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Comment by ethanwillis | Hacker News Reader

Zed developers, please don't. I don't want my core editor potentially sending out my code to who knows where or wasting cycles analyzing it.

If people want this just let it be a plugin.

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> Zed supports GitHub Copilot out of the box, and you can use GPT-4 generate or refactor code by pressing ctrl-enter and typing a natural language prompt. https://zed.dev/

Seems like that ship has sailed. Maybe it's a plugin already or could be in the future, but that's not on GP's suggestion.

I'm already picturing a "Zedium" fork for the FOSS/Privacy enthusiasts.

This made me chuckle. Then at the same time I find it disheartening that privacy is currently seen as an enthusiast position rather than the default. I really dont mind the idea of these anti-privacy things being included as long as I have an option to turn them off before running Zed for the first time.

To use them you’d need to already have a copilot subscription, and the GPT-4 thing apparently requires you to deliberately invoke a command. I’d say it’s pretty safe by default.

I’d say the ship is in port but ready to sail. Before this does anything you have to provide your own API key. So it’s off by default. It’s just the button that is there.

I’d much more prefer keeping all these Ai tools as plugins to keep the editor light.

Beyond "is it on by default" (due to data privacy concerns) whether something belongs in a "core" editor or in a plugin is a whole separate can of worms - moreso if the core editor starts shipping plugins. There is someone who reads that agreeing it means the editor should be just a plugin store and if you want font hinting, syntax coloring, tabs, terminals, smooth scrolling, and so on then download them yourself. At the same time there is someone who reads that agreeing it means the editor should have anything possible related to working with text but if you want to play a video while you code the plugin system should allow you to do that in a pane. Neither are really right or wrong about what should be a plugin, it's really a matter of what the tool wants to optimize for out of the box.

It seems inevitable we’ll also be able to run LLMs locally, which would make this type of feature more appealing.

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