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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

> Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used

This is a huge thing tbh. I don't like these AI things in general so I wouldn't use them anyway, but I just can't imagine going to my clients and asking them, "Hey is it okay with you if I routinely upload all your code to these random American venture-backed start-ups?". And I really can't imagine just doing that behind their back. I couldn't really imagine doing that with an employer's code either.

Ideally I don't even use software where accidentally toggling the wrong checkbox in some settings screen results in automatically uploading client code to these American start-ups either. Now I won't pretend that my stance against AI is purely out of some principled cybersecurity concern, but it's definitely a factor.

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You can use local LLMs.

Is that what Zed's integration does by default?

In any case, what I see most people doing is integrating it with Claude/Copilot/etc. The security concerns specifically obviously don't apply when running it locally.

By default Zed has a user choose what type of configuration they want. That could be something like LM Studio, Ollama, or your own API keys to a provider you're already paying for.

AI also isn't shoved in your face when using Zed, there's one small button on the button right.

> there's one small button on the [bottom] right.

Wait there's an always-present AI button in the normal text editing UI? That's way more prominent than I expected, I assumed it was just an option in a settings screen somewhere. I definitely don't want an AI button that's always on screen.

I just downloaded Zed to see this for myself and found not only one but two AI buttons in the lower right, one for integration with chat bots and one for their "prediction" AI. Both try to get you to log in to online services (even though, yes, a local chat bot is an option for one of them).

It seems like you can remove the chat bot ("agent") button through their config file, but I found no option to remove the "predictions" button.

Man this editor is pushing "AI" way harder than I imagined. As I said I genuinely assumed that it was just like iTerm2's chat bot integration where you could enable it in a settings screen.

AI features are essentially non-negotiable for a lot of people these days, and a lot of companies too. It’s hard to deny that LLMs coding assistants are at a minimum pretty promising. More promising than many other LLM uses. Zed wants to be a professional IDE, not just a random text editor, and LLM services are (whether you like it or not) an important tool in that IDE toolbox.

It’s fair to have huge concerns over AI (I certainly do), but I don’t think it’s fair to expect IDEs to skip some of the only technology that developers (and companies, importantly) are willing to pay for in an IDE.

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