There should be a concept called "engineering privilege".
I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to their companies, etc.
It must be awesome to be able to work in these conditions and still get paid. I'm not hating on it, it's how we get a lot of the good stuff we use.
And the cherry on the cake: you get paid to work on your engineering project, get traction around it as opensource and if there is enough traction, leave the company and spin-off a new one to sell the same product to other companies!
It's surely a lot of work but you get basically the discovery phase til market fit with your ass covered. Kudos to the engineers that pull that out, I really mean it!
That’s why nowadays every company will require that they legally own projects you work on during work hours unless explicitly asked. And many ask you to sign non compete clauses so you don’t take all the knowledge you acquired on the job to the competition, including your own projects, through this is quite hard to really enforce.
That seems to be common sense, is it not the default? That should be the norm if it isn't, it's like being a freelancer and being hired and publishing the project in your own name, that's borderline criminal imo.
A lot of companies were founded by one or a group of people leaving a company and opening a competitor with the knowledge they gained while working for them. Anthropic, as I understand it, is an example (from OpenAI). Even the company I work for was founded by people who used to work at the "old" industry giant and today we compete with them directly. This is not criminal unless you signed a contract forbidding doing that, though you may certainly claim it's morally a gray area. But yeah, it's very common. You don't get lots of domain knowledge, which is required to start most kinds of businesses, until you've worked in the area for someone else for a long time.
Re-invent is fine, that's how we actually get the good stuff we use.
Re-write (frequently) is usually a sign of bad power dynamics in the team, code rot and generally bad engineering management, in my experience.
That's why most React shops end up in this vicious cycle of constant re-writes of a perfectly fine working system for this reason. Yeah, must be really nice getting paid for it too.
Sometimes I feel like the software field is just begging to be "disrupted" by AI. So much bad management and useless wheel-spinning, all with salaries far above what is typical for any given area.
It's like taxis and Uber. Yes it's probably bad long-term that local taxi companies have been replaced by a mega-corporation. But there were so many bad taxi companies with rude dispatchers, lazy drivers, cars that show up 30 minutes late, drivers that don't run the meter, artificial supply restriction in NYC (medallions), etc. If taxis didn't suck so much, they might have been able to fight back better, and got more sympathy from the public along the way.
You see similar claims leveled at certain unions like the ILA and police unions.
That is mostly an US SV thingie, in many European countries, it is a comfortable office worker salary, just like the other folks on the office having jobs with any kind of degree above standard high school.
No but rarely are they as well compensated as software developers.
Also I think engineering team quality is bimodal, essentially a mixture of "good" teams "bad" teams. As with taxi drivers, only the "bad" ones really deserve to get disrupted.
I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when the acquisition conversations started.
> But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode
You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects.
That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.
They're projects where there's not a payment page to buy a copy sure, but VSCode especially has I'm sure indirectly led to a ton a of profit - its the natural home of Copilot, integrated with Github (including in their paid product Codespaces), and has I'm sure led to a ton of standardisation and productivity increases across the company.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the company that invented Electron was Github, and you could argue that Github's technical investments did all pay off very richly.
My favorite example was from Joel Spolsky's company, where bright engineers got bored with working on bug tracking software so they wrote their own C# compiler.
It may seem weird nowadays but at the time it made sense since wasabi was "transpiling" VBScript (on which their existing codebase was written since they were all into Microsoft products at the time) to other languages in environments where VBScript didn't exist (e.g. IIRC they could transpile to PHP - and there isn't "one" PHP).
They were basically making shrink-wrap software running on an environment (the web) that wasn't made for shrink-wrap software (especially at the time) and came up with a technical solution to it.
FWIW they weren't the only to attempt something like that. HaXe is basically the same idea and was used to port a ton of games from Flash to all sorts of platforms and Monkey was another similar attempt (i think most people aren't aware of these two because they were gaming related and really limited to indie games).
Because every company may have different needs that are not fulfilled by standards software. We have seen the large number of companies whose goal is to make custom software for other companies So is not always that reinventing is fun, but it may actually be needed.
The same logic also applies for software that is used internally. It's not always that developers want to rebuild stuff, but that they need to rebuild or alter software to fit their / company needs.
We have not even talked about cost or licensing or other issues.
Yes except a lot of it isn't even fit for their purpose and they don't rely on it. Facebook switched from Cassandra to HBase because "eventual consistency is a difficult pattern". No shit, really?
> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it. From any line of code, find the conversation. From any message, jump to the code it touched.
This is how Zed leapfrogs the field and becomes a centicorn.
If you can train a model to operate at a higher level and with looser requirements, you've gotten rid of engineers in the loop and built a system for the automated synthesis of high quality software.
You're training systems to produce higher quality chain of thought across the entire software development lifecycle.
"There is the software. And then there are the databases beneath the software, two enormous databases, encyclopedic in their comprehensiveness. One is the history of the code itself -- with every line annotated, showing every time it was changed, why it was changed, when it was changed, what the purpose of the change was, what specifications documents detail the change. Everything that happens to the program is recorded in its master history. The genealogy of every line of code -- the reason it is the way it is -- is instantly available to everyone."
also from ^ article on Lockheed Martin Corp space shuttle software group ...
Importantly, the group avoids blaming people for errors.
The process assumes blame - and it's the process that is
analyzed to discover why and how an error got through.
At the same time, accountability is a team concept:
no one person is ever solely responsible for writing or
inspecting code. "You don't get punished for making errors,"
says Marjorie Seiter, a senior member of the technical staff.
"If I make a mistake, and others reviewed my work, then I'm
not alone. I'm not being blamed for this."
It's funny, zed started out really refreshing, and now it's degraded to the point where it's fairly unusable. Regularly it would tie up tons of resources on my fairly beefy laptop. I switched back to sublime and it is a breath of fresh air, I didn't realize how slow zed had gotten. It seems like maybe they lost their way a bit, but I recognize that also they need to make money presumably, and it's hard to do that with a large team and a focused product.
It has degraded? In what way? It sounds like your issues could be caused by LSP servers going rogue. Zed itself has been perfectly stable for me since I started using it as my default editor ~1 year ago. The only thing I didn’t like were some default layout changes that were trivial to revert.
Did you check if the resources were consumed by the LSP or Zed? Also there was a Zed fork without the AI stuff, not sure if is a hard fork or not and if is still maintained (IIRC wasnt hosted on Github)
I know people disagree over definitions of "hard fork". Gram does not send patches to Zed but does occasionally merge fixes from Zed. There is not any specific effort to keep (non-AI) feature parity.
And yet it is written in Rust, a good evidence that compiled languages only help so much when the architecture isn't the right one, or bad algorithms are being chosen.
VSCode has plenty of C++ and Rust extensions to work around Electron limitations, which are then used as WebAssembly plugins on the browser version, though.
It shows the engineering effort that the team puts into it, which is why it is one of the few Electron based apps that is bearable to use.
I would like Zed to have feature parity with VSCode from 6 years ago. Working well over SSH or WSL, which it currently doesn't, is a part of that, even if I don't use that everyday.
I am a paying user, and have no plans to stop supporting them financially, but I wish they locked in and went through GH Issues queue, starting from the oldest.
Of course vs code accommodates wsl. Same company. Personally I couldn’t care less how badly MS wants to make windows a viable development environment. It’s more irrelevant every day. I’m glad zed doesn’t waste too much time on it.
They aren't proposing to replace git though. They are just attempting to make it simpler for developers to follow changes applied by an LLM in an ergonomic fashion. Not saying it will work well but I'm happy to see someone trying a new approach here.
I’m building an in-terminal IDE over at https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast that does this. No AI, no telemetry, just a text editor that has it all baked in and is easy on the eyes.
Then go get a text editor? They’ve been around for decades. Use sublime text for all eternity. Why even complain here when what you want is a solved problem?
I'm not satisfied with any of the text editors I've used (I've used all the big ones for a few years each).
Zed was a promising new direction I.e. VSCode minus the bullshit. But it's not getting the polish / productionisation it would need to actually be a better editor than the others. And now it doesn't look like it will.
No, a company will always build whatever they think will make them more money. If you want an editor without the bullshit try Sublime as it has a history of staying that way, or the good old Vim and emacs.
Try Gram. It's a fork of Zed which changes a few things, one of which is that all the AI stuff is disabled by default. I was interested in it because it doesn't download language servers without asking you (unlike Zed). Ultimately I'm kind of on the fence between it and Sublime, but it's a lot better than Zed imo.
They're a VC backed company, they aren't building for the user at all. The VC is their user.
Just need to see reality for how it is in the tech industry, products aren't made for users anymore they're mostly a ritual to please the VC gods. Bonus points if you're disruptive and a net-negative toward society.
Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex. For when I want to be near the code, I prefer it now over TUIs or the Codex app. It feels much more immediate that way. Sticking to the basics will kill them IMO. They have been pitching themselves as agent-native for a while btw.
And the workflow they are describing in the post sounds amazing, I‘ve been wishing for that. It‘s orthogonal to CVS, no? You can still make PRs. But, crucially, you can loop people in early on, when it matters the most.
> Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex.
you must not use it much. try pasting in an image, quitting zed and restarting (ie: upgrading the app). it shows you the base64 encoded data instead of just showing the image. heck, it doesn't even show you the image when you paste it in. it just shows the filename.
ACP integration is very good, IMO. I'm using it with Claude Code. They've made so many improvements over time. I use image pasting myself, TBH I was excited it worked at all. Surprised that some rough edges around images are enough to ruin the whole thing for you.
images were just one glaring example... i didn't say anything about ruined, i just think a lot of those 'rough edges' are a bit more rough than they could be.
it is a code editor after all. how about integrating the LSP so that it doesn't have to resort to rg/grep/sed/scripts to edit code?
At this point I'm happy when things don't break randomly. However, it seems I lost an ACP session today and I'm not sure it's my own fault. Could be Zed playing tricks.
Unfortunately their Zed agent is completely broken when running on Windows connected to WSL/SSH remote because the terminal tool checks for paths using the local Path style (windows) which breaks when applied to paths on the remote (linux).
Is it? Last time I checked, I had to maintain a custom fork because they didnt support device auth for remote env so you couldn’t really use your chatGPT sub.
Because the way we code has completely changed, and there is plenty of room for innovation.
I am convinced that the conversation is the primary artifact produce while coding, which is not a common/popular opinion. Still, i love to see someone pushing forward on this.
I agree with you that I wish they'd just nail the editor. I've been using it for years now and I really like it, but there are a few rough parts (settings and LSPs especially) that could probably be tuned up in no time if the focus was there.
Having said that, I love the idea of correlating the agent sessions to the changes. I'm glad someone is working on it.
You don't need a tool for that just configure your agent to write commit messages that link to a LLM log. And changes between commits. Maybe don't care why do we even care?
Of course you are right. I could write my own software to do what I want. Or, I could just do it all myself manually. This argument is valid in pretty much all cases, so I concede the point.
One could argue using WSL is an anti-pattern: use a real OS. I kid, I kid.
Yeah I’m an avid user of the editor. I don’t care for their AI stuff I bring my own but I just want to see the editor become awesome. A more detailed object plugin ecosystem would be nice.
Adding onto this I and many others have asked for a ui extension API to actually make use of AI tools and they've adamantly refused. Until someone else with the time and resources to fork and maintain it comes along, it's just in maintenance mode. These "AI" features are not useful at all.
We deal with it, but even with options like jj, it always feels like you're settling. Git works, and we are familiar with it, but is it much more than that? Our baseline expectation should be higher.
If I understand correctly, something like DeltaDB has always been part of the plan. Zed is a moonshot to reimagine collaborative development from the ground up. The editor, developer communication, the way changes are tracked, everything.
I've been hitting that or something recent recently; it's what I would consider a severe bug because it can result in lost work and related. Basically, if you `git pull`, edit a file elsewhere, or use an LLM, zed's tree will remain stale unless you re-close and open the file. (Restarting the application doesn't sort it). So you end up overwriting the file with whatever was in the buffer.
I’m not saying zed necessarily should be the one to do this, but in regards to "why not git, jj.."; if we don’t explore the fringes, how do we know if we are at local or global optimum with current solutions?
Oh, that sounds related to what I experienced. I recently had another look at Zed and tried to use it to full-text search through my workspace consisting of symlinked folders. Relevant things would just now show up, cmd+P also wouldn’t find the files. That’s where the evaluation stopped.
FYI: I've had success with changing the file_scan_inclusions setting which forces the file watcher to rescan all projects. Doesn't work consistently unfortunately, but easier than restarting.
But Zed has taken a shit ton of VC money, so Zed needs to grow exponentially. So, Zed needs to make stuff that they shove down their customer's throats and can make more money with. Therefore, Zed can't justify just focussing on the basics. This makes me zad.
Did you even read the post? The idea is to tie conversations to code. This is a more sophisticated version of something like doltdb, not a git replacement.
>This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.
It’s crazy that is still an issue. I really tried to use Zed because I was trying to move away from VSCode and VSCodium did not have a featureful python lsp. I just couldn’t stand little things like that that. Also, the font was really blurry. VSCodium now has Pyfly which is decent, so I just switched back.
> This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.
Have you considered using a keybind? They even show which keybind to use when you hover them.
Amazing that someone would prefer a vertical bar that is 85% empty, wasted space instead of pressing a few keys on the keyboard - for a text editor of all things.
Having keyboard shortcuts isn’t a valid reason for UI buttons to be unusable. If it should solely be accessed by a shortcut, then they should just remove the buttons altogether.
> An unprivileged userspace application, even if coded poorly, shouldn't crash the machine.
How would you prevent that? It can write until root disk is full, can take all your memory, saturate your CPU and a whole bunch of other stuff we (users) like to be able to do for the things that need them.
Unless you're suggesting something like Qubes or similar UX?
Right, my point being that it's should be up to the user to decide, because most of the times I run programs, I actually want them to be able to gobble up GB of disk, RAM and fully make use of my CPU. That's why I bought the hardware I have :)
Isn't that the default? The user has access to all available memory unless they (or an admin) set a restriction. Unavailable memory is only unavailable because writing to it crashes the kernel, thus preventing you from using your hardware!
Why develop this when the core editor is almost unusable? On Linux wayland, copypaste is broken, the file manager is laggy and snippets do not trigger before the heavy hint logic is done. This is just on top of my head, the list is long
I can't use an editor where the file contents I'm being shown don't match the reality of the file. I guess this issue doesn't affect most people somehow, but in the age of CLI agents I'm not sure how more people aren't running into it.
I was really enjoying Zed for a short while before I ran into this fundamental issue.
All I can say is it's the only editor I've ever used with this type of issue and unfortunately it's a deal breaker for me. I can get by with any other editor even if they aren't my favorite, but only Zed made me realize that the most important thing an editor can do for me is accurately show me files.
Have you checked your fs.inotify.max_user_watches value? Maybe your value is too low and Zed can't watch the files that are changing. I know the JetBrains IDEs need the default to be increased on Linux because they detected it and prompted me to increase it.
Even if that's the case, max_user_watches is never less than 8k unless you've set it lower for some reason. If the editor is prioritizing currently open files as it should, there should basically never be a problem even if project sync suffers.
The limit is per-user, not per-editor. Every process under your UID shares the same max_user_watches pool. So the editor's "prioritize open files" behavior can't help when a resident daemon like Watchman has already consumed the budget. Zed doesn't error out when it hits the watch limit. It logs a warning and periodically retries to establish the watch. Until it can do so, external file changes aren't reflected in the editor.
I just checked my workstation and found Watchman alone holds ~556K watches across 34 roots. It keeps those watches even after the tool that spawned it disconnects. Notably, I've never invoked Watchman manually -- other tools do. And the 8k floor isn't much of a floor. My nixpkgs checkout alone is 37,686 directories, 4.6x that.
Truthfully, I had no idea Watchman stays resident and accumulates watched roots. But, that's kind of the point. It's a very easy thing to miss.
Are you editing outside Zed? That’s the only time I see this issue.
Eg Pi has its own tools for editing files and ignores the ones Zed sends over ACP. If I used Zeds AI pane to have Pi change a file, I can see the edits in the ACP window but the editor view doesn’t update.
I end up having to use something from the command palette to force refresh it, something like “Editor: Reload File”.
It happens to me across Windows, OSX, native ArchLinux and ArchLinux via WSL.
I'm pretty sure I also ran into this very recently in linux wayland while working with symlinked files. It would show an empty file or show the old content if you recreate the symlink or modify the file externally
"Almost unusable"? Slight hyperbole don't you think? I initially tried the Flatpak version on Fedora 44 and had a few minor problems, but since switching to the terra repos version (terrapkg.com) I've had zero issues, Have you tried that?
For me, its a massive improvement over IntelliJ for my daily workflow.
This is surprising to hear. I have Zed on my tablet as IntelliJ (PyCharm/RustRover) turn it into a space heater. Zed's introspection/refactoring/general language knowledge etc isn't on the same tier at JB; it's closer to VsCode in that regard. I.e., I'd classify Zed as a project-based editor, while JB is an IDE.
I have been using Zed for about a year now on Debian 12 / Wayland and it works flawlessly. Even with Toshy (macOS) keybindings. I have it installed now on my Framework 13 Pro (also Fedora 44, and also with Toshy) and it works great aside from a subtle (100ms?) lag when using ctrl+arrow-key. Otherwise it is great.
The only thing that doesn't work well is inertial scrolling[0]. But scrolling is a fucking shit show on Linux no matter what... so I don't necessarily fault Zed for this. The same issue occurs in other apps.
Im on nixos and tried all immediate flavours of zed: stable, unstable and nightly. Nightly seems to be most stable and every time i pull the flake, i prey for more bugs to be fixed. Sometimes it works
Just installed it, works on my kde and niri setups (I logged out and switched to each), copy paste works as well. File manager laggi-ness I didn't notice I don't use it, I use it mostly to type stuff out.
I have never used snippets so unsure about that too, going from command bar seemed to work.
I think it might be bad, but could also be it's not correctly configured maybe try asking codex/claude or something to check if it can fix/fine tune the config, if that doesn't work file issues?
I do suspect it might be working for me cause I got lucky I do see an open issue[1], but given Zed is used a bunch the lack of comments does suggest maybe it's not that wide spread either way not a good look.
There are a lot of subtle bugs. I'm on macOS too, but perhaps my workflow is unusual? Every time I open it, I find small bugs. There are so many features that it's hard to maintain them, I guess.
For example, a lot of disable buttons do not actually disable stuff. They just hide it from the UI.
Agree, copy-paste feels like it works 80% of the time, which is maddening when 1 in 5 copy paste attempts fail. (mostly from zed to something else) Why??
At least Excel has the courtesy to telling you "Hey the copy-paste buffer said it didn't catch that, can you try again?"
lucky you, but here's the issue (note: there have been at least 3 issues before this one) https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/58651 crossing fingers it's solved for real now. i only use wayland on my laptop where it seems to be fixed, my go-to machine is with Xorg where there's no copy-paste problems
It still doesn't actually display a window my end until I press a keyboard key or move the mouse. So very often I sit and wait for it to open, only to realize I have to press a random key for it to unhide.
That's something I've never encountered on Linux/KDE/Wayland/Flatpak across Debian Trixie, Arch, and Fedora. Might be worth nuking your local Zed files and trying again.
I'm on macOS, but the core editor is far from unusable. I think it's unfair to call it that.
Zed is my daily driver and I'm pretty happy with it. I often switch over to other editors to do things Zed can't, but it's rarer than you'd think and really isn't that much of a hassle.
I started using Zed a couple weeks ago and immediately had issues with copy/paste/buffer on an M1 Mac. I tried a few suggested fixes and they didn't work.
Can't relate (Fedora 44 GNOME with Wayland, AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO w/ Radeon 860M), binary install (no Flatpak). Using Zed as daily driver since ~4 Months, never had such problems.
Thankfully it's been working well for me when i use it, which tbh hasn't been that much lately since I'm getting an agent to write code for me more and more.
One thing they need to add is a way to double click on file names in agent output to navigate to it. It works in the bottom terminal but not the agent terminal panes or built in agents
I've been using this "almost unusable" editor daily on both Linux and Mac for the past year and now experience no issues. while I still have JetBrains I haven't used it at all in at least six months.
A lot of the copy on this page feels like the kind of copy an AI would produce. But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy so I don’t want to accuse them of doing that.
Marketing aside, this is the kind of thing (advancements in VCSes) that I’d usually be excited about, but which I’m less excited about coming from Zed because it makes me start to worry that they’re going to continue focussing less on the core editor experience.
I love Zed and I hope that it doesn’t start to go flakey.
> But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy
I've written my fair share of landing pages and copy lately. I start out with Claude for ideation and headlines it produces are almost always low effort word salads. Case in point:
"Software is made
between commits"
It never fails to emphasize the last part, even if it bears no weight.
The only response to that headline is "Sure I guess".
It doesn't give you an idea of what problem it solves, doesn't sell you a vision or get you excited about the future. It's not even that insightful and is borderline factually incorrect.
Claude Design absolutely loves creating phrases like "Share the thread, not the PR". The amount of "do the xyz, not the abc" subheadings on docs in my workplace has exploded in the last 6 months, and it gets a bit tiring to see. I think it's a hard-coded alternative to em dashes or something.
Anytime a company/group announces some random new project now, I tend to immediately suspect over-reliance on AI. From what I’ve seen, AI addiction frequently manifests as an explosion in scope, possibly because LLMs make so much initial “progress” on new projects which you can then demo and have resource allocators extrapolate to some glorious shipping version. But then you have to go back & clean up the slop, progress slows to a crawl, and it’s all way less exciting. That initial rush can be addicting. Ultimately a supercharged version of eternal human impulses I guess.
I'm always hesitant to assert something is definitely AI copy because everyone's tone of voice is different.
I'm also starting to wonder how much real, human-made copy is mimicking AI-created copy that has been filling marketing pages as of late. When people make marketing websites, they often riff and rip off other websites' (à la "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[0]) design ideas and language -- I wouldn't be surprised if there are humans now inadvertently adopting LLM's writing style like that.
In my opinion / experience, AI copy is a generally more cumbersome to read and process. So I would assume a company at Series B stage would have a human (with marketing guidelines) go over the language used on a one-pager to announce a new product.
It's exactly because everyone's tone is different that I'm confident it's AI.
Granted, a bit of AI-influencing phrasing in human writing is common, but the idea that someone sat down, worked hard, and came back with an entire page of a pitch-perfect AI slop is simply incredible.
I really love Zed and I want them to really succeed. Unfortunately it seems that they are swamped with various things and the issue tracker is not a priority for the team, which fair enough. OSS is a gift and I take it as such. Wild proposal but if someone is willing to start a "user advocate" contributor, I'll be happy to donate monthly so user requests can be taken a look at :)
It's primarily aimed at creative workflows. I mainly use it for creative coding, but I realize now it could also serve the same purpose for tracking changes made by AI agents.
If it's really so for some people, a case could be made that their problems can already be half-solved by changing the granularity of their commits: just commit more often.
I disagree. JetBrains PyCharm has a similar "local history" feature that solves this very real and existing problem and has saved my ass more than once when accidentally overwriting changes before committing or fubar'ing a git reset.
1. Commits are really just manual checkpoints while you’re working. Why not automatically checkpoint everything so you can actually go back to an older implementation without needing to remember to commit it?
2. Agentic workflows are so deeply single player. It’s very annoying, I want to collaborate with my team with agents, not review the output of one dev’s agent which they’ll just shove back into their existing agent.
I really do like Zed, it's snappier than VS code and with pretty good vim emulation. Even through SSH, the native UI allows for no network latency, compared to something like vim+terminal. Like many other posters, I do feel like the core editor is getting worse.
Some issues I've encountered recently at work:
- Routinely encounter bugs with the python language server, it's particularly slow when compared to using VSCode. All that snappiest disappears when finding symbols after the '.' is considerably slower than my typing speed.
- I found similar issues with C++ code bases.
- It's also so hard to debug when something goes wrong. I was trying to find out why pyright keep spinning on startup, but the "LSP logs" never show anything.
- Connecting via SSH always opens the repo in restricted mode, even though I check the "Trust all projects in" checkbox. Never happened before.
- Debugger UI is a mess. Make a run, stop the run, edit the task.json, try running again, and 2 tasks show up. One for the old and one for the new.
--
I stuck with it because I really do like the UI, the performance, and initially it seemed to be an improvement from VS Code for my workflows, but lately I've been moving back to code as it seems more stable. I don't really use agent features, so I don't think I'm the target customer for this or other priority Zed features.
I do see the usefulness of something like this, I'm interested to see if the new agentic style of programming will result in the "code" part of editors becoming second class (for the better) and will allow for more rapid development. Although I'm not looking forward to read my coworker's "threads" of how a feature was made, I have a feeling that it will be more difficult to read than the raw code, as from my experience, LLMs don't really employ terse and effective communication (might not be entirely fair, I found ChatGPT /study mode pretty good.)
--
Anyone know of a good replacement editor that might meet my usecase? I'm really a batteries included type of developer.
Yeah apparently Zed was engineered for speed but I find it very slow in general, especially on startup.
VS Code can slow down as you add functionality, but Zed often just doesn’t have that functionality at all. So the proper comparison is “VS Code minus all extension-provided features” which is actually pretty fast.
> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it
A total nightmare and imo every dev should push back using this stuff. You'd otherwise have management brag about you not being a good communicator with the ai agent, the same management that have no idea how to steer these tools.
I really like Zed the editor, I'm not sure I like the path they getting into
These sort of paper trails are for developers not management though, does your manager open all your commits and start commenting on them? If so, maybe apply somewhere else.
Management nowadays are for sure playing with surveillance software against their workers. Let's please not think otherwise, it's one of the main value adds that LLM companies are selling to businesses; about the ease of which you can collect metrics on employees after feeding whatever into an LLM.
The neat thing is that they thing decide to make your life miserable based on their made up findings!
A lot of haters in the comments, but I think it’s a bit too much negativity.
It’s true that they could focus on polishing the edit experience, but given that I rarely code anymore by hand, I have some doubts that it’s future proof to do that.
I think is not a bad bet trying to innovate in the LLM-coding space. Looking forward to try deltaDB and I hope it works outside of Zed !
This feels very useful for training agents but almost completely useless to humans? Do I really want to go back to every change I made? Whatuse would that be?
Jetbrains has had a "local history" feature for many years that had this, and I only use it occasionally but it feels pretty essential now. I once accidentally wiped uncomimted work in the terminal, and brought up Local History to restore it in a click. Or more casually, I'm struggling with a CSS design: what did it look like at 3pm? It's an effortless escape or experimentation valve between commits.
(It's also why you never need to manually save a file in jetbrains. It just assumes you want to save, because you can always safely go back if needed. Editors with manual saving feel cumbersome now)
Looks like a great feature/product/functionality. I hope that Zed editor will make it work with LLMs/agents that run in the terminal, not just the Zen Agent itself. Is it even possible? I use OMP.sh agent running in Zed terminal.
This is the killer Zed feature, IMO, that they support almost any agent via extensions. I deleted Cursor but still use the agent via Zed because it’s a lot nicer experience, Zed never had popups telling me Grok is half off. I also use OpenRouter and Zed.dev with it, that’s three providers out of dozens that it supports.
Exactly. The more competitive the space is, the more important it is that products purposefully support 3rd-party providers. Now that people are increasingly switching from Anthropic/OpenAI for inference reseellers and on-prem compute, transparency and portability will be the new values, not being slightly better than the next agent or model.
Even more than supporting any agent that support almost anything period. They seem to take the default approach of using open community standards first when adding new features. By investing very heavily in LSP, ACP, DAP, tree-sitter etc it makes it easy for Zed to integrate with tons of different workflows, language, ecosystems etc quickly and easily. Its just good engineering and I love to see it.
Using OMP through ACP inside Zed is drastically worse experience than just running OMP inside Zed terminal. The ACP UI is dreadful and I had bunch of crashes even for first party Codex support.
When I saw the blog post about DeltaDB I thought oh okay cool but so what I don't really know what this is for me and how it helps me or what it does for me. Then again today I saw this link and looked at it and I can't help thing what is this to me? How does this help me, why would I want to request early access cause I have no idea what it does?
I'd much prefer some more time spent building a solid editor which is why I switched to Zed early on in it's development cause I was frustrated and tired of VSCode. But saying that ever since Zed AI I've felt more and more frustrated with Zed and it's quality is starting to lack?
1. There is not much money in making a good editor.
2. There is money in AI products, and a huge demand for solid AI workflows from many developers. Lack of AI tooling is absolutely a dealbreaker for many developers, whether you like it or not.
3. The core primitive here is just as much about enabling live collaboration which has been on Zed’s roadmap for many years before agents took over the industry.
The value you get for a sublime text+merge is so much higher than whatever you’d get by paying for an equivalent cost of a subscription to whatever Zed is selling to monetize their editor.
Can’t believe people hem and haw about paying for a license for them. $168 is nothing. That’s less than a half a day of salary for me and the amount of time saved using them easily adds up to multiples of that.
(1) If you wanted to make money don’t make an editor. And yet, somehow Sublime Text survives..
(2) hence why I call them “distractions”. And yet Sublime Text hasn’t gotten greedy..
(3) Nobody cares about the collaborative features either.
You’ll pry Sublime Text from my cold dead hands. I tried Zed and it really was close but ever since they got greedy the editor has gone to crap. So for now I will continue to happily renew my Subl license every few years. For less than what it would cost for an ongoing subscription to Zed’s AI plans to “support them”.
Once I've tried one SCM to track every single change to my files, and the other for bulk commits. The result was quite satisfying.
It was some 15 years ago, we just switched from CVS to SVN and everyone thought it was the end of the history, at least for SCMs. Main branch was called master, and we were locking files by simply telling our teammates not to touch them.
At one time I decided I really missed the Eclipse feature which was tracking all local changes to the files, even without an active SCM. Making tiny commits was not an option, because I want it to track every file save, and we haven't yet figured out working with branches.
So I decided to install mercurial and made a hook which made a dummy commit every time I saved a file. Everything mercurial related was ignored by SVN.
Suddenly I was able to teleport myself to a version from before the lunch while SVN history was crystal clear.
Somehow I still miss integrated, per file, timeline in IDE.
Some time ago I found Zed did not have undo-trees (like Emacs and Vim have, possible with plugin). I think DeltaDB is probably going to power undo-trees for Zed.
Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I think this just gives micro-managers the data they need to micro-manage you. It invites people to scrutinize the process, instead of the results.
Not once have I wished to review a colleague’s conversation with an AI. I want to review finished work.
I look at this and I can only imagine layoffs being justified with “bad prompt quality”. An incident retrospective broadcasting your agent conversations to the entire company, with people speculating where you should have put the “make no mistakes”.
It’s a shame, really, because I like Zed as an editor, but I can’t bring myself to support them if this is the direction they’re choosing.
The sort of company that would do those things is going to be mandating you to use their enterprise AI plan anyway, which already lets them read all your conversations if they want to.
Letting them read my conversations is okay. Systematically reconstructing a timeline of every keystroke that went into a project, then immortalizing this timeline into a VCS, that’s the creepy part.
I suppose companies could do this anyway just by installing spyware in your work computer, but I would very much prefer if that spyware was not my editor of choice.
The way I’m seeing AI used by organizations is to produce process slop: tickets, summaries, docs, etc. rather than drive process change and optimization, or enable individuals to be more effective within the organization.
This landing page is not good. It's mired in out-of-context jargon and implementation detail. (What does "virtualize the worktree" mean? Git already has "effectively free" branching. What does branching "mid-run" mean? How does a teammate "join while the work is happening"? What/where are they joining?).
What actually is it and what value do I get out of it?
Reading the linked blog posts: It's a layer on top of git for CRDT-based collaborative editing that captures addressable code deltas + agent conversations. I could have real-time collaborative humans + agents development and can resume any agent conversation from any point in history, because it is all stored (powered by DeltaDB). I guess?
I actually might want this, but wouldn't know it from the landing page.
Commercially speaking, going against Git is a fool's errand. As much as I'd like to see Git usurped, I can't imagine the people backing this would sign off on a competitor to Git unless it was some type of sidecar. No doubt it'll be tightly coupled to Zed as well which is concerning. Perhaps this is pessimistic but I don't have faith the team are going to deliver anything groundbreaking given their entire business is existing technology, but less shit. No one is going to move core infrastructure for less shit or slightly better, otherwise we'd be using Mercurial or Darcs.
That's what's trouble: git is reaching the end of its useful life.
It's 25 years old, and the patch files that make up the core of the decentralized collaboration system are fully 50 years old. Have the design requirements and constraints perhaps changed over the last 50 years?
1. Git breaks down if files are too large or lines within files are too large.
2. Add/Rename conflicts will always burn you because git does not protect the intent behind changes.
And really the third is that IDE's are shit because there's no document object model (like the browser has). You have to make an error recovering parser to try to deal with the fact that an IDE is editing code half the time and text half the time. You're stuck playing a game you can't possibly win. Can you imagine if the HTML DOM kept blinking into and out of existence? It'd be a nightmare...
If this is targeted at competing with git, I agree it’s a useless attempt.
If it’s targeted at working alongside git, and competing with the “local history” provided by like vscode, jetbrains and even vim where they track all saves to files it might serve a purpose?
The latter could be “useful” as an offline record. But the way they’re talking about sharing that, it feels like this is targeted at replacing git.
I kind of do the conversation tracing thing already. Every change is attributed by Claude code session id (and timestamped obviously), then I have a jq based tool over cc session jsons that I save indefinitely. I've found it very important to be loud about what I actually wrote vs what the llm wrote.
Personal use solo repo. I don't know id want people seeing my cc sessions lol.
Lots of negativity here, but this is interesting to me and moves Zed towards something that is more than 'just' an IDE in a future where IDE users may be in the minority of people creating software.
i think a system that uses git and file system artifacts (txt/md/xml files whatever preference) is much better. eng teams need to define their artifacts, eg plan file, reqs etc whatever is needed and important to that team. the agent convo itself doesn’t add much value IMO and adds unnecessary bloat.
I think there is a ton of value of being able to rewind in between commits. I always felt that asking for a description of a commit is way too much.
I can write a bunch of checkpoint commits and then squash them, I suppose, but the interface for doing it isn't super inviting and there are a lot of things I need to consider in terms of tracked and untracked files.
If I understand this correctly, I can deltaDB all my untracked and ignored files and git push my thought-out commits, fully respecting things ignored. And If I realise that I should have git-commited 10 minutes ago, I can rewind, commit, fast forward and continue.
VSCode is great, but its lack of a sandbox for extensions makes it extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks.
Zed is one of the few major editors that isolates plugins, which is why I like it. However, it has far too many bugs.
Regarding DeltaDB’s request to 'log conversations and changes together', I think the Linux kernel's development model — which combines mailing lists, patch exchanges and Git — provides a good solution.
I suspect that, to secure funding or land enterprise contracts, they need to showcase a “showcase” project like DeltaDB, but I believe they also want to focus on the core parts of the editor.
---
I wrote the original text, but I had an LLM polish it, so there are em dashes in it
I wouldn't really say DeltaDB is a showcase project, given Zed has been working on it for at least a year, so it's likely been a focal point of development for quite some time. If there is funding to secure, they either should've been louder on the initial announcement, or not thrown a year on this, right?
I missed that the announcement was actually from two months ago.
It will be interesting to see how they handle balancing both an editor and a VCS without Big Tech resources like Microsoft's. Considering how many contributions and years it took for Git to reach its current level of maturity, taking on both projects seems like a massive undertaking.
Jujutsu already does this. I had agent screwing up changeset over couple hour long session and it took one shell command to split on pieces with longer pause.
The only downside is that because of Jujutsu snapshots it can't be used inside sandbox (since all jj commands are mutating)
You still get snapshots of the working tree every time an agent calls a jj command, including reading ones. This is regular for me that I'm not worried to lose any intermediate state.
I guess an interesting use case for this would be to pinpoint exactly which change was made by who in cases where multiple people / agents work on the same code at the same time. The Zed team is working on two features that are probably going to be built on top of DeltaDB: async collaboration and instant sharing. Instant sharing used to be talked about more in the past and it's still the feature I am most eager to see.
Snapshots have an intention behind them as a chunk that the programmer thought of. It has infinite flexibility depending on the programmer/team. IMO they are a necessary feature, but the article considers it a bug. It’s an explicit and deliberate chunking of code writing process which is what you want in a chaotic “collaborative” environment. The system doesn’t get to decide but you decide when to commit.
Whoever on the zed team came up with this must be coding with agents way more than i am, because it hasn't come up for me as something I'd really need yet. But it sounds cool anyway. I guess it's kind of like undo history but persistent and with more visibility, and with branching? Anyone from zed here to comment?
I wish Zed in Windows(W11) would have fix the problem with windows(like opening the settings window on Zed) where if your scale is more than 100%(Settings -> System -> Display -> Scale) the title bar doesn't show as it is way up. Been having this problem since forever.
What am I missing in Zed is actually a "File History" - like in VS Code, which keeps a history of every time a file was saved to the disk, and it's very easy to review that history.
I have been using zed for almost 2ish years now, great overall, but last month when I tried ACP with opencode and even omp, it gave me many issues that it was easier just to use the terminal directly, oh, and I couldn’t select the model that time not sure if it’s fixed now.
If every commit has full ai conversation baggage, and you feed that history back to an ai… aren’t you wildly inflating context with stuff that may or may not matter? How does this even work with thousands of “commits?”
There is a universe where prompting with large context will be near instantaneous and pretty much free. In that universe, there would be no reason not to have even more robust and verbose logging like this. For thousands of commits, a chunking mechanism and a running summary of the chunks would roughly get you there.
nice to see more initiatives to improve vcs in the current chaos and paradigm change.
simultaneously, i find it curious that the ide's git integration feels incomplete in front of vs code and its forks.
git is not perfect but for a lot of users, a better ux can help solve most of their grievances. regardless, network effect exists and it would take more than a killer app/site to get this going.
i would not outright dismiss this attempt, just like svn guys may have treated git back in the day.
It will be interesting to see how this works out in practice. Personally I don't see much use from it, but I'll give it a try after it ships and see how it works in practice.
I had the great pleasure/misfortune of being forced to work with LaminDB, and I can tell you folks; data provenance isn't going away -- it will be used to train the very AI models snapping at our heels
This local history has saved my bacon on occasion. E.g. when I went too long without committing and something silly overwrote the file I was working on. Or because I did something silly with git. Then it is nice that there is still an independent backup elsewhere with different failure modes.
The whole point is that sometimes I or the build system performs an action that it cannot reverse. This happens in between commits as I’m not in the habit of committing after every few keystrokes.
Yes, it is open source, and I am not saying they should not do it. Chromium is also open source, but if they added too much nonsensical AI functionality, I would be upset. I am free to improve it on my own, but that does not mean I cannot express how I feel.
I have not gone to the Zed repository and created an issue telling them to stop developing DeltaDB because it takes away the maintainers’ time.
To all the people complaining about not getting upstream fixes.. why don't you just fork it and fix it for yourself? The cost and difficulty of that is on the floor.
Genuine question, and to be clear I don't think you're wrong to be frustrated with upstream Zed
Being a maintainer of a popular open source package sucks. You get hundreds of PRs and it takes a considerable amount time to only merge the good ones. LLMs have only exacerbated the problem.
So to your question, if you submit a perfect fix upstream and it doesn’t get merged. You either deal with immense friction for which your company won’t understand to get it merged. Or you silently diverge from source.
this looks like jetbrains "local changes" but globally synced. "for the agents" mights scare people who jump to think about micromanagers, but these people mostly hide or fake work. even micromanagers will eventually give you an agent to use so it won't matter what is in the change log, what matters is speed+quality. and since you can iterate from any branch you have inginite try and retry possibilities
Why are people in this thread being so incessantly cynical? I expect more out of HN. I get that some wish Zed had other priorities, but the features being touted sound really promising.
Of course it's just marketing until we get an actual product, but I for one look forward to seeing this stuff in action.
I still want to. I will give it another try when I am free.
But the whole environment has something that feels "invasion of privacy". Maybe its me.
I want an installation where typing latency must be invisible, literal invisible to the eye. Heard zed is great at that.
But I don't want my sensitive code to be put in a state that might lead it to exist in a cloud environment without my explicit permission.
Besides, the concept is good. Many a times I have wanted this exact feature - where what happens between commits can in principle be snapshoted with full checkout
to any point - without of course any conscious effort from my side.
Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL.
Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system?
There should be a concept called "engineering privilege".
I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to their companies, etc.
It must be awesome to be able to work in these conditions and still get paid. I'm not hating on it, it's how we get a lot of the good stuff we use.
And the cherry on the cake: you get paid to work on your engineering project, get traction around it as opensource and if there is enough traction, leave the company and spin-off a new one to sell the same product to other companies!
It's surely a lot of work but you get basically the discovery phase til market fit with your ass covered. Kudos to the engineers that pull that out, I really mean it!
That’s why nowadays every company will require that they legally own projects you work on during work hours unless explicitly asked. And many ask you to sign non compete clauses so you don’t take all the knowledge you acquired on the job to the competition, including your own projects, through this is quite hard to really enforce.
As long as you convince them to MIT license it doesn't really matter though right?
That seems to be common sense, is it not the default? That should be the norm if it isn't, it's like being a freelancer and being hired and publishing the project in your own name, that's borderline criminal imo.
A lot of companies were founded by one or a group of people leaving a company and opening a competitor with the knowledge they gained while working for them. Anthropic, as I understand it, is an example (from OpenAI). Even the company I work for was founded by people who used to work at the "old" industry giant and today we compete with them directly. This is not criminal unless you signed a contract forbidding doing that, though you may certainly claim it's morally a gray area. But yeah, it's very common. You don't get lots of domain knowledge, which is required to start most kinds of businesses, until you've worked in the area for someone else for a long time.
> They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly
Re-invent is fine, that's how we actually get the good stuff we use.
Re-write (frequently) is usually a sign of bad power dynamics in the team, code rot and generally bad engineering management, in my experience.
That's why most React shops end up in this vicious cycle of constant re-writes of a perfectly fine working system for this reason. Yeah, must be really nice getting paid for it too.
Sometimes I feel like the software field is just begging to be "disrupted" by AI. So much bad management and useless wheel-spinning, all with salaries far above what is typical for any given area.
It's like taxis and Uber. Yes it's probably bad long-term that local taxi companies have been replaced by a mega-corporation. But there were so many bad taxi companies with rude dispatchers, lazy drivers, cars that show up 30 minutes late, drivers that don't run the meter, artificial supply restriction in NYC (medallions), etc. If taxis didn't suck so much, they might have been able to fight back better, and got more sympathy from the public along the way.
You see similar claims leveled at certain unions like the ILA and police unions.
That is mostly an US SV thingie, in many European countries, it is a comfortable office worker salary, just like the other folks on the office having jobs with any kind of degree above standard high school.
Are there any fields where you feel managers and workers don't suck?
No but rarely are they as well compensated as software developers.
Also I think engineering team quality is bimodal, essentially a mixture of "good" teams "bad" teams. As with taxi drivers, only the "bad" ones really deserve to get disrupted.
Ah, but with re-writes you get to post those blog posts for Reddit and HN front page to drive traffic to the company's site, isn't that great?
I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when the acquisition conversations started.
> But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode
You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects.
That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.
They're projects where there's not a payment page to buy a copy sure, but VSCode especially has I'm sure indirectly led to a ton a of profit - its the natural home of Copilot, integrated with Github (including in their paid product Codespaces), and has I'm sure led to a ton of standardisation and productivity increases across the company.
Greatness cannot be planned.
Indirectly, maybe 8 years after Electron was first started, and not for the company that first invested in Electron.
My point yet again: only companies with money to burn can take that gamble.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the company that invented Electron was Github, and you could argue that Github's technical investments did all pay off very richly.
Well, some of these exact people are who built Zed.
My favorite example was from Joel Spolsky's company, where bright engineers got bored with working on bug tracking software so they wrote their own C# compiler.
You mean wasabi or whatever it was called?
It may seem weird nowadays but at the time it made sense since wasabi was "transpiling" VBScript (on which their existing codebase was written since they were all into Microsoft products at the time) to other languages in environments where VBScript didn't exist (e.g. IIRC they could transpile to PHP - and there isn't "one" PHP).
They were basically making shrink-wrap software running on an environment (the web) that wasn't made for shrink-wrap software (especially at the time) and came up with a technical solution to it.
FWIW they weren't the only to attempt something like that. HaXe is basically the same idea and was used to port a ton of games from Flash to all sorts of platforms and Monkey was another similar attempt (i think most people aren't aware of these two because they were gaming related and really limited to indie games).
Yeah the big driver for it, from memory, was them offering on-site deployment.
Because every company may have different needs that are not fulfilled by standards software. We have seen the large number of companies whose goal is to make custom software for other companies So is not always that reinventing is fun, but it may actually be needed.
The same logic also applies for software that is used internally. It's not always that developers want to rebuild stuff, but that they need to rebuild or alter software to fit their / company needs.
We have not even talked about cost or licensing or other issues.
Yes except a lot of it isn't even fit for their purpose and they don't rely on it. Facebook switched from Cassandra to HBase because "eventual consistency is a difficult pattern". No shit, really?
ok
It’s not out of their domain at all IMO. I‘m only using Zed now (despite its non existent GH integration) because it works with Codex.
I used to call this developer indulgence.
[dead]
> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it. From any line of code, find the conversation. From any message, jump to the code it touched.
This is how Zed leapfrogs the field and becomes a centicorn.
If you can train a model to operate at a higher level and with looser requirements, you've gotten rid of engineers in the loop and built a system for the automated synthesis of high quality software.
You're training systems to produce higher quality chain of thought across the entire software development lifecycle.
This is training data for the next stage.
Well this will certainly be an interesting test of your unbounded faith in a singularity based on word generators.
When do you expect them to become a ‘centicorn’ based on this fabulous technology?
It's not just a step, it's a leap towards real productivity that your agents will actually use!
I’ll have what you’re having.
One piece of load-bearing coming right up
You're absolutely right! Would you like me to generate that piece of load-bearing now?
<Accept> [Decline]
This is right at the seam of the possible and the dream and it poses several honest questions.
From 1996:
https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...
"There is the software. And then there are the databases beneath the software, two enormous databases, encyclopedic in their comprehensiveness. One is the history of the code itself -- with every line annotated, showing every time it was changed, why it was changed, when it was changed, what the purpose of the change was, what specifications documents detail the change. Everything that happens to the program is recorded in its master history. The genealogy of every line of code -- the reason it is the way it is -- is instantly available to everyone."
also from ^ article on Lockheed Martin Corp space shuttle software group ...
It's funny, zed started out really refreshing, and now it's degraded to the point where it's fairly unusable. Regularly it would tie up tons of resources on my fairly beefy laptop. I switched back to sublime and it is a breath of fresh air, I didn't realize how slow zed had gotten. It seems like maybe they lost their way a bit, but I recognize that also they need to make money presumably, and it's hard to do that with a large team and a focused product.
It has degraded? In what way? It sounds like your issues could be caused by LSP servers going rogue. Zed itself has been perfectly stable for me since I started using it as my default editor ~1 year ago. The only thing I didn’t like were some default layout changes that were trivial to revert.
It is randomly consuming high CPU on my mac as well, without any LSPs. Getting annoying.
Yea I figured it was my LSP but when I disabled it, it wasn't resolved. I didn't debug it, I just switched.
Did you check if the resources were consumed by the LSP or Zed? Also there was a Zed fork without the AI stuff, not sure if is a hard fork or not and if is still maintained (IIRC wasnt hosted on Github)
Gram Editor. It's actively maintained.
I know people disagree over definitions of "hard fork". Gram does not send patches to Zed but does occasionally merge fixes from Zed. There is not any specific effort to keep (non-AI) feature parity.
https://gram-editor.com
https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram
Why does the author hate the AI so much?
[flagged]
have they fixed the file refresh issue?
And yet it is written in Rust, a good evidence that compiled languages only help so much when the architecture isn't the right one, or bad algorithms are being chosen.
For a large application the language it is written in has almost no bearing on the perceived speed by users. VSCode is one example.
VSCode has plenty of C++ and Rust extensions to work around Electron limitations, which are then used as WebAssembly plugins on the browser version, though.
It shows the engineering effort that the team puts into it, which is why it is one of the few Electron based apps that is bearable to use.
I don't want Zed to focus on accommodating WSL's quirks.
I would like Zed to have feature parity with VSCode from 6 years ago. Working well over SSH or WSL, which it currently doesn't, is a part of that, even if I don't use that everyday.
I am a paying user, and have no plans to stop supporting them financially, but I wish they locked in and went through GH Issues queue, starting from the oldest.
Of course vs code accommodates wsl. Same company. Personally I couldn’t care less how badly MS wants to make windows a viable development environment. It’s more irrelevant every day. I’m glad zed doesn’t waste too much time on it.
Windows is more than viable as development platform, ask Valve why they need Proton in first place.
Breaking an illegal monopoly takes decades but, as it happened with Internet Explorer 6, it's finally happening for Windows.
70% market share, plus all the games that Proton depends on.
Are you saying that games get released on Windows a lot because developers prefer Windows as a development platform?
Yes, that is the favourite platform for game studios, and console devkits.
How about accommodating basic fundamentals like file change notifications not being universally reliable?
All my code lives on the other end of a Samba share. Guess what doesn't work reliably.
They aren't proposing to replace git though. They are just attempting to make it simpler for developers to follow changes applied by an LLM in an ergonomic fashion. Not saying it will work well but I'm happy to see someone trying a new approach here.
I don't want someone "to make it simpler for developers to follow changes applied by an LLM in an ergonomic fashion". I want a text editor.
I want "VScode without the bullshit". That's what I thought they were building.
I’m building an in-terminal IDE over at https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast that does this. No AI, no telemetry, just a text editor that has it all baked in and is easy on the eyes.
Defining “it all” is exactly the problem here.
Then go get a text editor? They’ve been around for decades. Use sublime text for all eternity. Why even complain here when what you want is a solved problem?
I'm not satisfied with any of the text editors I've used (I've used all the big ones for a few years each).
Zed was a promising new direction I.e. VSCode minus the bullshit. But it's not getting the polish / productionisation it would need to actually be a better editor than the others. And now it doesn't look like it will.
No, a company will always build whatever they think will make them more money. If you want an editor without the bullshit try Sublime as it has a history of staying that way, or the good old Vim and emacs.
Try Gram. It's a fork of Zed which changes a few things, one of which is that all the AI stuff is disabled by default. I was interested in it because it doesn't download language servers without asking you (unlike Zed). Ultimately I'm kind of on the fence between it and Sublime, but it's a lot better than Zed imo.
They're a VC backed company, they aren't building for the user at all. The VC is their user.
Just need to see reality for how it is in the tech industry, products aren't made for users anymore they're mostly a ritual to please the VC gods. Bonus points if you're disruptive and a net-negative toward society.
Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex. For when I want to be near the code, I prefer it now over TUIs or the Codex app. It feels much more immediate that way. Sticking to the basics will kill them IMO. They have been pitching themselves as agent-native for a while btw.
And the workflow they are describing in the post sounds amazing, I‘ve been wishing for that. It‘s orthogonal to CVS, no? You can still make PRs. But, crucially, you can loop people in early on, when it matters the most.
> Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex.
you must not use it much. try pasting in an image, quitting zed and restarting (ie: upgrading the app). it shows you the base64 encoded data instead of just showing the image. heck, it doesn't even show you the image when you paste it in. it just shows the filename.
ACP integration is very good, IMO. I'm using it with Claude Code. They've made so many improvements over time. I use image pasting myself, TBH I was excited it worked at all. Surprised that some rough edges around images are enough to ruin the whole thing for you.
images were just one glaring example... i didn't say anything about ruined, i just think a lot of those 'rough edges' are a bit more rough than they could be.
it is a code editor after all. how about integrating the LSP so that it doesn't have to resort to rg/grep/sed/scripts to edit code?
What I really like is that all code links it outputs, open a pane at that line.
low bar. we've had anchor hrefs for decades now.
At this point I'm happy when things don't break randomly. However, it seems I lost an ACP session today and I'm not sure it's my own fault. Could be Zed playing tricks.
don't get me wrong. it has improved. i use it all day, every day.
my favorite ux goof right now is the fastmode switch button right next to the stop button and how much space it all takes up.
I use it constantly but haven’t felt the need to paste an image yet. I guess I‘m using pi and the Codex app more for that.
sorry, i didn't mean a quantity of time, i meant depth of usage.
Unfortunately their Zed agent is completely broken when running on Windows connected to WSL/SSH remote because the terminal tool checks for paths using the local Path style (windows) which breaks when applied to paths on the remote (linux).
I fixed this and a couple related issues in a PR but it hasn't gotten any attention yet. I guess they are a bit swamped. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/59937
Merged, thank you Richard! :)
Is it? Last time I checked, I had to maintain a custom fork because they didnt support device auth for remote env so you couldn’t really use your chatGPT sub.
I‘m using codex no issues, over ACP.
Because the way we code has completely changed, and there is plenty of room for innovation.
I am convinced that the conversation is the primary artifact produce while coding, which is not a common/popular opinion. Still, i love to see someone pushing forward on this.
I think conceptually, the deltas are exactly the type of “basics” Zed is built on.
I agree with you that I wish they'd just nail the editor. I've been using it for years now and I really like it, but there are a few rough parts (settings and LSPs especially) that could probably be tuned up in no time if the focus was there.
Having said that, I love the idea of correlating the agent sessions to the changes. I'm glad someone is working on it.
You don't need a tool for that just configure your agent to write commit messages that link to a LLM log. And changes between commits. Maybe don't care why do we even care?
Of course you are right. I could write my own software to do what I want. Or, I could just do it all myself manually. This argument is valid in pretty much all cases, so I concede the point.
Thanks. There maybe middle ground too like a Claude plugin.
I think Zed doesn't need to build this though.
Claude, for example, already does write a git commit trailer with a session ID.
One could argue using WSL is an anti-pattern: use a real OS. I kid, I kid.
Yeah I’m an avid user of the editor. I don’t care for their AI stuff I bring my own but I just want to see the editor become awesome. A more detailed object plugin ecosystem would be nice.
Adding onto this I and many others have asked for a ui extension API to actually make use of AI tools and they've adamantly refused. Until someone else with the time and resources to fork and maintain it comes along, it's just in maintenance mode. These "AI" features are not useful at all.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/53403#disc...
Some random thoughts that I think are prevalent in a startup context:
- basics are easy
- everyone can do basics
- need to do the things that will bring in the next 1000 users.
- everyone already does the basics
Although I agree and I hit same roadblock I found that wsl is working well when you open the project with special "projects: open folder in WSL" command, see my comment here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26857#disc...
Nevertheless it could have been working better.
Because git kind of sucks, in my humble opinion.
We deal with it, but even with options like jj, it always feels like you're settling. Git works, and we are familiar with it, but is it much more than that? Our baseline expectation should be higher.
If I understand correctly, something like DeltaDB has always been part of the plan. Zed is a moonshot to reimagine collaborative development from the ground up. The editor, developer communication, the way changes are tracked, everything.
I've been hitting that or something recent recently; it's what I would consider a severe bug because it can result in lost work and related. Basically, if you `git pull`, edit a file elsewhere, or use an LLM, zed's tree will remain stale unless you re-close and open the file. (Restarting the application doesn't sort it). So you end up overwriting the file with whatever was in the buffer.
I’m not saying zed necessarily should be the one to do this, but in regards to "why not git, jj.."; if we don’t explore the fringes, how do we know if we are at local or global optimum with current solutions?
Oh, that sounds related to what I experienced. I recently had another look at Zed and tried to use it to full-text search through my workspace consisting of symlinked folders. Relevant things would just now show up, cmd+P also wouldn’t find the files. That’s where the evaluation stopped.
FYI: I've had success with changing the file_scan_inclusions setting which forces the file watcher to rescan all projects. Doesn't work consistently unfortunately, but easier than restarting.
Thank you for finally explaining why open source developers hate AI so much. If their bug reports are all like this AI sloprambl.
everyone wants to be everything in 2026
is this supposed to compete with a traditional vcs like git? it reads to me like it's a separate different thing
But Zed has taken a shit ton of VC money, so Zed needs to grow exponentially. So, Zed needs to make stuff that they shove down their customer's throats and can make more money with. Therefore, Zed can't justify just focussing on the basics. This makes me zad.
Did you even read the post? The idea is to tie conversations to code. This is a more sophisticated version of something like doltdb, not a git replacement.
So like Fossil then.
I like Fossil be because it can be all in one. WIki, a place to store architectural diagrams, tickets, basic webgui, etc.
This specific issue drove me mad for a couple of hours, I thought my LLM wasn't creating files and lying about it
Hmm, yeah before "DeltaDB" I have a big list of things I would rather they develop/fix:
- Vertical activity bar (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecommen... - rejected because it "doesn’t match our design vision for Zed")
This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.
- Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory
- Don't freeze when resuming from suspension (I suspect this is GPU-driver related on linux) forcing me to `killall zed-editor`
>This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.
It’s crazy that is still an issue. I really tried to use Zed because I was trying to move away from VSCode and VSCodium did not have a featureful python lsp. I just couldn’t stand little things like that that. Also, the font was really blurry. VSCodium now has Pyfly which is decent, so I just switched back.
The font blurriness har finally been fixed now, at least.
> This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.
Have you considered using a keybind? They even show which keybind to use when you hover them.
Amazing that someone would prefer a vertical bar that is 85% empty, wasted space instead of pressing a few keys on the keyboard - for a text editor of all things.
Having keyboard shortcuts isn’t a valid reason for UI buttons to be unusable. If it should solely be accessed by a shortcut, then they should just remove the buttons altogether.
Except they aren’t unusable either.
Sometimes there may be keybinding conflicts. Since when we have started to push back on bog standard expectations like usable buttons in a UI?
> Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory
I don't think you can put this on Zed. An unprivileged userspace application, even if coded poorly, shouldn't crash the machine.
> An unprivileged userspace application, even if coded poorly, shouldn't crash the machine.
How would you prevent that? It can write until root disk is full, can take all your memory, saturate your CPU and a whole bunch of other stuff we (users) like to be able to do for the things that need them.
Unless you're suggesting something like Qubes or similar UX?
Disk, memory, and CPU limits? The app should crash, not the kernel.
Right, my point being that it's should be up to the user to decide, because most of the times I run programs, I actually want them to be able to gobble up GB of disk, RAM and fully make use of my CPU. That's why I bought the hardware I have :)
Isn't that the default? The user has access to all available memory unless they (or an admin) set a restriction. Unavailable memory is only unavailable because writing to it crashes the kernel, thus preventing you from using your hardware!
Sometimes OOM Killer can stop it before it wrecks too much havoc, but often everything grinds to a complete halt and I have to just power cycle.
My annoyance with Zed is the inability to disable the "collaboration/multiplayer" functionality, so much that I'd rather just use VS Code.
Why develop this when the core editor is almost unusable? On Linux wayland, copypaste is broken, the file manager is laggy and snippets do not trigger before the heavy hint logic is done. This is just on top of my head, the list is long
I had to stop using Zed because of this issue (which persists despite being closed): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/38109
I can't use an editor where the file contents I'm being shown don't match the reality of the file. I guess this issue doesn't affect most people somehow, but in the age of CLI agents I'm not sure how more people aren't running into it.
I was really enjoying Zed for a short while before I ran into this fundamental issue.
I do not have this issue. (Yes, I am on Linux/Wayland)
All I can say is it's the only editor I've ever used with this type of issue and unfortunately it's a deal breaker for me. I can get by with any other editor even if they aren't my favorite, but only Zed made me realize that the most important thing an editor can do for me is accurately show me files.
Have you checked your fs.inotify.max_user_watches value? Maybe your value is too low and Zed can't watch the files that are changing. I know the JetBrains IDEs need the default to be increased on Linux because they detected it and prompted me to increase it.
Even if that's the case, max_user_watches is never less than 8k unless you've set it lower for some reason. If the editor is prioritizing currently open files as it should, there should basically never be a problem even if project sync suffers.
The limit is per-user, not per-editor. Every process under your UID shares the same max_user_watches pool. So the editor's "prioritize open files" behavior can't help when a resident daemon like Watchman has already consumed the budget. Zed doesn't error out when it hits the watch limit. It logs a warning and periodically retries to establish the watch. Until it can do so, external file changes aren't reflected in the editor.
I just checked my workstation and found Watchman alone holds ~556K watches across 34 roots. It keeps those watches even after the tool that spawned it disconnects. Notably, I've never invoked Watchman manually -- other tools do. And the 8k floor isn't much of a floor. My nixpkgs checkout alone is 37,686 directories, 4.6x that.
Truthfully, I had no idea Watchman stays resident and accumulates watched roots. But, that's kind of the point. It's a very easy thing to miss.
Are you editing outside Zed? That’s the only time I see this issue.
Eg Pi has its own tools for editing files and ignores the ones Zed sends over ACP. If I used Zeds AI pane to have Pi change a file, I can see the edits in the ACP window but the editor view doesn’t update.
I end up having to use something from the command palette to force refresh it, something like “Editor: Reload File”.
It happens to me across Windows, OSX, native ArchLinux and ArchLinux via WSL.
I'm pretty sure I also ran into this very recently in linux wayland while working with symlinked files. It would show an empty file or show the old content if you recreate the symlink or modify the file externally
I stopped using it due to this issue as well; too dangerous/risky.
"Almost unusable"? Slight hyperbole don't you think? I initially tried the Flatpak version on Fedora 44 and had a few minor problems, but since switching to the terra repos version (terrapkg.com) I've had zero issues, Have you tried that?
For me, its a massive improvement over IntelliJ for my daily workflow.
This is surprising to hear. I have Zed on my tablet as IntelliJ (PyCharm/RustRover) turn it into a space heater. Zed's introspection/refactoring/general language knowledge etc isn't on the same tier at JB; it's closer to VsCode in that regard. I.e., I'd classify Zed as a project-based editor, while JB is an IDE.
I have been using Zed for about a year now on Debian 12 / Wayland and it works flawlessly. Even with Toshy (macOS) keybindings. I have it installed now on my Framework 13 Pro (also Fedora 44, and also with Toshy) and it works great aside from a subtle (100ms?) lag when using ctrl+arrow-key. Otherwise it is great.
The only thing that doesn't work well is inertial scrolling[0]. But scrolling is a fucking shit show on Linux no matter what... so I don't necessarily fault Zed for this. The same issue occurs in other apps.
- [0] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14473
> massive improvement over IntelliJ for my daily workflow.
Why?
I used Zed for about 6 months but I lost motivation.
I have the full jetbrains subscription and use it for some debugging etc. I got vim for quick edits and cli tooling for ai. I got no use case for Zed.
Im on nixos and tried all immediate flavours of zed: stable, unstable and nightly. Nightly seems to be most stable and every time i pull the flake, i prey for more bugs to be fixed. Sometimes it works
>> For me, its a massive improvement over IntelliJ for my daily workflow.
That's a bit of a low bar. Perhaps that's the disconnect?
Just installed it, works on my kde and niri setups (I logged out and switched to each), copy paste works as well. File manager laggi-ness I didn't notice I don't use it, I use it mostly to type stuff out.
I have never used snippets so unsure about that too, going from command bar seemed to work.
I think it might be bad, but could also be it's not correctly configured maybe try asking codex/claude or something to check if it can fix/fine tune the config, if that doesn't work file issues?
I do suspect it might be working for me cause I got lucky I do see an open issue[1], but given Zed is used a bunch the lack of comments does suggest maybe it's not that wide spread either way not a good look.
[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/47004
Maybe I got lucky?? Does it not auto update on linux maybe I am on an old build... Very suspicious.
The copy-paste bug manifests itself after some time and the bug is silent.
I regularly leave it open for days and never run into any copy/paste bugs in Wayland/Flatpak.
I use it as a daily driver with few if any problems, but I'm on macOS. Maybe their Linux support is particularly crappy?
There are a lot of subtle bugs. I'm on macOS too, but perhaps my workflow is unusual? Every time I open it, I find small bugs. There are so many features that it's hard to maintain them, I guess.
For example, a lot of disable buttons do not actually disable stuff. They just hide it from the UI.
Yep. Many issues are Linux only. And even with the issues it’s still more pleasant to use than vscode/ium.
Agree, copy-paste feels like it works 80% of the time, which is maddening when 1 in 5 copy paste attempts fail. (mostly from zed to something else) Why??
At least Excel has the courtesy to telling you "Hey the copy-paste buffer said it didn't catch that, can you try again?"
Linux Wayland (Ubuntu 26.04)
What exactly is broken with copy-paste? I've been using Zed on Wayland (official install, not flatpak and not terra) and had no issues with this.
lucky you, but here's the issue (note: there have been at least 3 issues before this one) https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/58651 crossing fingers it's solved for real now. i only use wayland on my laptop where it seems to be fixed, my go-to machine is with Xorg where there's no copy-paste problems
It still doesn't actually display a window my end until I press a keyboard key or move the mouse. So very often I sit and wait for it to open, only to realize I have to press a random key for it to unhide.
Terrible Linux support.
That's something I've never encountered on Linux/KDE/Wayland/Flatpak across Debian Trixie, Arch, and Fedora. Might be worth nuking your local Zed files and trying again.
I'm on macOS, but the core editor is far from unusable. I think it's unfair to call it that.
Zed is my daily driver and I'm pretty happy with it. I often switch over to other editors to do things Zed can't, but it's rarer than you'd think and really isn't that much of a hassle.
I started using Zed a couple weeks ago and immediately had issues with copy/paste/buffer on an M1 Mac. I tried a few suggested fixes and they didn't work.
Can't relate (Fedora 44 GNOME with Wayland, AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO w/ Radeon 860M), binary install (no Flatpak). Using Zed as daily driver since ~4 Months, never had such problems.
Completely ditched VS Code and never looked back.
Maybe some Ubuntu-specific issue?
Thankfully it's been working well for me when i use it, which tbh hasn't been that much lately since I'm getting an agent to write code for me more and more.
One thing they need to add is a way to double click on file names in agent output to navigate to it. It works in the bottom terminal but not the agent terminal panes or built in agents
I've been using this "almost unusable" editor daily on both Linux and Mac for the past year and now experience no issues. while I still have JetBrains I haven't used it at all in at least six months.
Ha if you thought it was laggy try it on software accelerated graphics.
why develop this when it seems jetbrains had a local history feature which recorded every change for the past decade(s)
> when the core editor is almost unusable
Shit, as someone who uses Zed everyday, I didn't realize what I am using is unusable.
I guess we have slightly different standards and/or use cases
Because it's not broken, the issues you're describing are far from universal. Also, fixing them won't bring any money.
A lot of the copy on this page feels like the kind of copy an AI would produce. But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy so I don’t want to accuse them of doing that.
Marketing aside, this is the kind of thing (advancements in VCSes) that I’d usually be excited about, but which I’m less excited about coming from Zed because it makes me start to worry that they’re going to continue focussing less on the core editor experience.
I love Zed and I hope that it doesn’t start to go flakey.
> But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy
I've written my fair share of landing pages and copy lately. I start out with Claude for ideation and headlines it produces are almost always low effort word salads. Case in point:
"Software is made between commits"
It never fails to emphasize the last part, even if it bears no weight.
The only response to that headline is "Sure I guess".
It doesn't give you an idea of what problem it solves, doesn't sell you a vision or get you excited about the future. It's not even that insightful and is borderline factually incorrect.
Claude Design absolutely loves creating phrases like "Share the thread, not the PR". The amount of "do the xyz, not the abc" subheadings on docs in my workplace has exploded in the last 6 months, and it gets a bit tiring to see. I think it's a hard-coded alternative to em dashes or something.
Anytime a company/group announces some random new project now, I tend to immediately suspect over-reliance on AI. From what I’ve seen, AI addiction frequently manifests as an explosion in scope, possibly because LLMs make so much initial “progress” on new projects which you can then demo and have resource allocators extrapolate to some glorious shipping version. But then you have to go back & clean up the slop, progress slows to a crawl, and it’s all way less exciting. That initial rush can be addicting. Ultimately a supercharged version of eternal human impulses I guess.
God it’s so tiring reading this bullshit framing that you people constantly regurgitate.
Why? People care about their craft and people care about what they interact with the world.
The vast majority of people don't like using poorly made things, especially when it is forced upon them against their will.
The page design looks like it has Claude's fingerprints on it. Claude design is the new bootstrap.
You're too kind. It's obviously AI copy, and a huge negative signal (to me, anyway).
I'm always hesitant to assert something is definitely AI copy because everyone's tone of voice is different.
I'm also starting to wonder how much real, human-made copy is mimicking AI-created copy that has been filling marketing pages as of late. When people make marketing websites, they often riff and rip off other websites' (à la "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[0]) design ideas and language -- I wouldn't be surprised if there are humans now inadvertently adopting LLM's writing style like that.
[0] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#:~:text=Good%20arti...
Why do you think an AI-focused company would hesitate to put AI-generated copy on their website?
Hah :)
In my opinion / experience, AI copy is a generally more cumbersome to read and process. So I would assume a company at Series B stage would have a human (with marketing guidelines) go over the language used on a one-pager to announce a new product.
But -- evidently -- anyone's guess!
It's exactly because everyone's tone is different that I'm confident it's AI.
Granted, a bit of AI-influencing phrasing in human writing is common, but the idea that someone sat down, worked hard, and came back with an entire page of a pitch-perfect AI slop is simply incredible.
Sounds like a side-effect of being VC-backed. Like what the ex GitHub CEO went on to build (Entire). Unnecessary.
It also feels like his former company could implement his new company in a couple of weeks if they choose to.
I really love Zed and I want them to really succeed. Unfortunately it seems that they are swamped with various things and the issue tracker is not a priority for the team, which fair enough. OSS is a gift and I take it as such. Wild proposal but if someone is willing to start a "user advocate" contributor, I'll be happy to donate monthly so user requests can be taken a look at :)
I've been working on a somewhat related tool called Spor: https://github.com/emprcl/spor
It's primarily aimed at creative workflows. I mainly use it for creative coding, but I realize now it could also serve the same purpose for tracking changes made by AI agents.
A non-existent problem that nobody asked to solve...
They say that "history between commits" matters.
If it's really so for some people, a case could be made that their problems can already be half-solved by changing the granularity of their commits: just commit more often.
What about the other half?
I disagree. JetBrains PyCharm has a similar "local history" feature that solves this very real and existing problem and has saved my ass more than once when accidentally overwriting changes before committing or fubar'ing a git reset.
I think that:
1. Commits are really just manual checkpoints while you’re working. Why not automatically checkpoint everything so you can actually go back to an older implementation without needing to remember to commit it?
2. Agentic workflows are so deeply single player. It’s very annoying, I want to collaborate with my team with agents, not review the output of one dev’s agent which they’ll just shove back into their existing agent.
VCs count as people unfortunately.
I really do like Zed, it's snappier than VS code and with pretty good vim emulation. Even through SSH, the native UI allows for no network latency, compared to something like vim+terminal. Like many other posters, I do feel like the core editor is getting worse.
Some issues I've encountered recently at work:
- Routinely encounter bugs with the python language server, it's particularly slow when compared to using VSCode. All that snappiest disappears when finding symbols after the '.' is considerably slower than my typing speed.
- I found similar issues with C++ code bases.
- It's also so hard to debug when something goes wrong. I was trying to find out why pyright keep spinning on startup, but the "LSP logs" never show anything.
- Connecting via SSH always opens the repo in restricted mode, even though I check the "Trust all projects in" checkbox. Never happened before.
- Debugger UI is a mess. Make a run, stop the run, edit the task.json, try running again, and 2 tasks show up. One for the old and one for the new.
--
I stuck with it because I really do like the UI, the performance, and initially it seemed to be an improvement from VS Code for my workflows, but lately I've been moving back to code as it seems more stable. I don't really use agent features, so I don't think I'm the target customer for this or other priority Zed features.
I do see the usefulness of something like this, I'm interested to see if the new agentic style of programming will result in the "code" part of editors becoming second class (for the better) and will allow for more rapid development. Although I'm not looking forward to read my coworker's "threads" of how a feature was made, I have a feeling that it will be more difficult to read than the raw code, as from my experience, LLMs don't really employ terse and effective communication (might not be entirely fair, I found ChatGPT /study mode pretty good.)
--
Anyone know of a good replacement editor that might meet my usecase? I'm really a batteries included type of developer.
Yeah apparently Zed was engineered for speed but I find it very slow in general, especially on startup.
VS Code can slow down as you add functionality, but Zed often just doesn’t have that functionality at all. So the proper comparison is “VS Code minus all extension-provided features” which is actually pretty fast.
Too bad VCs won't give you money for just building a fast editor.
Agree. Too bad it is impossible to have a sustainable, responsible business. Everything has to be to the moon, not to a sustainable future.
> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it
A total nightmare and imo every dev should push back using this stuff. You'd otherwise have management brag about you not being a good communicator with the ai agent, the same management that have no idea how to steer these tools.
I really like Zed the editor, I'm not sure I like the path they getting into
These sort of paper trails are for developers not management though, does your manager open all your commits and start commenting on them? If so, maybe apply somewhere else.
Management nowadays are for sure playing with surveillance software against their workers. Let's please not think otherwise, it's one of the main value adds that LLM companies are selling to businesses; about the ease of which you can collect metrics on employees after feeding whatever into an LLM.
The neat thing is that they thing decide to make your life miserable based on their made up findings!
A lot of haters in the comments, but I think it’s a bit too much negativity.
It’s true that they could focus on polishing the edit experience, but given that I rarely code anymore by hand, I have some doubts that it’s future proof to do that.
I think is not a bad bet trying to innovate in the LLM-coding space. Looking forward to try deltaDB and I hope it works outside of Zed !
Basically what IntelliJ calls local history. It is a feature that has saved my bacon. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html
Similar, but not as polished, also exists in VSCode and derivatives, named the same way. Definitely saved me a few times as well.
This saved me from accidental resets in the past. I learned it existed because the files were showing up in mdfind
Yes, I concur. Local History is wonderful; nice to see Zed getting its own version.
Ooooh, this is cool. I was unaware of this. Thanks for the link.
This feels very useful for training agents but almost completely useless to humans? Do I really want to go back to every change I made? Whatuse would that be?
Jetbrains has had a "local history" feature for many years that had this, and I only use it occasionally but it feels pretty essential now. I once accidentally wiped uncomimted work in the terminal, and brought up Local History to restore it in a click. Or more casually, I'm struggling with a CSS design: what did it look like at 3pm? It's an effortless escape or experimentation valve between commits.
(It's also why you never need to manually save a file in jetbrains. It just assumes you want to save, because you can always safely go back if needed. Editors with manual saving feel cumbersome now)
Looks like a great feature/product/functionality. I hope that Zed editor will make it work with LLMs/agents that run in the terminal, not just the Zen Agent itself. Is it even possible? I use OMP.sh agent running in Zed terminal.
It supports anything with ACP. So it can actually run Codex and Claude Code, not just the Zed Agent.
Looks like omp supports ACP, so all you have to do is specify a Custom Agent in Zed and it should just work.
https://omp.sh/docs/acp
https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents
This is the killer Zed feature, IMO, that they support almost any agent via extensions. I deleted Cursor but still use the agent via Zed because it’s a lot nicer experience, Zed never had popups telling me Grok is half off. I also use OpenRouter and Zed.dev with it, that’s three providers out of dozens that it supports.
Exactly. The more competitive the space is, the more important it is that products purposefully support 3rd-party providers. Now that people are increasingly switching from Anthropic/OpenAI for inference reseellers and on-prem compute, transparency and portability will be the new values, not being slightly better than the next agent or model.
Even more than supporting any agent that support almost anything period. They seem to take the default approach of using open community standards first when adding new features. By investing very heavily in LSP, ACP, DAP, tree-sitter etc it makes it easy for Zed to integrate with tons of different workflows, language, ecosystems etc quickly and easily. Its just good engineering and I love to see it.
Using OMP through ACP inside Zed is drastically worse experience than just running OMP inside Zed terminal. The ACP UI is dreadful and I had bunch of crashes even for first party Codex support.
Yeah, I saw the same degradation. I will try the terminal threads that a poster below has mentioned. It sounds very interesting.
I use this every day — https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads
This looks very promising.
When I saw the blog post about DeltaDB I thought oh okay cool but so what I don't really know what this is for me and how it helps me or what it does for me. Then again today I saw this link and looked at it and I can't help thing what is this to me? How does this help me, why would I want to request early access cause I have no idea what it does?
I'd much prefer some more time spent building a solid editor which is why I switched to Zed early on in it's development cause I was frustrated and tired of VSCode. But saying that ever since Zed AI I've felt more and more frustrated with Zed and it's quality is starting to lack?
Please just make a good editor and stop getting distracted by AI nonsense.
1. There is not much money in making a good editor.
2. There is money in AI products, and a huge demand for solid AI workflows from many developers. Lack of AI tooling is absolutely a dealbreaker for many developers, whether you like it or not.
3. The core primitive here is just as much about enabling live collaboration which has been on Zed’s roadmap for many years before agents took over the industry.
I would pay the cost of a license for a good editor. I did with sublime+sublime merge. I did with Intellij. I did many times
The value you get for a sublime text+merge is so much higher than whatever you’d get by paying for an equivalent cost of a subscription to whatever Zed is selling to monetize their editor.
Can’t believe people hem and haw about paying for a license for them. $168 is nothing. That’s less than a half a day of salary for me and the amount of time saved using them easily adds up to multiples of that.
(1) If you wanted to make money don’t make an editor. And yet, somehow Sublime Text survives..
(2) hence why I call them “distractions”. And yet Sublime Text hasn’t gotten greedy..
(3) Nobody cares about the collaborative features either.
You’ll pry Sublime Text from my cold dead hands. I tried Zed and it really was close but ever since they got greedy the editor has gone to crap. So for now I will continue to happily renew my Subl license every few years. For less than what it would cost for an ongoing subscription to Zed’s AI plans to “support them”.
tangent
Once I've tried one SCM to track every single change to my files, and the other for bulk commits. The result was quite satisfying.
It was some 15 years ago, we just switched from CVS to SVN and everyone thought it was the end of the history, at least for SCMs. Main branch was called master, and we were locking files by simply telling our teammates not to touch them.
At one time I decided I really missed the Eclipse feature which was tracking all local changes to the files, even without an active SCM. Making tiny commits was not an option, because I want it to track every file save, and we haven't yet figured out working with branches.
So I decided to install mercurial and made a hook which made a dummy commit every time I saved a file. Everything mercurial related was ignored by SVN.
Suddenly I was able to teleport myself to a version from before the lunch while SVN history was crystal clear.
Somehow I still miss integrated, per file, timeline in IDE.
Some time ago I found Zed did not have undo-trees (like Emacs and Vim have, possible with plugin). I think DeltaDB is probably going to power undo-trees for Zed.
This makes me uncomfortable.
Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I think this just gives micro-managers the data they need to micro-manage you. It invites people to scrutinize the process, instead of the results.
Not once have I wished to review a colleague’s conversation with an AI. I want to review finished work.
I look at this and I can only imagine layoffs being justified with “bad prompt quality”. An incident retrospective broadcasting your agent conversations to the entire company, with people speculating where you should have put the “make no mistakes”.
It’s a shame, really, because I like Zed as an editor, but I can’t bring myself to support them if this is the direction they’re choosing.
Not only this. I'm also shuddering at the thought of how much more noise this adds which can only be filtered through LLMs.
Don’t worry, Zed (or another company in their VC backers’ portfolios) will helpfully sell you inference to filter through that noise!
I guess this data is not intended to be used all the time. But occasionally you may find it useful in blame or bisect or similar things.
The sort of company that would do those things is going to be mandating you to use their enterprise AI plan anyway, which already lets them read all your conversations if they want to.
Letting them read my conversations is okay. Systematically reconstructing a timeline of every keystroke that went into a project, then immortalizing this timeline into a VCS, that’s the creepy part.
I suppose companies could do this anyway just by installing spyware in your work computer, but I would very much prefer if that spyware was not my editor of choice.
I don't know. I've been giving Zed a chance for almost half a year now and it just doesn't seem to be going the way I would want an editor to go.
It's also delusional to think you can find that one edit that was really useful but you forgot to commit but then deleted in another giant commit.
As anyone who's ever tried to split a days worth of work apart with `git add -p` is well aware.
It may be feasible with a million agents, but they could remember what they typed three hours ago anyhow.
The way I’m seeing AI used by organizations is to produce process slop: tickets, summaries, docs, etc. rather than drive process change and optimization, or enable individuals to be more effective within the organization.
this is the perfect description of how I've seen AI used in most organizations
This landing page is not good. It's mired in out-of-context jargon and implementation detail. (What does "virtualize the worktree" mean? Git already has "effectively free" branching. What does branching "mid-run" mean? How does a teammate "join while the work is happening"? What/where are they joining?).
What actually is it and what value do I get out of it?
Reading the linked blog posts: It's a layer on top of git for CRDT-based collaborative editing that captures addressable code deltas + agent conversations. I could have real-time collaborative humans + agents development and can resume any agent conversation from any point in history, because it is all stored (powered by DeltaDB). I guess?
I actually might want this, but wouldn't know it from the landing page.
I think this is an evolution of Zed’s “multiplayer” CRDT features from a few years back, but with some new agent affordances.
Seems like Zed needs to clean up shop and fix their IDE first.
You can simulate this by having a jj repo with file system watches.
Commercially speaking, going against Git is a fool's errand. As much as I'd like to see Git usurped, I can't imagine the people backing this would sign off on a competitor to Git unless it was some type of sidecar. No doubt it'll be tightly coupled to Zed as well which is concerning. Perhaps this is pessimistic but I don't have faith the team are going to deliver anything groundbreaking given their entire business is existing technology, but less shit. No one is going to move core infrastructure for less shit or slightly better, otherwise we'd be using Mercurial or Darcs.
That's what people would have said 3 years ago about going against google (and search engines in general), yet here we are.
Revolution is in the air.
Google is doing great... Record profits this year, not sure I'd call that a "revolution".
Google of Thesseus.
This isn't trying to be a replacement for Git. Maybe read up first?
That's what's trouble: git is reaching the end of its useful life.
It's 25 years old, and the patch files that make up the core of the decentralized collaboration system are fully 50 years old. Have the design requirements and constraints perhaps changed over the last 50 years?
> git is reaching the end of its useful life
Based on what exactly? I think that git is more useful than ever in this new "age of ai [slop]".
Thankfully, something being old doesn't automatically make it not useful anymore.
Two big things:
1. Git breaks down if files are too large or lines within files are too large.
2. Add/Rename conflicts will always burn you because git does not protect the intent behind changes.
And really the third is that IDE's are shit because there's no document object model (like the browser has). You have to make an error recovering parser to try to deal with the fact that an IDE is editing code half the time and text half the time. You're stuck playing a game you can't possibly win. Can you imagine if the HTML DOM kept blinking into and out of existence? It'd be a nightmare...
I don't think so.
Umm.. it actually is. Look at what it is bemoaning. Plus the post itself is corp speak bs.
If this is targeted at competing with git, I agree it’s a useless attempt.
If it’s targeted at working alongside git, and competing with the “local history” provided by like vscode, jetbrains and even vim where they track all saves to files it might serve a purpose?
The latter could be “useful” as an offline record. But the way they’re talking about sharing that, it feels like this is targeted at replacing git.
Dude the writing is on the wall, git had a good run but it's time for something else. Lore is also solid.
I kind of do the conversation tracing thing already. Every change is attributed by Claude code session id (and timestamped obviously), then I have a jq based tool over cc session jsons that I save indefinitely. I've found it very important to be loud about what I actually wrote vs what the llm wrote.
Personal use solo repo. I don't know id want people seeing my cc sessions lol.
For others considering this, note that Claude removes session history files from ~/.claude after 30 days
A "smooth" editor with uncountable bugs and without smooth scrolling... I agree they should focus on basics.
Lots of negativity here, but this is interesting to me and moves Zed towards something that is more than 'just' an IDE in a future where IDE users may be in the minority of people creating software.
i think a system that uses git and file system artifacts (txt/md/xml files whatever preference) is much better. eng teams need to define their artifacts, eg plan file, reqs etc whatever is needed and important to that team. the agent convo itself doesn’t add much value IMO and adds unnecessary bloat.
this type of sh*t is why i'm glad i didn't switch from neovim to zed
I think there is a ton of value of being able to rewind in between commits. I always felt that asking for a description of a commit is way too much.
I can write a bunch of checkpoint commits and then squash them, I suppose, but the interface for doing it isn't super inviting and there are a lot of things I need to consider in terms of tracked and untracked files.
If I understand this correctly, I can deltaDB all my untracked and ignored files and git push my thought-out commits, fully respecting things ignored. And If I realise that I should have git-commited 10 minutes ago, I can rewind, commit, fast forward and continue.
VSCode is great, but its lack of a sandbox for extensions makes it extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks. Zed is one of the few major editors that isolates plugins, which is why I like it. However, it has far too many bugs.
Regarding DeltaDB’s request to 'log conversations and changes together', I think the Linux kernel's development model — which combines mailing lists, patch exchanges and Git — provides a good solution.
I suspect that, to secure funding or land enterprise contracts, they need to showcase a “showcase” project like DeltaDB, but I believe they also want to focus on the core parts of the editor.
--- I wrote the original text, but I had an LLM polish it, so there are em dashes in it
I wouldn't really say DeltaDB is a showcase project, given Zed has been working on it for at least a year, so it's likely been a focal point of development for quite some time. If there is funding to secure, they either should've been louder on the initial announcement, or not thrown a year on this, right?
I missed that the announcement was actually from two months ago.
It will be interesting to see how they handle balancing both an editor and a VCS without Big Tech resources like Microsoft's. Considering how many contributions and years it took for Git to reach its current level of maturity, taking on both projects seems like a massive undertaking.
The problem with combining mailing lists, patch exchanges, and Git is that you have to combine mailing lists, patch exchanges, and Git.
Most projects are not created under those conditions.
I really don't want management critiquing when I swear at Claude, thanks.
I start to sound like a Jujutsu fanboy but...
Jujutsu already does this. I had agent screwing up changeset over couple hour long session and it took one shell command to split on pieces with longer pause.
The only downside is that because of Jujutsu snapshots it can't be used inside sandbox (since all jj commands are mutating)
Jujutsu is great, but it does not do this. It has no knowledge of agent sessions.
You still get snapshots of the working tree every time an agent calls a jj command, including reading ones. This is regular for me that I'm not worried to lose any intermediate state.
would it make sense to add jj snapshotting commands in agent hooks?
> The only downside is that because of Jujutsu snapshots it can't be used inside sandbox (since all jj commands are mutating)
I guess it depends? You could certainly start with another repo clone that's separate from the one you work on yourself?
I guess an interesting use case for this would be to pinpoint exactly which change was made by who in cases where multiple people / agents work on the same code at the same time. The Zed team is working on two features that are probably going to be built on top of DeltaDB: async collaboration and instant sharing. Instant sharing used to be talked about more in the past and it's still the feature I am most eager to see.
Snapshots have an intention behind them as a chunk that the programmer thought of. It has infinite flexibility depending on the programmer/team. IMO they are a necessary feature, but the article considers it a bug. It’s an explicit and deliberate chunking of code writing process which is what you want in a chaotic “collaborative” environment. The system doesn’t get to decide but you decide when to commit.
Whoever on the zed team came up with this must be coding with agents way more than i am, because it hasn't come up for me as something I'd really need yet. But it sounds cool anyway. I guess it's kind of like undo history but persistent and with more visibility, and with branching? Anyone from zed here to comment?
The fallacy here is that if you have LLM then just start a new thread. That's what all vibe coders do anyways
Not sure I get what you're saying?
Vibe coders don't bother reading code. They won't bother reading the logs
For any problem they just start chatting with LLM for 4 straight hours.
I wish Zed in Windows(W11) would have fix the problem with windows(like opening the settings window on Zed) where if your scale is more than 100%(Settings -> System -> Display -> Scale) the title bar doesn't show as it is way up. Been having this problem since forever.
Can maybe think of one time in the last 10 years that I would have wanted this. Its only purpose is for training LLMs
What am I missing in Zed is actually a "File History" - like in VS Code, which keeps a history of every time a file was saved to the disk, and it's very easy to review that history.
Now this DeltaDB goes way beyond that
If you like Zed, but hate their decisions on non fixing bugs, try https://gram-editor.com (zed fork)
I have been using zed for almost 2ish years now, great overall, but last month when I tried ACP with opencode and even omp, it gave me many issues that it was easier just to use the terminal directly, oh, and I couldn’t select the model that time not sure if it’s fixed now.
If every commit has full ai conversation baggage, and you feed that history back to an ai… aren’t you wildly inflating context with stuff that may or may not matter? How does this even work with thousands of “commits?”
There is a universe where prompting with large context will be near instantaneous and pretty much free. In that universe, there would be no reason not to have even more robust and verbose logging like this. For thousands of commits, a chunking mechanism and a running summary of the chunks would roughly get you there.
nice to see more initiatives to improve vcs in the current chaos and paradigm change.
simultaneously, i find it curious that the ide's git integration feels incomplete in front of vs code and its forks.
git is not perfect but for a lot of users, a better ux can help solve most of their grievances. regardless, network effect exists and it would take more than a killer app/site to get this going.
i would not outright dismiss this attempt, just like svn guys may have treated git back in the day.
It will be interesting to see how this works out in practice. Personally I don't see much use from it, but I'll give it a try after it ships and see how it works in practice.
I have fallen in love with Zed.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492533 (June 11th, 225 comments)
Is it available now? Still seems to be a waitlist?
I had the great pleasure/misfortune of being forced to work with LaminDB, and I can tell you folks; data provenance isn't going away -- it will be used to train the very AI models snapping at our heels
Nice, how about fix bugs?
So is this basically Beads + Dolt? This isn’t to diminish it, it’d be great if this ends up being a less “vibe code-y” alternative to those.
If not, beads + dolt seems like it would be pretty great.
that was my first question too. Here's hoping
Is this just any Jetbrains IDE file history?
Intellij is the emacs of this generation.
https://xkcd.com/378/
It should work with github inbetween commits, that i may use. Right now I'm using staging as an in bewteen in a dangerous way.
Sounds a lot like JJ.. could just make JJ a first class citizen in zed and skip the hard part.. plus it’s git compatible
I’m curious, are many people using Zed as their daily driver in their professional work? (Not just in side projects)
I do but I do regret.
This local history has saved my bacon on occasion. E.g. when I went too long without committing and something silly overwrote the file I was working on. Or because I did something silly with git. Then it is nice that there is still an independent backup elsewhere with different failure modes.
Like a branch on the server?
That would still be in git. The local history in IntelliJ works independently of any VCS.
Also I’ve had formatters botch files including changes I hadn’t committed yet. For that the local edit history is also useful.
Or add it to git? What's wrong with git?
The whole point is that sometimes I or the build system performs an action that it cannot reverse. This happens in between commits as I’m not in the habit of committing after every few keystrokes.
Zed used to be good, now it hogs CPU for no reason and they don't bother fixing it.
This is a big unsolved dev tooling problem. Glad someone competent is working on it.
Yes, but it saps away the time that could be used to improve zed.
Or it’s actively used to improve Zed faster (or more efficiently).
I wonder if a large enough user community could fork zed and actually make progress on the bugs that matter?
Well this is going to be integrated into Zed. It’s an improvement by definition.
zed is open source, you are free to improve it on your own
Yes, it is open source, and I am not saying they should not do it. Chromium is also open source, but if they added too much nonsensical AI functionality, I would be upset. I am free to improve it on my own, but that does not mean I cannot express how I feel.
I have not gone to the Zed repository and created an issue telling them to stop developing DeltaDB because it takes away the maintainers’ time.
To all the people complaining about not getting upstream fixes.. why don't you just fork it and fix it for yourself? The cost and difficulty of that is on the floor.
Genuine question, and to be clear I don't think you're wrong to be frustrated with upstream Zed
Being a maintainer of a popular open source package sucks. You get hundreds of PRs and it takes a considerable amount time to only merge the good ones. LLMs have only exacerbated the problem.
So to your question, if you submit a perfect fix upstream and it doesn’t get merged. You either deal with immense friction for which your company won’t understand to get it merged. Or you silently diverge from source.
A version control system that I cannot host myself? Count me out
You can do this all today and more with codecast.sh
It'll take more than a mouse jiggler to fool this new bossware.
So basically a layer built over Jujutsu?
this looks like jetbrains "local changes" but globally synced. "for the agents" mights scare people who jump to think about micromanagers, but these people mostly hide or fake work. even micromanagers will eventually give you an agent to use so it won't matter what is in the change log, what matters is speed+quality. and since you can iterate from any branch you have inginite try and retry possibilities
What problem does this product solve?
Collaborative (as in simultaneous multiplayer) editing I think, which has been Zed's mission since before LLMs were a thing...
See https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb but also https://zed.dev/blog/crdts from years ago.
Why are people in this thread being so incessantly cynical? I expect more out of HN. I get that some wish Zed had other priorities, but the features being touted sound really promising.
Of course it's just marketing until we get an actual product, but I for one look forward to seeing this stuff in action.
reads like the same could have been achieved by using JJ
Is this closed source?
I really liked it
Attempted multiple times to use zed. Gave up.
I still want to. I will give it another try when I am free.
But the whole environment has something that feels "invasion of privacy". Maybe its me.
I want an installation where typing latency must be invisible, literal invisible to the eye. Heard zed is great at that.
But I don't want my sensitive code to be put in a state that might lead it to exist in a cloud environment without my explicit permission.
Besides, the concept is good. Many a times I have wanted this exact feature - where what happens between commits can in principle be snapshoted with full checkout to any point - without of course any conscious effort from my side.
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I don't understand, what do you mean by this?
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yo wtf
There’s also Koi Editor.
No telemetry, no tracking, and much faster than Zed: https://koieditor.com/benchmarks/
Dev solely focused on performance and bug fixing.