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The collab editing stuff was Zed's original gimmick. The AI stuff is the real feature creep.

Without AI, the company would be dead in the water. You can very easily disable all AI features.

I think Tuple is a better collab app, but far more expensive.

The collaboration tools built into Zed have basically existed since the product launched. It is one of the primary drivers behind the product - they wanted to build the best editor for remote code collaboration.

I think the most difficult question are going to be how do you constraint that core feature without ever wanting to add more to it?

For instance, collaboration is a huge topic. You can have coding collaboration on the file, and that would be basic and appropriate, you can then replicate slack and you'll have chat rooms, which is entering creep territory, but it's natural! Then soon the chat room will need to link with issues and you can now have TODOs linked to some kanban board and we should be able to speak while we code on the same file! And this goes on and on.

It's exceedingly rare that the organization found hard courage to specifically avoid features that looks like easy pickings for the purpose of avoiding them.

Many of these features were in Zed since first release.

Also Zed was announced as a closed source comercial tool.