Cursor is great – We explored an alternate approach to our assistant similar to theirs as well, but in the end we found we wanted to lean into what we think our super power is: Transforming text.
So we leaned into it heavily. Zed's assistant is completely designed around retrieving, editing and managing text to create a "context"[0]. That context can be used to have conversations, similar to any assistant chatbot, but can also be used to power transformations right in your code[1], in your terminal, when writing prompts in the Prompt Library...
The goal is for context to be highly hackable. You can use the /prompt command to create nested prompts, use globs in the /file command to dynamically import files in a context or prompt... We even expose the underlying prompt templates that power things like the inline assistant so you can override them[2].
This approach doesn't give us the _simplest_ or most approachable assistant, but we think it gives us and everyone else the tools to create the assistant experience that is actually useful to them. We try to build the things we want, then share it with everyone else.
TL;DR: Everything is text because text is familiar and it puts you in control.
[0]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/contexts.html
[1]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/inline-assistant
[2]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/prompting#overriding-template...