Comment by mandeepj

19 hours ago

wait, there's more [copied from the top comment of their youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Bns1T77HM)] -

1. Mandatory arbitration by default. You waive your right to a jury trial and cannot join class action lawsuits. You have only 30 days to opt out after agreeing to the terms.

2. 1-year statute of limitations. You must file any legal claim within one year, which is much shorter than the default period under most state laws.

3. Zed can terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with no liability. No notice is required, and they owe you nothing if they pull the plug.

4. Autocomplete sends your code to AI providers in the background unless you turn it off. Worth knowing if you're working on proprietary or sensitive code.

5. No guarantees about data retention. If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.

6. All fees are non-refundable except where required by law, with one narrow exception for disagreeing with modified terms.

7. Zed can modify the terms at any time. For existing users, material changes take effect after just 30 days, and continued use counts as acceptance.

8. Zed can use your name, logo, and brand in their marketing without asking. You'd have to send a written request to stop them.

9. No warranties whatsoever. The service is "as is", they disclaim all responsibility for errors, data loss, or AI-generated output being inaccurate or harmful.

10. Liability is capped very low, at most, whatever you paid in the last 12 months, or $100, whichever is higher.

Why does a text editor have such a defensive license? This is extreme and reckless levels of paranoia.

Zed devs reading this: just release it as GPL. It will be better for literally everyone.

Some of these are questionable, but 3 and 5 stick out. Being included makes it sound like whoever wrote this list doesn’t really know what Zed is?

It’s a local text editor. The only thing an account gives you is access to their specific flavour of coding agent and a collaboration server.

> If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.

Pretty much the only associated data is your payment info.

Yeah, screw that.

I am literally shopping for a new editor. A once-a-decade thing for me. I want something that can effectively sandbox local models for code gen.

So I was looking at Zed yesterday. Cloned the repo. Then I noticed they were funded by our favorite VCs.

Between this and CVE-2026-31431 ("Copy Fail"), it seems like I dodged a bullet.

  • I think that's why fork "Gram" exists. It strips all the weird parts and leaves just the editor.

  • By sandbox you mean limit to certain files, certain actions, or both?

    I've been wanting to look into better emacs integration for agents. Imagine an agent making direct elisp function calls, or using macros... One could limit which functions are allowed to run similar to how cli harnesses work, but plug straight into LSP and etc.

These are all fairly standard terms.... nothing crazy