Zed was the first editor that tempted me into using AI features. It felt solid in general and AI feels mostly like autocomplete in other editors (in terms of how much it's in your face). There's definitely a place for AI models and agents in code editors, and Zed makes me feel like it's not built around them, which is great! Zed feel like "Come to us, we are making a good fast editor that also has AI." while competition feel like "Come to us, we want AI that has an editor".
I suspect I'm not the only one experiencing "AI fatigue" as every single piece of software grows more and more useless "AI" features I don't want and which get in the way of doing what I actually want.
Nah, its the quiet majority, and AI posts on places like HN quickly create their own echo chambers with folks patting themselves and each other on their backs.
There is AI as a useful tool, maybe, which is at most few % of current hype. Most folks seem to end up babysitting it a lot to get something useful out of it.
And then there is everything else which is mostly hype or narrow use cases.
To proper typical senior managing a team I don't see much added value. It can help juniors churn out large chunks of the code but I haven't worked in 20 years in a place that values quantity of code and quick deliveries over quality.
Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used even as I write it now, all popular sites are blocked and there are strict policies against. Couldn't care less, coding is such a small part of my work I don't want to lose this creative outlet by delegating it to something I need to triple check for bugs afterwards. Also with any new stuff I learn way more by implementing it myself rather than looking at pre-made code.
> Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used
This is a huge thing tbh. I don't like these AI things in general so I wouldn't use them anyway, but I just can't imagine going to my clients and asking them, "Hey is it okay with you if I routinely upload all your code to these random American venture-backed start-ups?". And I really can't imagine just doing that behind their back. I couldn't really imagine doing that with an employer's code either.
Ideally I don't even use software where accidentally toggling the wrong checkbox in some settings screen results in automatically uploading client code to these American start-ups either. Now I won't pretend that my stance against AI is purely out of some principled cybersecurity concern, but it's definitely a factor.
I strongly agree about the fatigue. I have extreme levels of concern, especially when the supposed top people are shooting their mouths off saying this stuff is doing material science, biochem, a million other things.
But all that annoying madness is distracting from how amazingly awesomely useful this stuff is. It's wild how many little quick projects I can kick out in a couple hours! Ideas just come out of my head with so much less fuss; when I don't like it I ask for something different.
My point is less to convince though about AI. I appreciate your starting sentiment here, but I really don't get the follow up?
> genuinely happy it works for you. I just don't want AI in my text editor, even if you're happy with it.
I don't see why it would bother you at all? There's a tiny little button in the status bar and a few scattered menu items that feel, to me, very easy to ignore.
It feels like someone being mad that their spreadsheet has I dunno, logarithms in it, but the person hates logarithms? It feels weird to opt in to caring against. I have a generalll abnner of thought which is "your anti-feature is not a feature", and this feels like one of those situations: i don't see why someone would cling to an editor not having a feature they don't use?
And I suspect you are an extreme minority. Among senior and staff engineers I barely see them leaving behind emacs, vim and jetbrains… none of them with ai plug-ins.
It's an unexpected position to take, though. You said you had been interested in Zed until they integrated AI. The response was "the AI is completely optional", which I'd expect would make you more likely to use Zed, since it removes your objection. But it doesn't change your position at all, which makes me suspect it's not that you're worried the AI would interfere with your workflow, but that it's there at all. So, is your position that the very fact that Zed allowed AI to touch it has infected it in some way?
I went to check out neovim and noticed it's currently sponsored by two AI products! Of course, that's one level removed from actually integrating AI in your product but, still—it's getting harder and harder to avoid altogether.
My guess is that neovim wouldn't do a core integration of ai that ships with the editor. At most, maybe if there are ui interface gaps that would help make a better experience, they might expose more apis there that could be useful outside ai as well.
Plugins are relatively easy to write in nvim so I'd expect all ai stuff to come from there and be opt in.
The Network was a good idea fifty years ago, and it was still a good idea by the time the Internet was definitely the next network which was a few years before the DotCom bubble, both actual large language models and the "What if all human conversations in a box?" thought experiment (this definitely passes the Turing test, but, it's clearly not a person is it) are also good ideas, distinct from present "AI in everything" LLM craziness.
Just because tulips are nice doesn't make Tulip Madness a good idea. At the height of the DotCom boom consumers were buying stock at IPO prices for companies which made no sense whatsoever, because they said "Internet" or, (hence the naming) ".com"
For example Be Inc. was a vehicle for a failed Apple exec to "prove" he was the right person to run Apple, not Steve Jobs. After their runway ran out and institutions wanted nothing further to do with it, Be Inc. went IPO. They do this by saying they were an "Internet appliance" company and taking an OS with terrible networking but pretending it's good. In normal times this would attract laughter - they're offering a worse product, most likely it just tanks or never comes to market, and in the extreme case that Apple wants the CEO they're going to cut a deal with the man, not save the dead weight company. His most senior people might get parachutes but Apple has no reason to pay ordinary stock owners a penny. Sure enough those who bought at IPO rescued the institutions but were wiped out.
No, we still have software with Internet features. But Internet features went from a solution looking for a problem, to just another tool we can reach for when it's actually useful.
A whole lot of "AI" features today are in that "solution looking for a problem" category. There's a lot of "AI" in places where it really makes no sense at all. Companies and projects are afraid of missing out on what they think could be the Next Big Thing, instead of just trying to make the best software they can.
When the AI bubble bursts, it could end up like Internet features: software gets them when it genuinely makes sense, but they won't be crammed into software which has no need for it. Or it could end up like cryptocurrency: it pretty much just disappears as people realize that they don't really have any use other than to speculate on its value and to buy drugs.
Personally, my bet is that they'll end up more like cryptocurrencies. After all, "AI" doesn't just have to be a useful feature to be worth it. It has a real cost. Companies like Microsoft and Apple and Google, as well as the venture capitalists and investment funds behind the likes of Anthropic, are currently sinking VAST amounts of capital into giving "AI" away for free or heavily subsidized. At some point, it'll need to become profitable, and I don't think many people will find that the value outweighs the real, non-subsidized costs.
Thankfully for me, I guess, neovim broke my config about a year ago by changing the default color scheme in a way that I could not fix easily with confug. So I forked and built my own and will likely never update it.
The AI features in Zed are very easy to turn off / ignore. I agree that the AI features are probably taking development time away from other features that might be more useful.
they are not intrusive but their entire focus changed on that instead of other features. Entire Git view feels abandoned in half done state yet they spent entire month working on AI chats, AI agents, their own AI edit (that's priced 20 per month yet they boast how light and performant it is -- why isn't it free local model then and why its priced worse than copilot?)
They're moving from "making awesome code editor" into yet another "buy our ai" product
debugger is very far from being feature-complete, I would call it MVP at the moment; lets see if they will iterate on that or will quickly go back to new shiny thing...
The fact that they have released both features within 3 months of each other is mind boggling. Their development velocity is insane. These are not trivial features.
AFAIK they added conflict resolution just recently, so it's not like non-AI features such as Git get no attention at all. And of course the debugger now.
I'm much prefer the VS Code style when you have 2 clear sections: staged and not staged. Zed's chose the IntelliJ style which is just a bunch of checkboxes, I can see it being easier to understand for the novice, but not very intuitive from a git point of view.
Never used Git in Jetbrain IDEs or Zed (yet), but recently VS Code improved a lot the Git by making easier to stage changes in a file in a granular manner (I tried briefly edamagit extension a while ago and now use a lot gitu in the terminal, in combination with VS Code version control).
I suspect their previous “collab editing” marketing angle was probably not a big enough draw. AI features seem to be desired by more people, or at least the hype cycle currently says so.
I think you're referring to autocomplete? It's much better than, say, 2 years ago when it was indeed annoying as hell. Having said I always turn it off and use agentic coding, which is not intrusive, only activate if you ask for it. This applies to all coding tools these days, autocomplete is no longer their focus.
I just tried it out again. It seems like you can disable the chat bot integration by adding this to the config:
"agent": {
"enabled": false
}
However from the documentation[1] I can't see a way to disable the "AI" predictions button (which asks you to sign in to their online "AI" service with your GitHub account). Am I missing something?