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by jvmancuso 666 days ago
- open-source vs closed fork of vscode

- transparent assistant panel vs opaque composer. you control your own prompts (cf. [0])

- in Zed the assistant panel is "just another editor", which means you can inline-assist when writing prompts. super underrated feature imo

- Zed's assistant is pretty hackable as well, you can add slash commands via native Zed extensions [1] or non-native, language-agnostic Context Servers [2]

- Zed's /workflow is analogous to Cursor's composer. to be honest it's not quite as good yet, however it's only ~1 week old. we'll catch up in no time :)

- native rust vs electron slop. Zed itself is one of the larger Rust projects out there [3], can be hard to work with in VS Code/Cursor, but speedy in Zed itself :)

[0]: https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/prompt/

[1]: https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/slash-commands

[2]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/context-servers

[3]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2024/08/15/this-devel...

1 comments

Two areas where I think Zed might fall behind: Cursor Tab is REALLY good and probably requires some finetuning/ML chops and some boutique training data.

For composer, there's going to be more use of "shadow workspace" https://www.cursor.com/blog/shadow-workspace to create an agentic feedback loop/ objective function for codegen along with an ability to navigate the language server and look up definitions and just generally have full context like an engineer. Are there plans for the same in zed?

Also, cursor has a model agnostic apply model, whereas you all are leaning on claude.