Comment by thomascountz

My dealbreaker with Zed is that it takes away my autonomy and agency.

1. Zed downloads binaries without user input as soon as you open a file; think LSPs and linters. This is a hot topic and has been for a while.[0]

I would rather my editor break (or even better, fail gracefully and helpfully), than obscure what amounts to being a significant action that I believe warrants user involvement.

2. I can't tell what gets sent to Zed's servers.

I don't have time to audit all the code, but as an example, this PR, [Allow Al interactions to be proxied through Zed's server so you don't need an API key][1], has +3,628 -8,918 changes and even just by the title seems to suggest that using the Assistant feature may result in requests being sent to Zed's servers.

This is a dealbreaker for me because, not only is this not documented anywhere, it seems in contradiction to the EULA.

"User Content is transmitted from Your environment only if You collaborate with other Zed users by electing to share a project in the Editor. Once You share a project, Zed may transmit User Content consisting of file paths, file contents, and metadata regarding the code returned by language servers."[2] It doesn't mention if using the Assistant feature is part of the network based solution or that it's the same as "sharing a project," but I'm not an Editor-EULA lawyer.

Arguably, this is true is any open source project, though my stance is generally to be more alert to privacy concerns with software from newly-backed pre-profitable startups. I don't want to spend my rare editor-tweaking time on nonconfigurable privacy and security control workarounds.

Edit: As if on cue, another PR to seemingly default to sending data to zed.dev: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/16454

[0]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/7367

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240718140959/https://zed.dev/e...