You can now disable all AI features in Zed

I have it nicely integrated with Zed by defining the following task, which you can then add a keybinding for if you want:

    {
        "label": "gitu",
        "command": "gitu",
        "reveal_target": "center",
        "hide": "always",
        "env": {
          "VISUAL": "zed",
          "GIT_EDITOR": "vim"
        }
    }

However, at least at the time, Zed's extension/plugin ecosystem prevented me from making the jump off vscode. Just like it took me a long while to ween myself off JetBrains and their workflow/plugins, it'll take a long while to do the same here - that's if an equivalent plugin exists (yet).

It seems to me, it would be a killer feature for new IDE's to just embrace vscode's extensions and make them "just work". It would remove a lot of the barriers people have with switching IDE's.

Maybe that's an impossible ask... I have no idea, but it would be pretty sweet.

The other two editors I use a lot are Xcode and Android Studio, and while the first is usually fine, Android Studio (IntelliJ) feels servicable but a touch sluggish in comparison. Given the popularity of JetBrains IDEs I’m a bit surprised that there’s not more demand from customers to make it more responsive.

Smart context / big context is a really interesting question, I’m kind of surprised Google isn’t building here given how much effort they’ve put into big context (they have Jules and Gemini CLI but no tab completion UX).

On further thought I think one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) should partner (ideally not buy) with Zed to get a foothold.

I never cared for the LLM sidebar.

But the tab completion is basically mind-reading.

The main feature I really care about is low latency, which is my main gripe about Copilot. There's still a ways to go to match Cursor's quality but I'm chipping away at it!

I used Zed for about a year and a half exclusively, without using any AI features, and then switched to cursor to try AI features out. When Zed released its agent mode, I switched back to Zed.

I absolutely agree that Cursor’s tab completion is far superior to Zeds. The difference is night and day. Cursor’s really is that good. But the Zed agent mode works very well for me and Zed is, IMHO just so much better than an editor. I really hate having to use vscode or a vscode-based editor after using Zed so much (I used vscode exclusively before switching to Zed). And that’s enough for me to give up on the superior tab completion.

I hope Zed eventually improve theirs to a similar experience to cursor, but regardless, I love Zed.

But at the same time, I’m also doing more vibe coding instead of manual coding as time goes on, so Zed might eventually win out.

I think there's also a fork if you can't let go of the VIM bindings.

There's also an importer tool [1] that lets you convert any VS Code theme to a Zed theme. You might still need to compile the importer yourself, but it's all pretty straightforward.

0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/7337

1: https://zed.dev/blog/user-themes-now-in-preview#using-a-vs-c...

And then, due to speed, there is no going back to the lag infested chromium derivative made by Microsoft.

I think it could be made to work better, but as it is now, it feels cumbersome to work with.

Having literally spent days at a time just to get a working run configuration at various employers and clients over the past decade, I find it backwards to use anything besides the terminal and version-controlled scripts & task runners / CLIs to fire up anything. (: People rarely document their JetBrains setup fully and even if they do, JetBrains IDEs are not exactly known for their reproducible behavior or for not occasionally messing up your configuration (in case you do decide to check in your IDE config & share with your team).

Besides, you will need those terminal scripts for your CI pipeline, anyway.

That being said,

> I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE.

I agree, that is very useful. However, to me it's the cherry on top of proper self-contained run scripts for the terminal.

VS Code can launch a fleet of dev containers but it's just not as good of an experience to restart and debug.

I understand that there are advantages to being a native app from their perspective, but for me, it is even better for my editor to be integrated into my terminal editor. And because they built it the opposite way though, they have to also build a terminal emulator into their editor.

There is a real cost to building zed this way. If they were an embedded terminal app, they would get full terminal support for free and would not have to implement 2d text rendering. They could even have made a bundled package with an oss terminal emulator like kitty. Then they could have focused strictly on their editing features and value adds. Every engineer hour spent fixing bugs/adding features to the rendering framework is an hour that could have been spent on value adds.

Personally, there is no way that latency itself can be that value add for me because I use neovim and don't use any language plugins so every keystroke already renders instantly. Clearly then you can do everything zed does in a terminal app within at worst tens of milliseconds of latency.

Of course their target market uses vscode and not vim and either doesn't know or care that you do not need to write your own rendering engine to make a low latency, featureful text editor. I am admittedly very much not the target consumer for zed though.

I have my entire set of plugins and things installed here and now the productivity that I get off this setup even exceeded my long-loved Jetbrains IDEs. I hope that will be temporary though, seriously. The only thing that I strictly dislike about VSCode is the number of high quality themes available - and there are not that many.

Recently stumbled upon VSCodium which is a clean VSCode fork that can work with any VSCode plugin, but I am yet to try it out.

FWIW, I've yet to find a better text editor than Sublime Text.

[1] https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl

It will improve. I'm glad they are at least targeting it as well.

Its agent AI assistant isn’t bad but sadly the restore points button in the AI panel seemed to be broken.

The fact it reminds me of sublime text is a big plus for me.

The rust evangelism is annoying. Really. No one cares what language a program is written it.

I use Golang from JetBrains, and disabling all AI features is only two clicks away. No fuss no muss.

The four AI features in Zed (that I'm aware of) are:

* autocomplete -- this can be turned on and off separately from the AI features toggle, and can be put into 'subtle' mode, where you have to hold a key to see the completions.

* inline AI editing -- only activated by hitting ctrl-enter, otherwise you'll never see it.

* agent/chat editing -- you can disable the right-side chat panel, and you'll never see/use this.

* AI generated commit messages -- there's a button you hit in the commit message panel to activate this.

They had AI features that were always on.

Some people complained so they introduced a flag to, wait for it, disable the ai features.

So they didn't think too deeply about it and named the flag "disable_ai" because it mapped into how they were thinking about it.

You overstate the problem with negative booleans. It's trivial for them to add a function:

  fn isAiEnabled() { return !disable_ai }

I think it's reasonable to, for example, have a field that is labeled "Do Not Track".

From a business perspective, investors want to hear that AI is indeed part of the shipped product.

It's all about optics.

"disable_user_tracking: false" vs "enable_user_tracking: true"

"disable_adverts: false" vs "enable_adverts: true"

Fewer people would actively _enable_ user tracking or adverts compared to those who would take extra steps to _disable_ them.

I spent 20 years without it. That's enough for one lifetime.

It's like saying, "marijuana is rapidly becoming a part of how people get through their day, but we understand not everyone wants to spend their day high."

When investors are involved this immediately changes to:

> Our goal is to build a product which will hopefully return more than our financial investment.

I get the feeling many HN contributors to this discussion forget that Zed is not a software project like Neovim, Nano or Emacs (etc.) which rely on donations and/or sponsors to either pay developers or cover required infrastructure costs.

It's a product backed by investors who - one day - will demand their pound of flesh, and "features" like AI are added to market the product to _more_ investors.

Perhaps the use of AI itself inside the product will also be tracked to steer potential opportunities for the investors themselves.

Like many fellow HN'ers, I use Zed on a daily basis, and it's no different than Google search or Facebook - "If a product from investors is free, YOU are the product"

As in even if you love AI and use it a lot you should have the ability to turn it off.

Mind elaborating?

This is a good conversation to have. We can start by pointing this out and encouraging broader interest. Zed has been my daily driver for over a year.

I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the incentives are not pointed in the right direction. Unless developers are paying directly for the functionality they want, that's misalignment. So enshittification seems probable, maybe inevitable, unless something structural changes.

OTOH, because they charge for their editor, JetBrains has incentives that are better in line with customers.

OTOH I was never able to switch to Jetbrains IDEs for long, because everything was too different, even after installing compat keymaps.

> Zed is built for engineers who care about their tools. That means giving you control over your development environment, including the choice to work without AI if that's what works best for you.