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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

Something tells me that disabling AI is going to age about as well as disabling JavaScript. Even so, I like what Zed is doing here.

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Disagree. The tab completion is very annoying when you’re trying to type. I know, I know, AI hipsters think typing code is so 15 minutes ago. Get off my lawn/keyboard.

Its agent AI assistant isn’t bad but sadly the restore points button in the AI panel seemed to be broken.

The fact it reminds me of sublime text is a big plus for me.

The rust evangelism is annoying. Really. No one cares what language a program is written it.

I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power. Zed’s is not that good. It’s slow and normally not at all what I want. In cursor, it’s at least 80% of the time jumping to the next thing I was going to do anyways. (Example: I add a function call, and tab recommend jumping to the top of the file, importing the function from the right spot, and then jumping back to the call site. Example2: I change a function signature and update one call site. It then correctly auto-completes the 5 other call sites to match the new format.)

both of those examples (auto imports + refactoring) 'just work' in Jetbrains editors, and have for a decade, without any AI at all! and you have the added benefit of no hallucinations when doing a refactor across hundreds of KLOC

Also even if you want AI, the AI is a lot more powerful if it can use those features instead of constantly getting stuck on wrong imports.

> The tab completion is very annoying when you’re trying to type.

I think it is annoying if it completes it by itself, but tab completion can be helpful if you have to push the tab key (or whatever other key is mapped to autocompletion) to make the completion to work (although I don't need LLM to do tab completion).

Do you not use the tab key to indent code?

I don't indent with tabs, but I also don't usually use autocompletion in the text editor. I usually use tab completion in the command shell.

In most code editors, hitting tab increases the indent even if you are using spaces (e.g. it will add two or four spaces). But now you don’t know if it will increase indent or arbitrarily rewrite your code.

Yes, which is why you could use a different key or key combination for auto complete.

Disabling JS is incredibly beneficial for browser performance, battery life, privacy/tracking protection. As an added bonus, it protects you from malware from all the vulnerabilities in Javascript engines.

It also makes a lot of basic features on websites unusable. Just an HN vote uses JS. They deliberately added a fallback to work without it too, which most websites won't do, but it still has to reload the page.

Because of my job I end up browsing the web with JS disabled by default and 90% of the time I don't need JS at all. Most of the time there are features of websites that break/don't work (menus, search, videos, ads, etc) but the actual thing I went to the website to get works just fine. In fact, pages load much faster and look much cleaner!

There are some annoying websites that can't manage to display simple text or even a basic image without JS (which is just bad web designers doing bad web design) and some instances where the content I need is obscured by something that doesn't behave without JS (like an expanding menu spewed out all over the place because JS isn't there to hide what hasn't been selected/hovered over) but in those cases it's usually just 2 clicks to solve the issue (either for just that visit or for every visit to that domain in the future as well) so it's not really a big deal. I'm currently using HN without JS and it's great.

If you just want to read text, that makes sense. And HN will also fully work without JS.

Which vulnerabilities in the past few years were actually used as a way to propagate malware (Not targeted 0-days)? Even with a JS engine vulnerability, you'd still need a sandbox escape to do something useful with it

Most of the vulnerabilities I've seen that could infect your machine from a website require JS to work and most of those had nothing to do with the engine itself. Sandbox escapes are extremely common. Chrome patched one that'd been being actively exploited just last week

Do Zed AI features require interacting with third-party providers such as OpenAI? If so, I don’t think your comparison applies.

I use Golang from JetBrains, and disabling all AI features is only two clicks away. No fuss no muss.

A friend of mine created some business plans to help organizations migrate from cloud infrastructures back to on-prem solutions. Like AI features, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle: hybrid has its place instead of cloud-only, and AI features have their place instead of "everywhere."

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