Comment by franciscop
1 day ago
This is probably why I love using Zed for my hobby dev, it doesn't try to be too clever about AI. It's still there and when I do want some AI stuff it can be seamlessly prompted, but for normal day-to-day the AI steps back and I can just code. In contrast, using AI at work with VSCode I feel like the tools get too much in the way, particularly in 2 categories:
- Fragile interaction. There's popups on VSCode everywhere, and they are clickable. Too often I try to hover on a particular place and end up clicking on one of those. The AI autocomplete also feels way too intrusive, press the wrong key combination and BAM I get a huge amount of code I didn't intend to get.
- Train of thought disruption. Since some times the AI long auto-complete is useful (~1/3th of times), I do end up reading it and getting distracted from my original "building up" thinking and now change to "explore thinking", which kind of dismantles the abstraction castle.
I haven't seen either of those issues on Zed. It really brought me back the joy of programming on my free time. I also think both of these issues are about the implementation more than the actual feature.
Yeah, I'ma have to agree with you 100% on Zed. I was previously hardcore into JupyterLab for playing with code, and Kate (KDE default text editor) for writing code until I tried Zed. I love how it's first and foremost an IDE / Editor and all the other features (AI, Jupyter kernels, etc) are just there to enhance it's main purpose when the user wants them, but those features rarely (if ever) seem to "get in the way" of that primary mission of editing code / text. They're just quietly waiting there for when you need them. So far the Zed team has really hit the balance just right.