Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good.
<a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL.
Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system?
Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex. For when I want to be near the code, I prefer it now over TUIs or the Codex app. It feels much more immediate that way. Sticking to the basics will kill them IMO. They have been pitching themselves as agent-native for a while btw.
And the workflow they are describing in the post sounds amazing, I‘ve been wishing for that. It‘s orthogonal to CVS, no? You can still make PRs. But, crucially, you can loop people in early on, when it matters the most.
> Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex.
you must not use it much. try pasting in an image, quitting zed and restarting (ie: upgrading the app). it shows you the base64 encoded data instead of just showing the image. heck, it doesn't even show you the image when you paste it in. it just shows the filename.
ACP integration is very good, IMO. I'm using it with Claude Code. They've made so many improvements over time. I use image pasting myself, TBH I was excited it worked at all. Surprised that some rough edges around images are enough to ruin the whole thing for you.
images were just one glaring example... i didn't say anything about ruined, i just think a lot of those 'rough edges' are a bit more rough than they could be.
it is a code editor after all. how about integrating the LSP so that it doesn't have to resort to rg/grep/sed/scripts to edit code?
At this point I'm happy when things don't break randomly. However, it seems I lost an ACP session today and I'm not sure it's my own fault. Could be Zed playing tricks.
Unfortunately their Zed agent is completely broken when running on Windows connected to WSL/SSH remote because the terminal tool checks for paths using the local Path style (windows) which breaks when applied to paths on the remote (linux).
I fixed this and a couple related issues in a PR but it hasn't gotten any attention yet. I guess they are a bit swamped. <a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/59937" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/59937
Is it? Last time I checked, I had to maintain a custom fork because they didnt support device auth for remote env so you couldn’t really use your chatGPT sub.
Did you even read the post? The idea is to tie conversations to code. This is a more sophisticated version of something like doltdb, not a git replacement.
I agree with you that I wish they'd just nail the editor. I've been using it for years now and I really like it, but there are a few rough parts (settings and LSPs especially) that could probably be tuned up in no time if the focus was there.
Having said that, I love the idea of correlating the agent sessions to the changes. I'm glad someone is working on it.
You don't need a tool for that just configure your agent to write commit messages that link to a LLM log. And changes between commits. Maybe don't care why do we even care?
Of course you are right. I could write my own software to do what I want. Or, I could just do it all myself manually. This argument is valid in pretty much all cases, so I concede the point.
There should be a concept called "engineering privilege".
I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to their companies, etc.
It must be awesome to be able to work in these conditions and still get paid. I'm not hating on it, it's how we get a lot of the good stuff we use.
Because every company may have different needs that are not fulfilled by standards software. We have seen the large number of companies whose goal is to make custom software for other companies So is not always that reinventing is fun, but it may actually be needed.
The same logic also applies for software that is used internally. It's not always that developers want to rebuild stuff, but that they need to rebuild or alter software to fit their / company needs.
We have not even talked about cost or licensing or other issues.
Yes except a lot of it isn't even fit for their purpose and they don't rely on it. Facebook switched from Cassandra to HBase because "eventual consistency is a difficult pattern". No shit, really?
> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it. From any line of code, find the conversation. From any message, jump to the code it touched.
This is how Zed leapfrogs the field and becomes a centicorn.
If you can train a model to operate at a higher level and with looser requirements, you've gotten rid of engineers in the loop and built a system for the automated synthesis of high quality software.
You're training systems to produce higher quality chain of thought across the entire software development lifecycle.
My favorite example was from Joel Spolsky's company, where bright engineers got bored with working on bug tracking software so they wrote their own C# compiler.
It may seem weird nowadays but at the time it made sense since wasabi was "transpiling" VBScript (on which their existing codebase was written since they were all into Microsoft products at the time) to other languages in environments where VBScript didn't exist (e.g. IIRC they could transpile to PHP - and there isn't "one" PHP).
They were basically making shrink-wrap software running on an environment (the web) that wasn't made for shrink-wrap software (especially at the time) and came up with a technical solution to it.
FWIW they weren't the only to attempt something like that. HaXe is basically the same idea and was used to port a ton of games from Flash to all sorts of platforms and Monkey was another similar attempt (i think most people aren't aware of these two because they were gaming related and really limited to indie games).
> They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly
Re-invent is fine, that's how we actually get the good stuff we use.
Re-write (frequently) is usually a sign of bad power dynamics in the team, code rot and generally bad engineering management, in my experience.
That's why most React shops end up in this vicious cycle of constant re-writes of a perfectly fine working system for this reason. Yeah, must be really nice getting paid for it too.
Ah, but with re-writes you get to post those blog posts for Reddit and HN front page to drive traffic to the company's site, isn't that great?
Sometimes I feel like the software field is just begging to be "disrupted" by AI. So much bad management and useless wheel-spinning, all with salaries far above what is typical for any given area.
It's like taxis and Uber. Yes it's probably bad long-term that local taxi companies have been replaced by a mega-corporation. But there were so many bad taxi companies with rude dispatchers, lazy drivers, cars that show up 30 minutes late, drivers that don't run the meter, artificial supply restriction in NYC (medallions), etc. If taxis didn't suck so much, they might have been able to fight back better, and got more sympathy from the public along the way.
You see similar claims leveled at certain unions like the ILA and police unions.
And the cherry on the cake: you get paid to work on your engineering project, get traction around it as opensource and if there is enough traction, leave the company and spin-off a new one to sell the same product to other companies!
It's surely a lot of work but you get basically the discovery phase til market fit with your ass covered. Kudos to the engineers that pull that out, I really mean it!
That’s why nowadays every company will require that they legally own projects you work on during work hours unless explicitly asked. And many ask you to sign non compete clauses so you don’t take all the knowledge you acquired on the job to the competition, including your own projects, through this is quite hard to really enforce.
I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when the acquisition conversations started.
> But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode
You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects.
That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.
They're projects where there's not a payment page to buy a copy sure, but VSCode especially has I'm sure indirectly led to a ton a of profit - its the natural home of Copilot, integrated with Github (including in their paid product Codespaces), and has I'm sure led to a ton of standardisation and productivity increases across the company.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the company that invented Electron was Github, and you could argue that Github's technical investments did all pay off very richly.
I've been hitting that or something recent recently; it's what I would consider a severe bug because it can result in lost work and related. Basically, if you `git pull`, edit a file elsewhere, or use an LLM, zed's tree will remain stale unless you re-close and open the file. (Restarting the application doesn't sort it). So you end up overwriting the file with whatever was in the buffer.
I would like Zed to have feature parity with VSCode from 6 years ago. Working well over SSH or WSL, which it currently doesn't, is a part of that, even if I don't use that everyday.
I am a paying user, and have no plans to stop supporting them financially, but I wish they locked in and went through GH Issues queue, starting from the oldest.
Of course vs code accommodates wsl. Same company. Personally I couldn’t care less how badly MS wants to make windows a viable development environment. It’s more irrelevant every day. I’m glad zed doesn’t waste too much time on it.
Oh, that sounds related to what I experienced. I recently had another look at Zed and tried to use it to full-text search through my workspace consisting of symlinked folders. Relevant things would just now show up, cmd+P also wouldn’t find the files. That’s where the evaluation stopped.
"There is the software. And then there are the databases beneath the software, two enormous databases, encyclopedic in their comprehensiveness. One is the history of the code itself -- with every line annotated, showing every time it was changed, why it was changed, when it was changed, what the purpose of the change was, what specifications documents detail the change. Everything that happens to the program is recorded in its master history. The genealogy of every line of code -- the reason it is the way it is -- is instantly available to everyone."
also from ^ article on Lockheed Martin Corp space shuttle software group ...
Importantly, the group avoids blaming people for errors.
The process assumes blame - and it's the process that is
analyzed to discover why and how an error got through.
At the same time, accountability is a team concept:
no one person is ever solely responsible for writing or
inspecting code. "You don't get punished for making errors,"
says Marjorie Seiter, a senior member of the technical staff.
"If I make a mistake, and others reviewed my work, then I'm
not alone. I'm not being blamed for this."
One could argue using WSL is an anti-pattern: use a real OS. I kid, I kid.
Yeah I’m an avid user of the editor. I don’t care for their AI stuff I bring my own but I just want to see the editor become awesome. A more detailed object plugin ecosystem would be nice.
It's funny, zed started out really refreshing, and now it's degraded to the point where it's fairly unusable. Regularly it would tie up tons of resources on my fairly beefy laptop. I switched back to sublime and it is a breath of fresh air, I didn't realize how slow zed had gotten. It seems like maybe they lost their way a bit, but I recognize that also they need to make money presumably, and it's hard to do that with a large team and a focused product.
And yet it is written in Rust, a good evidence that compiled languages only help so much when the architecture isn't the right one, or bad algorithms are being chosen.
VSCode has plenty of C++ and Rust extensions to work around Electron limitations, which are then used as WebAssembly plugins on the browser version, though.
It shows the engineering effort that the team puts into it, which is why it is one of the few Electron based apps that is bearable to use.
Did you check if the resources were consumed by the LSP or Zed? Also there was a Zed fork without the AI stuff, not sure if is a hard fork or not and if is still maintained (IIRC wasnt hosted on Github)
I know people disagree over definitions of "hard fork". Gram does not send patches to Zed but does occasionally merge fixes from Zed. There is not any specific effort to keep (non-AI) feature parity.
It has degraded? In what way? It sounds like your issues could be caused by LSP servers going rogue. Zed itself has been perfectly stable for me since I started using it as my default editor ~1 year ago. The only thing I didn’t like were some default layout changes that were trivial to revert.
FYI: I've had success with changing the file_scan_inclusions setting which forces the file watcher to rescan all projects. Doesn't work consistently unfortunately, but easier than restarting.
Because the way we code has completely changed, and there is plenty of room for innovation.
I am convinced that the conversation is the primary artifact produce while coding, which is not a common/popular opinion. Still, i love to see someone pushing forward on this.
Adding onto this I and many others have asked for a ui extension API to actually make use of AI tools and they've adamantly refused. Until someone else with the time and resources to fork and maintain it comes along, it's just in maintenance mode. These "AI" features are not useful at all.
They aren't proposing to replace git though. They are just attempting to make it simpler for developers to follow changes applied by an LLM in an ergonomic fashion. Not saying it will work well but I'm happy to see someone trying a new approach here.
I don't want someone "to make it simpler for developers to follow changes applied by an LLM in an ergonomic fashion". I want a text editor.
I want "VScode without the bullshit". That's what I thought they were building.
No, a company will always build whatever they think will make them more money. If you want an editor without the bullshit try Sublime as it has a history of staying that way, or the good old Vim and emacs.
I’m building an in-terminal IDE over at <a href="https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast that does this. No AI, no telemetry, just a text editor that has it all baked in and is easy on the eyes.
Then go get a text editor? They’ve been around for decades. Use sublime text for all eternity. Why even complain here when what you want is a solved problem?
I'm not satisfied with any of the text editors I've used (I've used all the big ones for a few years each).
Zed was a promising new direction I.e. VSCode minus the bullshit. But it's not getting the polish / productionisation it would need to actually be a better editor than the others. And now it doesn't look like it will.
They're a VC backed company, they aren't building for the user at all. The VC is their user.
Just need to see reality for how it is in the tech industry, products aren't made for users anymore they're mostly a ritual to please the VC gods. Bonus points if you're disruptive and a net-negative toward society.
Try Gram. It's a fork of Zed which changes a few things, one of which is that all the AI stuff is disabled by default. I was interested in it because it doesn't download language servers without asking you (unlike Zed). Ultimately I'm kind of on the fence between it and Sublime, but it's a lot better than Zed imo.
Although I agree and I hit same roadblock I found that wsl is working well when you open the project with special "projects: open folder in WSL" command, see my comment here: <a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26857#discussioncomment-17661638" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26857#disc...
But Zed has taken a shit ton of VC money, so Zed needs to grow exponentially. So, Zed needs to make stuff that they shove down their customer's throats and can make more money with. Therefore, Zed can't justify just focussing on the basics. This makes me zad.
I’m not saying zed necessarily should be the one to do this, but in regards to "why not git, jj.."; if we don’t explore the fringes, how do we know if we are at local or global optimum with current solutions?
If I understand correctly, something like DeltaDB has always been part of the plan. Zed is a moonshot to reimagine collaborative development from the ground up. The editor, developer communication, the way changes are tracked, everything.
We deal with it, but even with options like jj, it always feels like you're settling. What we're used to works, and we're familiar with it, but is it much more than that? Our baseline expectation should be higher.
NoDodgeQuestion · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL.
Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system?
manmal · · focus · HN ↗
And the workflow they are describing in the post sounds amazing, I‘ve been wishing for that. It‘s orthogonal to CVS, no? You can still make PRs. But, crucially, you can loop people in early on, when it matters the most.
latchkey · · focus · HN ↗
you must not use it much. try pasting in an image, quitting zed and restarting (ie: upgrading the app). it shows you the base64 encoded data instead of just showing the image. heck, it doesn't even show you the image when you paste it in. it just shows the filename.
manmal · · focus · HN ↗
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latchkey · · focus · HN ↗
it is a code editor after all. how about integrating the LSP so that it doesn't have to resort to rg/grep/sed/scripts to edit code?
manmal · · focus · HN ↗
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manmal · · focus · HN ↗
latchkey · · focus · HN ↗
my favorite ux goof right now is the fastmode switch button right next to the stop button and how much space it all takes up.
infogulch · · focus · HN ↗
I fixed this and a couple related issues in a PR but it hasn't gotten any attention yet. I guess they are a bit swamped. <a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/59937" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/59937
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I like Fossil be because it can be all in one. WIki, a place to store architectural diagrams, tickets, basic webgui, etc.
ibejoeb · · focus · HN ↗
Having said that, I love the idea of correlating the agent sessions to the changes. I'm glad someone is working on it.
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hahahaa · · focus · HN ↗
I think Zed doesn't need to build this though.
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dlisboa · · focus · HN ↗
I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to their companies, etc.
It must be awesome to be able to work in these conditions and still get paid. I'm not hating on it, it's how we get a lot of the good stuff we use.
tomnipotent · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
benjiro29 · · focus · HN ↗
The same logic also applies for software that is used internally. It's not always that developers want to rebuild stuff, but that they need to rebuild or alter software to fit their / company needs.
We have not even talked about cost or licensing or other issues.
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echelon · · focus · HN ↗
This is how Zed leapfrogs the field and becomes a centicorn.
If you can train a model to operate at a higher level and with looser requirements, you've gotten rid of engineers in the loop and built a system for the automated synthesis of high quality software.
You're training systems to produce higher quality chain of thought across the entire software development lifecycle.
This is training data for the next stage.
gcr · · focus · HN ↗
grey-area · · focus · HN ↗
When do you expect them to become a ‘centicorn’ based on this fabulous technology?
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<Accept> [Decline]
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badsectoracula · · focus · HN ↗
It may seem weird nowadays but at the time it made sense since wasabi was "transpiling" VBScript (on which their existing codebase was written since they were all into Microsoft products at the time) to other languages in environments where VBScript didn't exist (e.g. IIRC they could transpile to PHP - and there isn't "one" PHP).
They were basically making shrink-wrap software running on an environment (the web) that wasn't made for shrink-wrap software (especially at the time) and came up with a technical solution to it.
FWIW they weren't the only to attempt something like that. HaXe is basically the same idea and was used to port a ton of games from Flash to all sorts of platforms and Monkey was another similar attempt (i think most people aren't aware of these two because they were gaming related and really limited to indie games).
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neya · · focus · HN ↗
Re-invent is fine, that's how we actually get the good stuff we use.
Re-write (frequently) is usually a sign of bad power dynamics in the team, code rot and generally bad engineering management, in my experience.
That's why most React shops end up in this vicious cycle of constant re-writes of a perfectly fine working system for this reason. Yeah, must be really nice getting paid for it too.
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gwerbin · · focus · HN ↗
It's like taxis and Uber. Yes it's probably bad long-term that local taxi companies have been replaced by a mega-corporation. But there were so many bad taxi companies with rude dispatchers, lazy drivers, cars that show up 30 minutes late, drivers that don't run the meter, artificial supply restriction in NYC (medallions), etc. If taxis didn't suck so much, they might have been able to fight back better, and got more sympathy from the public along the way.
You see similar claims leveled at certain unions like the ILA and police unions.
NoDodgeQuestion · · focus · HN ↗
manmal · · focus · HN ↗
darkwater · · focus · HN ↗
It's surely a lot of work but you get basically the discovery phase til market fit with your ass covered. Kudos to the engineers that pull that out, I really mean it!
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dlisboa · · focus · HN ↗
You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects.
That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.
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dlisboa · · focus · HN ↗
My point yet again: only companies with money to burn can take that gamble.
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I am a paying user, and have no plans to stop supporting them financially, but I wish they locked in and went through GH Issues queue, starting from the oldest.
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Freaky · · focus · HN ↗
All my code lives on the other end of a Samba share. Guess what doesn't work reliably.
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<a href="https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20Write%20the%20Right%20Stuff.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...
"There is the software. And then there are the databases beneath the software, two enormous databases, encyclopedic in their comprehensiveness. One is the history of the code itself -- with every line annotated, showing every time it was changed, why it was changed, when it was changed, what the purpose of the change was, what specifications documents detail the change. Everything that happens to the program is recorded in its master history. The genealogy of every line of code -- the reason it is the way it is -- is instantly available to everyone."
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gigatexal · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah I’m an avid user of the editor. I don’t care for their AI stuff I bring my own but I just want to see the editor become awesome. A more detailed object plugin ecosystem would be nice.
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It shows the engineering effort that the team puts into it, which is why it is one of the few Electron based apps that is bearable to use.
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I know people disagree over definitions of "hard fork". Gram does not send patches to Zed but does occasionally merge fixes from Zed. There is not any specific effort to keep (non-AI) feature parity.
<a href="https://gram-editor.com" rel="nofollow">https://gram-editor.com
<a href="https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram" rel="nofollow">https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram
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rufasterisco · · focus · HN ↗
I am convinced that the conversation is the primary artifact produce while coding, which is not a common/popular opinion. Still, i love to see someone pushing forward on this.
waterTanuki · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/53403#discussioncomment-17009389" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/53403#disc...
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bjackman · · focus · HN ↗
I want "VScode without the bullshit". That's what I thought they were building.
brabel · · focus · HN ↗
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bjackman · · focus · HN ↗
Zed was a promising new direction I.e. VSCode minus the bullshit. But it's not getting the polish / productionisation it would need to actually be a better editor than the others. And now it doesn't look like it will.
shimman · · focus · HN ↗
Just need to see reality for how it is in the tech industry, products aren't made for users anymore they're mostly a ritual to please the VC gods. Bonus points if you're disruptive and a net-negative toward society.
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
blain · · focus · HN ↗
Nevertheless it could have been working better.
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ozgrakkurt · · focus · HN ↗
- basics are easy
- everyone can do basics
- need to do the things that will bring in the next 1000 users.
- everyone already does the basics
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manlymuppet · · focus · HN ↗
We deal with it, but even with options like jj, it always feels like you're settling. What we're used to works, and we're familiar with it, but is it much more than that? Our baseline expectation should be higher.