I feel like Zed stopped working on the editor itself since AI was rolled out. I also wanted it to be the open-source alternative to Sublime, but nothing comes close.
https://zed.dev/releases/stable
(And that's even with almost none of the work on the massive Windows project being included in the changelog!)
The blog used to be really personal and nice but now it's all AI https://zed.dev/blog
I get it, pausing some work to ship AI integration plumbing is a good strategy to keep momentum up with competition.
I think after their Series B, looking at the roadmap, and now with this pricing featured it's pretty clear what their priorities have become.
I'm not against AI, I just feel like they can do better and their original mission is still a better long-term angle.
By every metric - lines of code shipped, hours per week spent on it, number of people assigned to it, etc. - AI is a minority part of what Zed does. It's a priority, but it's not the priority.
I know there's a disproportionate amount of blogging about AI, but that's a decision about what prose gets written, not what code gets written!
My worry is on the direction and positioning as it stands _now_ when looking _out_.
I guess time will tell, and I have no problems being wrong here. In fact I even desire to be wrong.
Excited to see what DeltaDB is all about and how it affects the company direction too, especially now with Sequoia pulling some strings.
The way I see it, we’re sort of living in a world where UX is king. (Looking at you Cursor)
I feel like there’s a general sentiment where folks just want a sense of home with their tools more than anything. Yes they need to work, but they also need to work for you in your way. Cursor reinvented autocomplete with AI and that felt like home for most, what’s next? I see so much focus on Agents but to me personally that feels more like it should live on the CI/CD layer of things. Editors are built for humans, something isn’t quite there yet, excited to see how it unfolds.
I sometimes worry if we are moving too fast for no reason. Some things are becoming standards in an organic way but they feel suboptimal in my own little bias bubble corner.
Maybe I am getting old and struggling to adapt to the new generation way of getting work done, but I have a gut feeling that we need to revisit some of this stuff more deliberately.
I still see Agents as something that will be more like a background thread that yields rather than a first class citizen inside the Editor you observe as it goes.
I don't know about you, but I feel an existential dread whenever I prompt an Agent and turn into a vegetable watching it breathe. — am I using it wrong? Should I be leaving and coming back later? Should I pick a different file and task while it's doing its thing?
My complaints:
No Claude code hooks support at the time of this writing. As someone who leverages this somewhat heavily this is why I don’t really use it all the time. I actually find it to be somewhat of a feature at times because I can simply run the thing through Zed if I want to temporarily run with no hooks.
Performance is noticeably degraded presumably because of the “ACP” protocol they invented. I usually work either directly in Claude terminal window using its edit tools or using repoprompt’s mcp editor tools and both are noticeably faster than running in zed.
What seems to be memory leaks in the agent window causes sluggish performance, especially when scrolling. It’s not bad enough to make it unusable, but for an editor whose main advertisement is speed it feels particularly painful.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/11676
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4334
Font rendering should be the most important feature of a text editor.
A downside that comes with the territory of building the rendering pipeline from scratch is needing to work through the long tail of complex and tradeoff-heavy font rendering issues on different displays, operating systems, drivers, etc.
I know it's taking awhile to get through, but I agree it's important!
Every other piece of software in my toolbox is open-source. The scenarios I've described happened to some of those tools, and I maintain my own forks. Currently, Sublime is the single point of failure on my toolbox.
I would buy a source code license if I could.
Which ones?