[vaylian]

> you can only use AI on Helix through LSP

How do other editors do this, if they don't use LSPs? Helix specifically choses LSP as the integration mechanism (in combination with TreeSitter) for supporting different programming languages, because it is a language-agnostic protocol and therefore only needs to be implemented once. Is there some established AI-agnostic protocol/interface? I don't think MCP would work here?

[potro]

ACP Agent Client Protocol https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/registry

[beaker52]

This is a distinctly Zed solution - trying to move the agent experience into the editor, rather than just giving the agent an interface with which to control and read from the editor.

Not only do the most popular editors have little-to-no incentive to implement it (they’re more interested in pushing their own first-class implementations, rather than integrating those of others), it’s much more work to integrate the evolving agent experience into the IDE than it would be to provide IDE integration points for the agents themselves.

So, I think this project would have been much more successful if it had been more focussed on keeping the agent and IDE experiences separated but united by the protocol, instead of trying to deeply marry them. But that’s not in line with Zed’s vision and monetization strategy.

It won’t be long before the big players start to release their own cloud-based editors. They’ll be cloud-based because the moat is wider, and they’ll try to move coding to the cloud in the way that Google Workspaces moved docs to the cloud. Probably with huge token discounts to capture people. If you squint, you can already see this starting to happen with Claude Desktop, which runs its agent loop on the cloud (you can tell because skills appear to need to be uploaded).

Notably, Microsoft, with VSCode and GitHub have a web-based editor advantage in this space, but no models.

[spudlyo]

It's not just Zed, Emacs has has a thriving ACP implementation in agent-shell[0], and allows for some very cool integrations[1]. There are a fair number of other clients[2] as well.

[0]: https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJQ86HuSIJI

[2]: https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/clients

[yammosk]

The second half of this is spot on. The now is making IDEs that can integrate with agents, not the other way around. Soon the Claude and Codex will do that for us on their hosts and the argument is it will save sending the context up.

[nikita2206]

Just watching filesystem for file changes and updating the in-memory view of the file on any change? This isn’t really relevant to MCP, though one option is to provide a different tool to the AI agent for file modifications, which would make modifications through the file editor itself.

[vaylian]

> Just watching filesystem for file changes

This is non-trivial, if you want to do it efficiently. On Linux you can set up an inotify listener for individual files, but not for entire directories. This also breaks down if you are working with data on non-local drives.

[small_scombrus]

> Is there some established AI-agnostic protocol/interface?

AFAIK no

[logicprog]

ACP?

https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome