Comment by jeremy_k
7 days ago
Just wanted to say I had been happily plodding along using AI tools in Zed, which had worked pretty well but seeing the SST team was behind OpenCode I decided to finally give a terminal based agent a try. I was blown away, primarily by the feedback loops of say OpenCode writing new tests, running the test suite, seeing the tests errored and looping back start the whole process again. That looping does not happen in Zed!
It was the first time I felt like I could write up a large prompt, walk away from my laptop, and come back to a lot of work having been done. I've been super happy with the experience so far.
I’ve definitely had exactly that sort of looping work with Zed, as long as I tell it how to run the tests. Are you perhaps not using one of the “thinking” models?
That might be it. I use GitHub CoPilot through Zed as Zed does not accept the Claude subscription (that I'm using with OpenCode). I've primarily used Sonnet 3.7 in Zed, I'll try out the thinking model and see if that changes anything.
"It was the first time I felt like I could write up a large prompt, walk away from my laptop, and come back to a lot of work having been done. I've been super happy with the experience so far." - this yet-to-be-defined "happiness" metric will be important moving forward. Apart from Opencode & Leap.new (so far) I still haven't found something where I feel as happy.
I don't know if others share this sentiment but with all these tools/agents coming out, the main personal "metric" I look at when using them is happiness, rather than other more traditional metrics that I look at when evaluating tools.
That's tablestakes at this point. If Zed is not doing it, it's far behind others like Ampcode and rest.
Intellij’s agent, Junie, does that too… and you get a proper UI as well!
I've had pretty good experiences with Junie, their UI is really pleasant! Kind of wish I could put in an API key for Sonnet or Gemini myself and get rid of any rate limits.
Outside of JetBrains IDEs I also quite enjoy RooCode, though stuff like GitHub Copilot is decent.
While I haven't used Junie I have been using an intelliJ plugin ProxyAI for a while. It has a couple of built in models and more you can pay for ($10/mo) but you can add pretty much any model you want with your own keys (I even tried perplexity's Sonar model for kicks).
It's been my go-to, along with Claude Code on the side for bigger stuff.