I feel like Zed stopped working on the editor itself since AI was rolled out. I also wanted it to be the open-source alternative to Sublime, but nothing comes close.
If the full magnitude of products that stopped working on the main product and started to try to shoehorn AI in was known, the economy would collapse overnight.
It really is concerning. I keep an excel sheet with links of all companies I could apply to whenever i change jobs, and checking it the other day practically every row was now selling an ai product.
I just went through the job hunt circuit and honestly while many companies do have some AI thing they're selling, for the actual day-to-day work and what most teams are working on, there's barely any mention of AI. It seems mostly marketing people and non-technical management cares, the devs I've spoken to in my interviews have not cared about AI much at all, and I had interviews with some large, influential companies.
Intellij wasn't immune to it either. Number of bugs has exploded since they started adding ai features to their ide, none of which I used for more than 5 minutes.
A quick glance at Zed's changelog is all it takes to see that AI has been a minority of what Zed has shipped since it was rolled out over a year ago. :)
> I get it, pausing some work to ship AI integration plumbing is a good strategy to keep momentum up with competition.
By every metric - lines of code shipped, hours per week spent on it, number of people assigned to it, etc. - AI is a minority part of what Zed does. It's a priority, but it's not the priority.
I know there's a disproportionate amount of blogging about AI, but that's a decision about what prose gets written, not what code gets written!
Yeah exactly this! I get they want to stay in the game and follow the market, but I’m sad they’re not being more aggressive on that original vision. I still think there could be a huge payoff for them if they invested more on their brand and aesthetics of a more polished and comfy editor.
The way I see it, we’re sort of living in a world where UX is king. (Looking at you Cursor)
I feel like there’s a general sentiment where folks just want a sense of home with their tools more than anything. Yes they need to work, but they also need to work for you in your way. Cursor reinvented autocomplete with AI and that felt like home for most, what’s next? I see so much focus on Agents but to me personally that feels more like it should live on the CI/CD layer of things. Editors are built for humans, something isn’t quite there yet, excited to see how it unfolds.
I think their recent push to delegate to CLI agents in the agent panel is the right direction. Claude Code has been running in Zed for the past month. Sure, there are SDK limitations and kinks to iron out, but it’s moving quickly. I’m into it.
I really do like the Claude code integration in zed. Conceptually it’s pretty well done. Provides some better visualization over running Claude code in the terminal and really aligns with the close supervisor style I like to work with. I really like the follow feature that brings the editor along with the agent.
My complaints:
No Claude code hooks support at the time of this writing. As someone who leverages this somewhat heavily this is why I don’t really use it all the time. I actually find it to be somewhat of a feature at times because I can simply run the thing through Zed if I want to temporarily run with no hooks.
Performance is noticeably degraded presumably because of the “ACP” protocol they invented. I usually work either directly in Claude terminal window using its edit tools or using repoprompt’s mcp editor tools and both are noticeably faster than running in zed.
What seems to be memory leaks in the agent window causes sluggish performance, especially when scrolling. It’s not bad enough to make it unusable, but for an editor whose main advertisement is speed it feels particularly painful.
I get what you are saying, and I think they are doing a good job there as well. That said, it still feels like something is missing in that whole workflow to me.
I sometimes worry if we are moving too fast for no reason. Some things are becoming standards in an organic way but they feel suboptimal in my own little bias bubble corner.
Maybe I am getting old and struggling to adapt to the new generation way of getting work done, but I have a gut feeling that we need to revisit some of this stuff more deliberately.
I still see Agents as something that will be more like a background thread that yields rather than a first class citizen inside the Editor you observe as it goes.
I don't know about you, but I feel an existential dread whenever I prompt an Agent and turn into a vegetable watching it breathe. — am I using it wrong? Should I be leaving and coming back later? Should I pick a different file and task while it's doing its thing?
Yep. I used it for a while and went back to VS Code for my personal stuff because there just wasn’t any visible improvement on the editor itself. Having a native UI is a great party trick, but the functionality needs to follow.
There have been improvements recently, but it still has some of the worst text rendering of any editor on macOS, if you have a non-4K display plugged in. Rendering text is kind of a big deal!
A downside that comes with the territory of building the rendering pipeline from scratch is needing to work through the long tail of complex and tradeoff-heavy font rendering issues on different displays, operating systems, drivers, etc.
I know it's taking awhile to get through, but I agree it's important!
Sorry did not mean to hate on Sublime, it was pointed out in another comment that the comparison didn’t really match and I sort of agree. The mental model that brought that initially was the one-off use case of opening large files, for which I have traditionally done through Sublime in the past.
I love Sublime. I have been using it for years and it's just fantastic software. I have no problems paying for it. But since it is such an important part of my toolbox, not having the source code is a liability. What if they decide to drop support for my platform? What if they decide to shift gears into AI and enshittify the experience?
Every other piece of software in my toolbox is open-source. The scenarios I've described happened to some of those tools, and I maintain my own forks. Currently, Sublime is the single point of failure on my toolbox.
