documentation, why should I run the project? But actually, I will look into AUR (archlinux) and Homebrew formula if someone has already do the first jobs of figuring dependency version. If there's a dockerfile, I will use that instead.
> convert an idea or plan.md or a paper into working code?
Iteratively. First have an hello world or something working, then mowing down the task list.
> Fix flakes, fix test<->code discrepancies or increase coverage etc
Either the test is wrong or the code is wrong. Figure out which and rework it. The figuring part always take longer as you will need to ask around.
> If you do all this manually, why?
Because when something happens in prod, you really don't want that feeling of being the last one that have interacted with that part, but with no idea of what has changed.
mackeye · 31m ago
> how do you convert a paper into working code?
this is something i've found LLMs almost useless at. consider https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11908 --- the paper explains its proposed methodology pretty well, so i figured this would be a good LLM use case. i tried to get a prototype to run with gemini 2.5 pro, but got nowhere even after a couple of hours, so i wrote it by hand; and i write a fair bit of code with LLMs, but it's primarily questions about best practices or simple errors, and i copy/paste from the web interface, which i guess is no longer in vogue. that being said, would cursor excel here at a one-shot (or even a few hours of back-and-forth), elegant prototype?
asadm · 14m ago
I have found that whenever it fails for me, it's likely that I was trying to one-shot the solution and I retry by breaking the problem into smaller chunks or doing a planning work with gemini cli first.
chamomeal · 35m ago
For stuff like adding generating and integrating new modules: the helpfulness of AI varies wildly.
If you’re using nest.js, which is great but also comically bloated with boilerplate, AI is fantastic. When my code is like 1 line of business logic per 6 lines of boilerplate, yes please AI do it all for me.
Projects with less cruft benefit less. I’m working on a form generator mini library, and I struggle to think of any piece I would actually let AI write for me.
Similar situation with tests. If your tests are mostly “mock x y and z, and make sure that this spied function is called with this mocked payload result”, AI is great. It’ll write all that garbage out in no time.
If your tests are doing larger chunks of biz logic like running against a database, or if you’re doing some kinda generative property based testing, LLMs are probably more trouble than they’re worth
craftkiller · 43m ago
> generate new modules/classes in your projects
I type:
class Foo:
or:
pub(crate) struct Foo {}
> integrate module A into module B
What do you mean by this? If you just mean moving things around then code refactoring tools to move functions/classes/modules have existed in IDEs for millennia before LLMs came around.
> get someones github project up and running on your machine
docker
> convert an idea or plan.md or a paper into working code
I sit in front of a keyboard and start typing.
> Fix flakes, fix test<->code discrepancies or increase coverage etc
I sit in front of a keyboard, read, think, and then start typing.
> If you do all this manually, why?
Because I care about the quality of my code. If these activities don't interest you, why are you in this field?
asadm · 27m ago
> If these activities don't interest you, why are you in this field?
I am in this field to deliver shareholder value. Writing individual lines of code; unless absolutely required, is below me?
craftkiller · 7m ago
Ah well then, this is the cultural divide that has been forming since long before LLMs happened. Once software engineering became lucrative, people started entering the field not because they're passionate about computers or because they love the logic/problem solving but because it is a high paying, comfortable job.
There was once a time when only passionate people became programmers, before y'all ruined it.
stevenbedrick · 44m ago
To do those things, I do the same thing I've been doing for the thirty years that I've been programming professionally: I spend the (typically modest) time it takes to learn to understand the code that I am integrating into my project well enough to know how to use it, and I use my brain to convert my ideas into code. Sometimes this requires me to learn new things (a new tool, a new library, etc.). There is usually typing involved, and sometimes a whiteboard or notebook.
Usually it's not all that much effort to glance over some other project's documentation to figure out how to integrate it, and as to creating working code from an idea or plan... isn't that a big part of what "programming" is all about? I'm confused by the idea that suddenly we need machines to do that for us: at a practical level, that is literally what we do. And at a conceptual level, the process of trying to reify an idea into an actual working program is usually very valuable for iterating on one's plans, and identifying problems with one's mental model of whatever you're trying to write a program about (c.f. Naur's notions about theory building).
As to why one should do this manually (as opposed to letting the magic surprise box take a stab at it for you), a few answers come to mind:
1. I'm professionally and personally accountable for the code I write and what it does, and so I want to make sure I actually understand what it's doing. I would hate to have to tell a colleague or customer "no, I don't know why it did $HORRIBLE_THING, and it's because I didn't actually write the program that I gave you, the AI did!"
2. At a practical level, #1 means that I need to be able to be confident that I know what's going on in my code and that I can fix it when it breaks. Fiddling with cmakes and npms is part of how I become confident that I understand what I'm building well enough to deal with the inevitable problems that will occur down the road.
3. Along similar lines, I need to be able to say that what I'm producing isn't violating somebody's IP, and to know where everything came from.
4. I'd rather spend my time making things work right the first time, than endlessly mess around trying to find the right incantation to explain to the magic box what I want it to do in sufficient detail. That seems like more work than just writing it myself.
Now, I will certainly agree that there is a role for LLMs in coding: fancier auto-complete and refactoring tools are great, and I have also found Zed's inline LLM assistant mode helpful for very limited things (basically as a souped-up find and replace feature, though I should note that I've also seen it introduce spectacular and complicated-to-fix errors). But those are all about making me more efficient at interacting with code I've already written, not doing the main body of the work for me.
So that's my $0.02!
insane_dreamer · 26m ago
didn't Zed recently add a config option to disable all AI features?
cultofmetatron · 2m ago
I've been using AI extensivly the last few weeks but not as a coding agent. I really don't trust it for that. Its really helpful for generating example code for a library I might not be familiar with. a month ago, I was interested in using rabbitmq but he docs were limited. chatgpt was able to give me a fairly good amount of starter code to see how these things are wired together. I used some of it and added to it by hand to finally come up with what is running in production. It certainly has value in that regard. Letting it write and modify code directly? I'm not ready for that. other things its useful for is finding the source of an error when the error message isnt' so great. I'll usually copy paste code that I know is causing the error along with the error message and it'll point out the issues in a way that I can immediatly address. My method is cheaper too, I can get by just fine on the $20/month chatgpt sub doing that.
ElijahLynn · 2m ago
I on the other hand would probably only switch to Zed with the AI integration. Want to learn a new language? Using AI speeds it up by a factor of months.
_benj · 2h ago
I’m curious how this will turn out. Reminds me of the node.js fork IO.js and how that shifted the way node was being developed.
If there’s a group of people painfully aware of telemetry and AI being pushed everywhere is devs…
No comments yet
RestartKernel · 2h ago
Bit premature to post this, especially without some manifesto explaining the particular reason for this fork. The "no rugpulls" implies something happened with Zed, but you can't really expect every HN reader to be in the loop with the open source controversy of the week.
eikenberry · 1h ago
Contributor Agreements are specifically there for license rug-pulls, so they can change the license in the future as they own all the copyrights. So the fact that they have a CA means they are prepping for a rug-pull and thus this bullet point.
latexr · 9m ago
I can’t speak for Zed’s specific case, but several years ago I was part of a project which used a permissive license. I wanted to make it even more permissive, by changing it to one of those essentially-public-domain licenses. The person with the ultimate decision power had no objections and was fine with it, but said we couldn’t do that because we never had Contributor License Agreements. So it cuts both ways.
jen20 · 1h ago
Are you suggesting the FSF has a copyright assignment for the purposes of “rug pulls”?
ilc · 1h ago
Yes.
The FSF requires assignment so they can re-license the code to whatever new license THEY deem best.
tl;dr: If someone violates the GPL, the FSF can't sue them on your behalf unless they are a copyright holder.
(personally I don't release anything under virus licenses like the GPL but I don't think there's a nefarious purpose behind their CLA)
eikenberry · 1h ago
It was, some see the GPL2->GPL3 as a rug-pull... but it doesn't matter today as the FSF stopped requiring CAs back in 2021.
NoboruWataya · 1h ago
Zed is quite well known to be heavily cloud- and AI-focused, it seems clear that's what's motivating this fork. It's not some new controversy, it's just the clearly signposted direction of the project that many don't like.
No, this fork is at least 6 months old. The first PR is dated February 13th.
decentrality · 1h ago
This is correct. The fork and the pitchforks are not causally related
FergusArgyll · 1h ago
That's not a rug pull, that's a few overly sensitive young 'uns complaining
MeetingsBrowser · 1h ago
overly sensitive to what?
bigstrat2003 · 1h ago
"You're doing business with someone whose views I dislike" is not harassment, nor do I believe that the person who opened the issue is arguing in good faith. The world is full of people with whom I disagree (often strongly) on matters of core values, and I work with them civilly because that is what a mature person does. Unless the VC firm starts pushing Zed to insert anti-Muslim propaganda into their product, or harassing the community, there is no reasonable grounds to complain about the CoC.
MeetingsBrowser · 23m ago
I don't agree that it is immature or overly sensitive. The issue basically says:
> Hey, you look to be doing business with someone who publicly advocates for harming others. Could you explain why and to what extend they are involved?
"doing business with someone whose views I dislike" is slightly downplaying the specific view here.
GuB-42 · 20m ago
Boycotting a text editor because the company that makes it accepted funding from another company that has a partner who holds controversial views on a conflict in Gaza where children are killed is going a bit far I think.
In a perfect world, children don't get killed, but with that many levels of indirection, I don't think there is anything in this world that is not linked to some kind of genocide or other terrible things.
runarberg · 6m ago
It should be relatively easy to simply not accept money from companies such as these. Accepting this money is a pretty damning moral failure.
marcosdumay · 1h ago
They got a VC investment.
But a fork with focus on privacy and local-first only needs lack of those to justify itself. It will have to cut some features that zed is really proud of, so it's hard to even say this is a rugpull.
dkersten · 17m ago
What I really want from Zed is multi window support. Currently, I can’t pop out the agent panel or any other panels to use them on another monitor.
Local-first is nice, but I do use the AI tools, so I’m unlikely to use this fork in the near term. I do like the idea behind this, especially no telemetry and no contributor agreements. I wish them the best of luck.
I did happily use Zed for about year before using any of its AI features, so who knows, maybe I’ll get fed up with AI and switch to this eventually.
adastra22 · 1h ago
Thank you.
That's all I have to say right now, but I feel it needs to be said. Thank you for doing this.
> I’m gradually removing all the features I deem undesirable: telemetry, auto-updates, proprietary cloud-only AI integrations, reliance on node.js, auto-downloading of language servers, upsells, the sign-in button, etc. I’m also aiming to make some of the cloud-only features self-hostable where it makes sense, e.g. running Zeta edit predictions off of your own llama.cpp or vLLM instance. It’s currently good enough to be my main editor, though I tend to be a bit behind on updates since there is a lot of code churn and my way of modifying the codebase isn’t exactly ideal for avoiding merge conflicts. To that end I’m experimenting with using tree-sitter to automatically apply AST-level edits, which might end up becoming a tool that can build customizable “unshittified” versions of Zed.
haneefmubarak · 1h ago
> relying on node.js
When did people start hating node and what do they have against it?
leblancfg · 1h ago
> When did people start hating node
You're kidding, right?
Sephr · 26m ago
For me, upon its inception. We desperately needed unity in API design and node.js hasn't been adequate for many of us.
WinterTC has only recently been chartered in order to make strides towards specifying a unified standard library for the JS ecosystem.
woodson · 56m ago
I guess some node.js based tools that are included in Zed (or its language extensions) such as ‘prettier’ don’t behave well in some environments (e.g., they constantly try to write files to /home/$USER even if that’s not your home directory). Things like that create some backlash.
aDyslecticCrow · 45m ago
Slow and ram heavy. Zed feels refreshingly snappy compared to vscode even before adding plugins. And why does desktop application need to use interpreted programming languages?
muppetman · 1h ago
You might not be old enough to remember how much everyone hated JavaScript initially - just as an in-browser language. Then suddenly it's a standalone programming language too? WTH??
I assume that's where a lot of the hate comes from. Note that's not my opinion, just wondering if that might be why.
skydhash · 28m ago
JavaScript is actually fine as the warts have been documented. The main issue these days is the billions of tiny packages. So many people/org to trust for every project that uses npm.
conradev · 1h ago
Chrome : Chromium :: Zed : ????
I don’t view Chrome and Chromium as different projects, but primarily as different builds of the same project. I feel like this will (eventually) go the same way.
jazzyjackson · 1h ago
I'm confused how the "contributors" feature works on GitHub, is this showing that this fork has 986 contributors and 29,961 commits? Surely that's the Zed project overall. I feel like this gives undue reputation to an offshoot project.
It's fair because those people contributed to the codebase you're seeing. Someone can't fork a repo, make a couple commits, and then have GitHub show them as the sole contributor.
brailsafe · 1h ago
It's the zed project overall from the point where the fork was created, plus any downstream merges and unique contributions to zedless
rubbietheone · 1h ago
Yeah i get it, it looks like zedless itself has been going on for a while. However, i'm not sure what's the best way to approach this, the fork still carries zed's original commit history
alpha_trion · 1h ago
This feels unnecessary.
Tepix · 2h ago
So, what‘s Zed?
yobert · 2h ago
Zed is a really really nice editor. I consider the AI features secondary but they have been useful here and there. (I usually have them off.) You can use it like cursor if you want to.
Where I think it gets really interesting is they are adding features in it to compete with slack. Imagine a tight integration between slack huddles and VS code's collaborative editing. Since it's from scratch it's much nicer than both. I'm really excited about it.
spagoop · 2h ago
Zed's dead, baby. Zed’s dead.
jeffreygoesto · 1h ago
Padadadap - Sound of fingers on a leather hood...
jks · 2h ago
An AI editor, a competitor to Cursor but written from scratch and not a VS Code fork. They recently announced a funding round from Sequoia. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172
athenot · 2h ago
Even without any AI stuff, it's a fantastic editor for its speed.
azemetre · 1m ago
Someone posted this in the other zed thread but it looks on par with VS Code in speed according to these results:
I don't understand why people say X is a competitor to Cursor, which is built on Visual Studio Code, when GitHub Copilot came out first, and is... built on Visual Studio Code.
It also didn't start out as a competitor to either.
efilife · 2h ago
It wasn't an AI editor for a long time
TheCraiggers · 1h ago
Yup. Their big design goal seemed to just be "speed" for a majority of development. That's it.
dmit · 1h ago
Code editor. Imagine VSCode, but with a native GUI for each platform it supports and fewer plugins. And a single `disable_ai` setting that you can use to toggle those kinds of features off or on.
ricardobeat · 2h ago
Spiritual successor to Sublime Text. They’ve been doing a lot of AI stuff but originally just focused on speed.
More like a spiritual successor to Atom, at least per the people that started it who came from that project.
lexoj · 1h ago
Its funny how the same guy who wrote (borderline) the slowest editor, went ahead and built the fastest. Practice makes perfect I guess :)
skrtskrt · 2h ago
Yet another code editor for people who want to spend their time tacking together an IDE experience from poor implementations of language servers and obscure config files.
zwnow · 2h ago
Sorry I couldn't hear you through the nvim startup time and keyboard noises while you are waiting for your IDE to start
pjmlp · 1h ago
Who restarts their IDE all the time?
I take more than that to fetch a coffee down the kitchen area.
mosburger · 37s ago
> Who restarts their IDE all the time?
Xcode users laugh nervously.
fidotron · 1h ago
> Who restarts their IDE all the time?
Android developers reindexing.
jen20 · 1h ago
Depends which IDE. IntelliJ stays open permanently. When I used full-fat visual studio it would crash so often that I’d have developed an even worse caffeine problem had I fetched coffee every time it needed restarting.
skrtskrt · 1h ago
Famous indicator of software quality: how fast an editor opened to write it.
0x457 · 1h ago
Sometimes my ADHD kicks in while Intellij launches and I forget what I was working on.
skrtskrt · 1h ago
This is completely fair lol
Ygg2 · 1h ago
Neovim just gets in the way. I observe the machine code directly through my sacred bond with the machine spirit. And the holy mechanical tentacles connected to my visual cortex.
jen20 · 1h ago
The reason I’ve been using Zed is _because_ there is no screwing about with any of that stuff. For Erlang and Elixir it’s been less problematic than IntelliJ, faster and less gross than VS code, and hasn’t required me to edit configuration files other than to turn the font size up.
tonyedgecombe · 2h ago
Harsh but true.
barbazoo · 1h ago
Watch the video on https://zed.dev/, apparently it's really good at quickly cycling through open documents at 120Hz while still seeing every individual tab. Probably something people asked for at some point.
syntaxing · 45m ago
This is awesome, honestly with the release of Qwen3Coder-30B-A3B, we have a model that’s pretty close to the perfect local model. Obviously the larger 32B dense one does better but the 30B MoE model does agentic pretty well and is great at FIM/autocomplete
ahmetcadirci25 · 1h ago
Was it necessary?
johanneskanybal · 1h ago
Saw Zed mentioned for the first time today on the hackernews front page. Readme doesn't even bother to mention what it is. I think it's an ide? You want me to install rust and build it to use it? I get hn is an echo chamber but sometimes..
trostaft · 37m ago
???
The first line of the README
> Welcome to Zed, a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.
The second line of the README (with links to download & package manager instructions omitted)
> Installation
> On macOS and Linux you can download Zed directly or install Zed via your local package manager.
I do not dispute that HN is an echo chamber. But how did you come to your conclusions?
some_furry · 1h ago
If this project receives yet another fork, might I recommend naming it Zedless Zed Zero?
I welcome this, now we get Zed for free with privacy on top without all the AI features that nobody asked for.
As soon as _any_ dev tool gets VC backing there should be an open source alternative to alleviate the inevitable platform decay (or enshittification for lack of a better word)
This is a better outcome for everyone.
Some of us just want a good editor for free.
jen20 · 1h ago
> Some of us just want a good editor for free.
Sums up the problem neatly. Everyone wants everything for free. Someone has to pay the developers. Sometimes things align (there is indeed a discussion in LinkedIn about Apple hiring the OPA devs today), mostly it doesn’t.
TheCraiggers · 57m ago
> Someone has to pay the developers.
Agreed. Although nobody ever mentions the 1,100+ developers that submitted PRs to Zed.
And yeah. I know what you mean. But this is the other side of the OSS coin. You accept free work from outside developers, and it will inevitably get forked because of an issue. But from my perspective, it's a great thing for the community. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here.
ComputerGuru · 1h ago
On the same day a Code of Conduct violation discussion was opened against Zed for accepting funding from Sequoia after Maguire's very loud and very public Islamophobia and open support for occupation and genocide: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
The fact of the matter is, I am not even using AI features much in my editor anymore. I've tried Copilot and friends over and over and it's just not _there_. It needs to be in a different location in the software development pipeline (Probably code reviews and RAG'ing up for documentation).
- I can kick out some money for a settings sync service. - I can kick out some money to essentially "subscribe" for maintenance.
I don't personally think that an editor is going to return the kinds of ROI VCs look for. So.... yeah. I might be back to Emacs in a year with IntelliJ for powerful IDE needs....
It can also encourage laziness: If the AI reviewer didn't spot anything, it's easier to justify skimming the commit. Everyone says they won't do it, but it happens.
For anything AI related, having manual human review as the final step is key.
LLM’s are fundamentally text generators, not verifiers.
They might spot some typos and stylistic discrepancies based on their corpus, but they do not reason. It’s just not what the basic building blocks of the architecture do.
In my experience you need to do a lot of coaxing and setting up guardrails to keep them even roughly on track. (And maybe the LLM companies will build this into the products they sell, but it’s demonstrably not there today)
I don't mind the AI stuff. It's been nice when I used it, but I have a different workflow for those things right now. But all the stuff besides AI? It's freaking great.
I wouldn't sing them praises for being FOSS. All contributions are signed away under their CLA which will allow them to pull the plug when their VCs come knocking and the FOSS angle is no longer convenient.
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But in my day to day I'm just writing pure Go, highly concurrent and performance-sensitive distributed systems, and AI is just so wrong on everything that actually matters that I have stopped using it.
I'm blown away.
I'm a very senior engineer. I have extremely high standards. I know a lot of technologies top to bottom. And I have immediately found it insanely helpful.
There are a few hugely valuable use-cases for me. The first is writing tests. Agentic AI right now is shockingly good at figuring out what your code should be doing and writing tests that test the behavior, all the verbose and annoying edge cases, and even find bugs in your implementation. It's goddamn near magic. That's not to say they're perfect, sometimes they do get confused and assume your implementation is correct when the test doesn't pass. Sometimes they do misunderstand. But the overall improvement for me has been enormous. They also generally write good tests. Refactoring never breaks the tests they've written unless an actually-visible behavior change has happened.
Second is trying to figure out the answer to really thorny problems. I'm extremely good at doing this, but agentic AI has made me faster. It can prototype approaches that I want to try faster than I can and we can see if the approach works extremely quickly. I might not use the code it wrote, but the ability to rapidly give four or five alternatives a go versus the one or two I would personally have time for is massively helpful. I've even had them find approaches I never would have considered that ended up being my clear favorite. They're not always better than me at choosing which one to go with (I often ask for their summarized recommendations), but the sheer speed in which they get them done is a godsend.
Finding the source of tricky bugs is one more case that they excel in. I can do this work too, but again, they're faster. They'll write multiple tests with debugging output that leads to the answer in barely more time than it takes to just run the tests. A bug that might take me an hour to track down can take them five minutes. Even for a really hard one, I can set them on the task while I go make coffee or take the dog for a walk. They'll figure it out while I'm gone.
Lastly, when I have some spare time, I love asking them what areas of a code base could use some love and what are the biggest reward-to-effort ratio wins. They are great at finding those places and helping me constantly make things just a little bit better, one place at a time.
Overall, it's like having an extremely eager and prolific junior assistant with an encyclopedic brain. You have to give them guidance, you have to take some of their work with a grain of salt, but used correctly they're insanely productive. And as a bonus, unlike a real human, you don't ever have to feel guilty about throwing away their work if it doesn't make the grade.
[0] https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features
I would prefer an off-by-default telemetry, but if there's a simple opt-out, that's fine?
- generate new modules/classes in your projects - integrate module A into module B or entire codebase A into codebase B?
- get someones github project up and running on your machine, do you manually fiddle with cmakes and npms?
- convert an idea or plan.md or a paper into working code?
- Fix flakes, fix test<->code discrepancies or increase coverage etc
If you do all this manually, why?
AI doesn't really help me code vs me doing it myself.
AI is better doing other things...
I agree. For me the other things are non-business logic, build details, duplicate/bootstrap code that isn't exciting.
When I was younger, I had to memorize how to drive to work/the grocery store/new jersey. I still remember those routes but I haven't learned a single new route since getting a smartphone.
Are we ready to stop learning as programmers? I certainly am not and it sounds like you aren't either. I'll let myself plateau when I retire or move into management. Until then, every night debugging and experimenting has been building upon every previous night debugging and experimenting, ceaselessly progressing towards mastery.
If it's formulaic enough, I will use the editor templates/snippets generator. Or write a code generator (if it involves a bunch of files). If it's not, I probably have another class I can copy and strip out (especially in UI and CRUD).
> integrate module A into module B
If it's cannot be done easily, that's the sign of a less than optimal API.
> entire codebase A into codebase B
Is that a real need?
> get someones github project up and running on your machine, do you manually fiddle with cmakes and npms
If the person can't be bothered to give proper documentation, why should I run the project? But actually, I will look into AUR (archlinux) and Homebrew formula if someone has already do the first jobs of figuring dependency version. If there's a dockerfile, I will use that instead.
> convert an idea or plan.md or a paper into working code?
Iteratively. First have an hello world or something working, then mowing down the task list.
> Fix flakes, fix test<->code discrepancies or increase coverage etc
Either the test is wrong or the code is wrong. Figure out which and rework it. The figuring part always take longer as you will need to ask around.
> If you do all this manually, why?
Because when something happens in prod, you really don't want that feeling of being the last one that have interacted with that part, but with no idea of what has changed.
this is something i've found LLMs almost useless at. consider https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11908 --- the paper explains its proposed methodology pretty well, so i figured this would be a good LLM use case. i tried to get a prototype to run with gemini 2.5 pro, but got nowhere even after a couple of hours, so i wrote it by hand; and i write a fair bit of code with LLMs, but it's primarily questions about best practices or simple errors, and i copy/paste from the web interface, which i guess is no longer in vogue. that being said, would cursor excel here at a one-shot (or even a few hours of back-and-forth), elegant prototype?
If you’re using nest.js, which is great but also comically bloated with boilerplate, AI is fantastic. When my code is like 1 line of business logic per 6 lines of boilerplate, yes please AI do it all for me.
Projects with less cruft benefit less. I’m working on a form generator mini library, and I struggle to think of any piece I would actually let AI write for me.
Similar situation with tests. If your tests are mostly “mock x y and z, and make sure that this spied function is called with this mocked payload result”, AI is great. It’ll write all that garbage out in no time.
If your tests are doing larger chunks of biz logic like running against a database, or if you’re doing some kinda generative property based testing, LLMs are probably more trouble than they’re worth
I type:
or: > integrate module A into module BWhat do you mean by this? If you just mean moving things around then code refactoring tools to move functions/classes/modules have existed in IDEs for millennia before LLMs came around.
> get someones github project up and running on your machine
docker
> convert an idea or plan.md or a paper into working code
I sit in front of a keyboard and start typing.
> Fix flakes, fix test<->code discrepancies or increase coverage etc
I sit in front of a keyboard, read, think, and then start typing.
> If you do all this manually, why?
Because I care about the quality of my code. If these activities don't interest you, why are you in this field?
I am in this field to deliver shareholder value. Writing individual lines of code; unless absolutely required, is below me?
There was once a time when only passionate people became programmers, before y'all ruined it.
Usually it's not all that much effort to glance over some other project's documentation to figure out how to integrate it, and as to creating working code from an idea or plan... isn't that a big part of what "programming" is all about? I'm confused by the idea that suddenly we need machines to do that for us: at a practical level, that is literally what we do. And at a conceptual level, the process of trying to reify an idea into an actual working program is usually very valuable for iterating on one's plans, and identifying problems with one's mental model of whatever you're trying to write a program about (c.f. Naur's notions about theory building).
As to why one should do this manually (as opposed to letting the magic surprise box take a stab at it for you), a few answers come to mind:
1. I'm professionally and personally accountable for the code I write and what it does, and so I want to make sure I actually understand what it's doing. I would hate to have to tell a colleague or customer "no, I don't know why it did $HORRIBLE_THING, and it's because I didn't actually write the program that I gave you, the AI did!"
2. At a practical level, #1 means that I need to be able to be confident that I know what's going on in my code and that I can fix it when it breaks. Fiddling with cmakes and npms is part of how I become confident that I understand what I'm building well enough to deal with the inevitable problems that will occur down the road.
3. Along similar lines, I need to be able to say that what I'm producing isn't violating somebody's IP, and to know where everything came from.
4. I'd rather spend my time making things work right the first time, than endlessly mess around trying to find the right incantation to explain to the magic box what I want it to do in sufficient detail. That seems like more work than just writing it myself.
Now, I will certainly agree that there is a role for LLMs in coding: fancier auto-complete and refactoring tools are great, and I have also found Zed's inline LLM assistant mode helpful for very limited things (basically as a souped-up find and replace feature, though I should note that I've also seen it introduce spectacular and complicated-to-fix errors). But those are all about making me more efficient at interacting with code I've already written, not doing the main body of the work for me.
So that's my $0.02!
If there’s a group of people painfully aware of telemetry and AI being pushed everywhere is devs…
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The FSF requires assignment so they can re-license the code to whatever new license THEY deem best.
Not the contributors.
A CLA should always be a warning.
tl;dr: If someone violates the GPL, the FSF can't sue them on your behalf unless they are a copyright holder.
(personally I don't release anything under virus licenses like the GPL but I don't think there's a nefarious purpose behind their CLA)
> Hey, you look to be doing business with someone who publicly advocates for harming others. Could you explain why and to what extend they are involved?
"doing business with someone whose views I dislike" is slightly downplaying the specific view here.
In a perfect world, children don't get killed, but with that many levels of indirection, I don't think there is anything in this world that is not linked to some kind of genocide or other terrible things.
But a fork with focus on privacy and local-first only needs lack of those to justify itself. It will have to cut some features that zed is really proud of, so it's hard to even say this is a rugpull.
Local-first is nice, but I do use the AI tools, so I’m unlikely to use this fork in the near term. I do like the idea behind this, especially no telemetry and no contributor agreements. I wish them the best of luck.
I did happily use Zed for about year before using any of its AI features, so who knows, maybe I’ll get fed up with AI and switch to this eventually.
That's all I have to say right now, but I feel it needs to be said. Thank you for doing this.
Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366
Sequoia backs Zed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172
> Since someone mentioned forking, I suppose I’ll use this opportunity to advertise my fork of Zed: https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed
> I’m gradually removing all the features I deem undesirable: telemetry, auto-updates, proprietary cloud-only AI integrations, reliance on node.js, auto-downloading of language servers, upsells, the sign-in button, etc. I’m also aiming to make some of the cloud-only features self-hostable where it makes sense, e.g. running Zeta edit predictions off of your own llama.cpp or vLLM instance. It’s currently good enough to be my main editor, though I tend to be a bit behind on updates since there is a lot of code churn and my way of modifying the codebase isn’t exactly ideal for avoiding merge conflicts. To that end I’m experimenting with using tree-sitter to automatically apply AST-level edits, which might end up becoming a tool that can build customizable “unshittified” versions of Zed.
When did people start hating node and what do they have against it?
You're kidding, right?
WinterTC has only recently been chartered in order to make strides towards specifying a unified standard library for the JS ecosystem.
I assume that's where a lot of the hate comes from. Note that's not my opinion, just wondering if that might be why.
https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed/graphs/contributors
It's fair because those people contributed to the codebase you're seeing. Someone can't fork a repo, make a couple commits, and then have GitHub show them as the sole contributor.
Where I think it gets really interesting is they are adding features in it to compete with slack. Imagine a tight integration between slack huddles and VS code's collaborative editing. Since it's from scratch it's much nicer than both. I'm really excited about it.
https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/112146684329230663
It also didn't start out as a competitor to either.
https://zed.dev/
More like a spiritual successor to Atom, at least per the people that started it who came from that project.
I take more than that to fetch a coffee down the kitchen area.
Xcode users laugh nervously.
Android developers reindexing.
The first line of the README
> Welcome to Zed, a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.
The second line of the README (with links to download & package manager instructions omitted)
> Installation
> On macOS and Linux you can download Zed directly or install Zed via your local package manager.
I do not dispute that HN is an echo chamber. But how did you come to your conclusions?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenless_Zone_Zero
As soon as _any_ dev tool gets VC backing there should be an open source alternative to alleviate the inevitable platform decay (or enshittification for lack of a better word)
This is a better outcome for everyone.
Some of us just want a good editor for free.
Sums up the problem neatly. Everyone wants everything for free. Someone has to pay the developers. Sometimes things align (there is indeed a discussion in LinkedIn about Apple hiring the OPA devs today), mostly it doesn’t.
Agreed. Although nobody ever mentions the 1,100+ developers that submitted PRs to Zed.
And yeah. I know what you mean. But this is the other side of the OSS coin. You accept free work from outside developers, and it will inevitably get forked because of an issue. But from my perspective, it's a great thing for the community. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here.