[infecto]

I am not sure we should dismiss what they have today. Nobody has yet to come close with a full package ide that works well for coding. Is that not a moat? It is easy for my to in my head discount it, thinking that I could build something myself but between autocomplete and their workflow for agent use, it feels like they have some tangible moat emerging.

[virgilp]

If we ignore cost (which is kinda hard to ignore), I feel Codex kinda' does it for me. Sure it's not really an editor but I find I don't need that _that much_ and it's easy to launch an external editor (they actually have the feature).

The ironic thing is that half a year ago, after trying factory.ai I thought chat-first interface was a stupid idea that will never work.

[chillfox]

Have you tried Zed?

I haven’t tried Cursor, so don’t know how they compare, but I like Zed a lot.

Anyway, would love to see a comparison from someone who has used a recent version of each.

[turastory]

A few years ago I tried Zed when it was still pretty early, but eventually settled on Cursor. I gave Zed another shot a few days ago because Cursor’s worktree support still feels pretty weak.

In my setup I use multiple agents like Claude Code and Codex, and Zed’s ACP support makes it pretty nice to manage them all as “threads” in one place. Worktree switching also feels much smoother.

Overall the experience was pretty good, but the way the agent and editor are integrated still feels a bit lacking, and tab completion is the big one for me. Cursor’s tab completion is still the best I’ve used.

So now I’m using both. For work that needs a lot of focus and careful iteration, I use Cursor. For things that are easy to split into worktrees and hand off to agents, I use Zed with Claude/Codex.

[chillfox]

Interesting, is it that the tab completion is giving better results, or how it works is better?

[ramses0]

The tab completion is "faster than vim" from a long-time vimmer. It's at the point where a lot of times i'll lead with the comment instead of the code:

    # now take the list and sort by x.lastName
    <tab>

...and it'll "do the thing" (w/ type hints, its own comments, etc). Obviously in this very simple, understandable, completely contrived example, it's "trivial" (but 3 years ago would have seemed like magic), but it'll also pick up on "continuation / more of the same" type edits. A comment like `# use random_utility to call the api and only accept matches which supplement addresses that have already been found` will (usually) autocomplete all the gobbledy-gook w.r.t. tokens, URL's, function names, etc. so it's effectively an "automatic omni-complete with simplistic post-processing"

Example #2: I was just fixing some vibe-coded slop, where it was taking `click.echo( some_api.whatever_endpoint() )` and the "slop" portion was literally emitting: `str('{ "A": 1, "B": 2 }')` and that function call was emitting it directly.

On the command line, I was doing `blah whatever-endpoint --something | jq '.'` and got tired of the JQ thing, so I'm like: "I'll just use `json.dumps(...,indent=2)`", but lo and behold, I'm getting a dumb JSON string literal, not a pretty printed object shape.

I start typing `json.loads(` to move from "str()" to "dict()" ... and it autocompletes the whole scenario (on that line), then I move to `def some_other_endpoint` and it basically has that same edit queued up. (ie: it "knows" what i'm about to do).

...so overall, "faster than vim", even with high skill bar for repetition, motion, macros, sed-style edits, etc. You can't beat: "<tab>", especially when it's lightly intelligent (ie: knows when/what/str/int, adapts do different function calls, etc).

[nl]

I've tried Zed and really didn't like it.

I like VS Code with the Claude Plugin, and sometimes with the Codex Plugin

[infecto]

Tried it and it’s fine but the AI integration is not tight enough for me.