19 ms·
Sequoia backs Zed
- obayesshelton 1y agoHow is this any better than VSCode? Getting developers to switch is going to be hard. Personally I don't think they can do it.
- criticalfault 1y agoLatency, responsiveness...
- obayesshelton 1y agoNever had any issues with those.
- decentrality 1y agoDeltaDB sounds of being a >git innovation for coding itself, and would fulfill Zed's promises in Nathan Sobo's debate/discussion with Steve Yegge recently. Seems to solve a real problem which is growing rapidly, both in the old way and in the new way ... if it can overcome _slop_ in LLM chats, and the sheer enormity of code/data ahead. Trying to picture how coherence will survive. With claims/hype/concern floating around that >90% of code will be LLM-generated within 3-6 months, with the insinuation/tone [1] that the same amount of code will be written by humans as now ( at least at first ) but LLM code will radically grow to dilute the space ( as is happening ) ... seems like DeltaDB being done right/well is going to be do-or-die on whether coherence remains possible! [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-code-3-to-6-months-2025-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
- Groxx 1y agoFor anyone not clicking through the link: it's from 5 months ago, predicting 90% of today's code will be from LLMs. >I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. They're going to keep saying it because it's a juicy sound bite and they're sales people. That doesn't make it any more true than "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our socks" or how we surely have all had flying cars for decades now.
- verdverm 1y agoI had a week where I embraced and went deep on ai first coding (not vibe, that'd be crazy) The thing wrote at least 80%, so we aren't far off in this anecdotal instance. There are citizen devs who are building fun things for themselves where the AI does 100% It made me realize these things are more capable than I knew, though they still do dumb stuff reliably. But, it is easy to undo those changes, so the productivity boost remains
- adastra22 1y agoBy sheer volume, that 90% number might be right.
- decentrality 1y agoI agree. The level of dilution is becoming obvious and a big problem... code is becoming predominantly disposable Despite the article being salesmanship hype ( at WEF no less ) we are now in the time mentioned, and can feel this The idea that the code is GOOD or even being used is not necessary to be saying that it exists, strewn everywhere
- yubblegum 1y agohttps://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/vintage-cigarette-ads-doctor.jpg https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads... https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/pure-water.jpg https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...
- fudged71 1y agoCould you link to the Sobo/Yegge debate? Is it this? https://youtu.be/j2goZBL156Q?si=S1A2XO_HxL7fpeVU https://youtu.be/j2goZBL156Q?si=S1A2XO_HxL7fpeVU
- eorri 1y agoI think they're tackling a real problem that is revealing itself via agentic coding, and I think they've positioned themselves in an interesting spot. I'd be interested to know how much data DeltaDB accumulates over time - because the level of granularity is so high - and are they going to want to use that data as training data?
- kordlessagain 1y agoAm I the only one that associates "Zed" and "development" with Zed Shaw? I don't think he has anything to do with zed.dev, unfortunately.
- poetril 1y agoYou’re not. Everytime I see him on Twitch I have to do a double take.
- slig 1y agoDid not know he was a streamer now, thanks!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _mu 1y agoI really appreciate Zed Shaw for walking his own path and sticking to his guns. I miss some of his old posts that he took down from his website, in particular the one on learning statistics, that was a great one.
- ewf 1y agofeels like we are giving up privacy for productivity.
- laweijfmvo 1y agowouldn’t be the first time a massive investment from someone like sequoia sparks the death of a previously great tool/service
- verdverm 1y agoYea, this announcement makes it less likely I will try Zed I don't want chat with coworkers in my IDE, nor do I feel the pains they describe with conversations spread between tools. It's not a top 5 problem
- decentrality 1y agoFor the record: I have never used the collaboration aspects of Zed What I also have not used is vim emulation, though I have a vim background As mentioned elsewhere, Zed is still very configuration-dependent to get the full power of it, and a lot of its functionality is never discovered for that reason What pushed me to try it was Ollama integration which is not an afterthought, then I realized I loved it _way_ more than SublimeText, especially on performance, at first, then everything else once that won me over I have ~10 running instances at any given moment, and >99% of the time never feel any lag, whatsoever Another unexpected benefit is that terminals, code editor panels, and assistant chats, get to be sized and fit wherever you want, so it is also kind of a window manager... I often have more terminals open in Zed than in the Window Manager of the OS itself
- verdverm 1y agoI do all those same things in VS Code, especially the vim bindings, wouldn't give those up, but did recently leave the vim ecosystem because I had to spend too much time making the IDE work or enable features that are out-of-the-box in a code-oss based IDE
- pbiggar 1y ago[flagged]
- shafyy 1y agoI don't know why you are being downvoted. This is a real issue and a legitimate concern to have as a user of this software. I feel the same way (never used Zed in the first place because they are VC backed, but this would have been the final straw for me, too).
- pbiggar 1y agoHard to take their Code of Conduct seriously anymore https://zed.dev/code-of-conduct https://zed.dev/code-of-conduct
- an0malous 1y ago[flagged]
- cholantesh 1y agoA sibling comment claims that making a comment like this constitutes waging a 'political'/'ideological' battle that 'tramples curiosity', because raising a legitimate concern is inherently ideological, but silencing any and all scrutiny of a VC is not.
- ParetoOptimal 1y agoYeah, pretty ridiculous... maybe we can move off of hackernews too.
- throwaway329044 1y agoBecause Paul consistently violates HN guidelines: > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fidotron 1y ago[flagged]
- conartist6 1y agoThat brings them to 120x the amount of money I've invested in the same problem, and still they're only just announcing that they're intending to start trying to do something that I've already done better
- esafak 1y agoCan we see?
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoIt's apparently this but I can't really say that I get it: https://bablr.org https://bablr.org He seems to be saying he spent $350k making this. I guess it's some tooling for writing parsers. He has this to say about Zed: > Zed: Founded by Atom’s dev team, Zed was the rewrite that Atom always wanted to be able to do but couldn’t when Microsoft bought Github and made the executive decision to kill a product it might otherwise have had to compete with. Unfortunately Zed decided to do that rewrite in Rust. This has slowed their iteration speed, caused much of their dev effort to go to cross-platform support instead of innovation, cut them off from being able to offer their experience on the web, severely limited their hackability, and generally made theirs a niche tool for enthusiasts. What’s worse, their reliance on LSP — a product which believes that the presentation layer should be the primary abstraction layer — means their product is forever doomed to look like a VSCode knock-off. [1] 1. https://docs.bablr.org/architecture/prior-art/#ides https://docs.bablr.org/architecture/prior-art/#ides
- conartist6 1y agoHaha yes I wrote that, thank you for sharing. We're approaching the problem by drawing from browser design. We want to see an editor with a DOM API for code documents. BABLR is a parser framework meant as a direct answer to Tree-sitter.
- WD-42 1y agoMyself and most people I know that switch to Zed (many from Sublime) did it because we DON'T want a DOM in our text editor. Webtech makes for crappy text editors.
- markus_zhang 1y agoOK they touched Unity and now Zed. I’m sure it’s going to be good.
- mandeepj 1y agoIt’s sounds very similar to Google wave, if anyone remembers that, but for code.
- esafak 1y agoThis sounds interesting. Which aspects?
- mandeepj 1y ago“ never-ending stream of conversations”
- tzury 1y agoThat came back as Slack and other similar products
- mtndew4brkfst 1y agoNothing since then really recaptured what I personally liked about GWave or let me use their tool in similar ways to how I used it. YMMV, of course, more so than most of my comments.
- mccoyb 1y agoI love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up). Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.
- spudlyo 1y agoThe problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time. Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
- parentheses 1y agoNote to Zed: I prefer paid products to enshittened ones. Please please please, get paid rather than holding on too tightly to making things free forcing future enshittening.
- rtfeldman 1y agoWe're working on it! :) You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).
- reitanuki 1y ago
- Dowwie 1y agoZed defaults don't seem to capture the full value of what it offers. For instance, edit predictions via tab completion are documented yet I've never experienced them. I need better settings, I guess.
- pvtmert 1y agoOn the bottom right, there is a button looks like magic emoji (). Click that and it will show general AI settings. You can choose _Eager-Completion_ rather than trigger-based one. As a user, most IDEs/Editors currently show in _eager_ way. For example, VSCode by default shows ghost-text as well as Amazon Q extension too. Usually disabling those disables the AI completion completely. Meanwhile I like Zed's approach that you can trigger completions with Alt+Space, not burning through your "tokens" in free-tiers. They also provide a free-tier completions, as well as _next-edit suggestions_. *) Next-edit suggestions: When you edit some piece of code repeatedly, it suggest to do similar on the next few instances, with context awareness, quite nice feature saving several keystrokes every single time.
- witx 1y ago> we've been building the world's fastest IDE Any data to backup this?
- yurishimo 1y agoYou can try it out. I would say it’s aiming to be a more modern Sublime Text, which is a win to be considered in the same category imo.
- decentrality 1y agoThis is accurate. I came over from Sublime Text because it had become laggy over >5 running instances, and native LLM integration. Even VS Code doesn't actually have that... where everything is an extension versus seamlessly/perfectly fitting As mentioned in other comments, it actually outperforms window management in general in many/most cases. Radically flexible and almost never gets in the way
- duped 1y agoI have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code. The modern Sublime Text is Sublime Text. There is way too much "extra" in Zed to compare it. If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.
- bpev 1y agoSlower than VS Code?? I guess it's just poorly optimized for Linux. On MacOS, I find it to be significantly faster than VS Code, and the only alternative I've found that's in the ballpark of Sublime (from the performance aspect).
- aniviacat 1y agoI'm on Linux and performance is the reason I switched from VSCode to Zed. It works great for me. Perhaps the same issue that had Zed fail to recognize their GPU also tanked their performance.
- pton_xd 1y ago> To make this possible, we're building DeltaDB: a new kind of version control that tracks every operation, not just commits. Let me guess: DeltaDB is free to use as long as we host your data and have free range on training AI based on your editor interactions.
- decentrality 1y agoNot sure what this guess is based on. Would that be a guess for git also, if mentioned by a company versus an individual? My read was that they are pulling a Linus Torvalds with the Linux->Git move where both are innovations on their own, but work great together ( without dystopian universe instantiation ) CRDTs mentioned: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
- azemetre 1y agoDefinitely sounds very eerie. Luckily there are open source solutions that do just this with no AI integration: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin
- nerdypepper 1y agohow is atuin doing what deltaDB does?
- azemetre 1y agoah not much at all, did too much selective reading on my end. Should have read the entire blog and not the quoted selection.
- shepherdjerred 1y agothis doesn't seem related to the above post that said atuin is excellent
- k_bx 1y agoI don't know what's DeltaDB, but if it will be able to show when a commit is simultaneously a refactoring and a change of code being refactored (moved into another module) – I would love to see that! At the moment if you refactor you punish the people reviewing the code, which reverses the motivation for cleaning things up.
- rirze 1y agoCool, I basically get the same effect with "code snapshots" with using jj so I wonder if this will be different.
- fredgrott 1y agoThe problem I see is the VC involvement... VCs operate from the goal of xtreme high user market share as the problem.. As frameworks get better, the audience using the IDE changes... Both are misaligned before even meeting and it will get worse once VC money control is added. My bias, I am a flutter framework user and MS VSCode user.
- arkits 1y agoHave they fixed the big/feature where it insists on downloading entire distributions of Node.js for running it's language server functionality?
- reitanuki 1y agoThis is basically my main gripe with Zed atm — it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries. I have a light fork that tries to nullify this, but I don't think I've managed to catch all the instances. Other than that, it's a very nice editor in my opinion.
- decentrality 1y agoEasy fix: { "server_url": "", } I comment out that JSONC line periodically when I feel like cherry-picking updates
- 0x457 1y ago> it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries. I hate this pattern in software so much.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoThat is the great thing about Zed. Stuff just works.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoThat's not great at all. It's not acceptable to "just work" by downloading and running third party software without asking the user.
- mikevm 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sunaookami 1y agoGreat, maybe they can finally make Zed start maximized instead of this small window and add a picker for recent files (not projects)! ;)
- segmondy 1y agozed is just on the hype train, obviously very talented people, they are thinking hard about LLMs but I'm not really sure where they are going, their pivot is probably going to be more interesting...
- burnt-resistor 1y agoData harvesting and non-ownership.
- submeta 1y agoNot a good move. Evernote went that path and then turned an otherwise very useful app into a VC bet that forced the founders to pivot the app into something nobody wanted. Same happened to Soundcloud.
- focusgroup0 1y agoI love Zed, but this makes me worry for its future. VCs are not the end user, and thus don't understand the perils of enshittification.
- BiraIgnacio 1y agoCongratulations!!
- aeon_ai 1y agoThe beginning of the end. You know where this goes.
- mococa 1y agoLet the enshitification begin.
- bogwog 1y agoOh well, back to Sublime Text. RIP Zed, you had a good run.
- JaggerJo 1y agoWhat on earth do they need this kind of money for?
- IshKebab 1y agoSounds like a noble goal.. but I'm skeptical. I normally don't care about every single edit I've done, and don't want to store them and certainly don't want to see other people's character level edits. Also how on earth do you handle conflicts? This sounds most similar to IntelliJ's local history tracking, but that is local only which makes sense. Still, more IDEs is always good so I wish them luck and will wait and see. (As with Zed - I keep trying it but it's still very alpha quality so I always end up back in VSCode.)
- hardselius 1y ago[flagged]
- jazzyjackson 1y agoDoes an anti-palestinian fund investing in the company really count as harassment of the community?
- jakestevens2 1y agoMet the CEO of Zed. Very humble and deeply technical. Glad to see they're doing well!
- zkoch 1y agoI love working in Zed. It really is a delight to use, and I think the Agentic coding integration is really well done. I'm excited to see them investing in this space more. I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product! Zed being OSS is a gift to the community, and I suspect DeltaDB will be as well. And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human. Congrats, Zed!
- ignoramous 1y ago> And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human. Hate cancel culture as much as the next techbro, but since y'all point out they're "a delightful human", it'd be interesting to see how Nathan then responds to concerns raised in some quarters: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
- kiney 1y ago[flagged]
- ignoramous 1y ago> being "islamophobic" is actually the right thing to do from a humanitarian perspective Every perpetrator of terrorism sees himself as a victim. Such is the case not only with individual terrorists, who often compete with their enemies over who is more victimized, but also with terrorist groups and nation states. - Bessel van der Kolk (author, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma).
- hashbig 1y agoCan I replace "islamophobic" in your comment with "antisemitic" and not have my comment deleted or my profile banned on this site?
- esalman 1y ago
- calebm 1y agoVC backed? Zed's dead.
- airesQ 1y agoIs IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative? This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view
- v3ss0n 1y agoVC funding and self funded are totally different beast. Self funded are organic and they can follow their own vision , not VC's vision.
- MeetingsBrowser 1y agoNot many people are willing to pay ~$300/year for an IDE. And Intellij didn't take any VC funding. So at some point Zed will likely need to pursue monetization more aggressively than IntelliJ does now.
- nicce 1y agoThe thing with taking VC funding is that your intention usually is not to steadily grow a sustainable product. You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster. All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new. At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users. In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users. I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
- dymk 1y agoCursor costs $240 per year and loads of people are paying for it
- MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
- ComputerGuru 1y ago[flagged]
- hashbig 1y agoThe mods deleted another comment that brought this up, and probably will delete this one too.
- dmix 1y agodeltadb sounds interesting. AI editors should look into letting you operate on multiple git branches simultaneously, like isolated browser tabs where the AI gen doesn't contaminate the other. One of the reasons I find LLMs don't increase productivity much is that I can't switch branches to multitask while it's processing. Context switching isn't always useful but there's still lots of opportunities for rapidly experimenting or ticking off a couple small bugs quickly while AI takes the first pass on something more complicated. Each "branch tab" could have a sort of TODO list or plan.
- porphyra 1y agoI have been running multiple instances of the Codex CLI tool in several terminals to do different stuff. You can even checkout the repo several times, write the todo to a file (or ask the agent to do so), if you need.
- irskep 1y ago> AI editors should look into letting you operate on multiple git branches simultaneously Git worktrees are great for this. I built a little tool to make them more ergonomic: https://steveasleep.com/autowt/ https://steveasleep.com/autowt/ You really don't need every LLM vendor to build their own version of worktrees.
- lazzlazzlazz 1y agoShould bring some interesting new features to Zed quickly. Glad to see it.
- rustystump 1y agoWhile i am sure this sounds insane i had to drop zed due to lack of the “last file dif” button gitlens vscode plugin provides. It is a godsend on quickly debugging the why of things. If anyone knows how to replicate the same functionality with the same number of clicks in zed, id happily switch back to it.
- pvtmert 1y agoi use the gutter markers, where a click shows the chunk-diff. there is also inline-blame, both are native (ie. no plugins required)
- rustystump 1y agoNice. I dont like the gutters taking up space. I like the ux of click, see dif of last change, click see the next last change. It seems such a silly thing but it made me not use zed at least until vscode eats all my ram again.
- andelink 1y agoSeems like a minor thing to change IDEs over. Would a Zed task that runs the relevant git command work for you? e.g. // ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/zed/tasks.json [ { "command": "git --paginate log --follow -p -m -1 ${ZED_FILE}", "label": "last-file-diff:${ZED_FILE}", "shell": { "program": "sh" } } ] You can even throw a keybind on it if you'd like: // ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/zed/keymap.json [ { "context": "Editor && mode == full", "bindings": { "ctrl-shift-g d": [ "task::Spawn", { "task_name": "last-file-diff:${ZED_FILE}" } ] } } ] I am not familiar with gitlens so not sure how close this gets you but you should be able to replicate the functionality you need from the git CLI and some light scripting. This can be a jumping off point maybe. If you want to view the diff using the zed diff viewer, you can do so using `zed --diff`, as demonstrated in this GitHub discussion: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/33503#discussioncomment-14182511 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/33503#disc...
- popcorncowboy 1y agoAw man :( I too loved the promise of Zed. Well done I suppose to the Zed founders as they're on the Sequoia gravy train now. But as others have noted this puts an inevitable clock on the enshittification no matter how hard the team crosses their heart and truly believes otherwise (or not, I mean maybe this IS the gameplan). Hopefully Zedless [0] gets some community steam behind it. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916
- dang 1y agoRelated ongoing threads: Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916 Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366
- llIIllIIllIIl 1y agoButch: Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead.
- RobLach 1y agobad news "total funding to over $42M" the enshittification it'll take to extract $400m of value out of a text editor will be dismal
- insane_dreamer 1y agoI do like Zed very much. Fast, good UI, decent set of features. Still missing some key features to get parity for python with PyCharm, and git features need more love, but pace of development has been blistering. Kudos to the team for building something really solid. I don't use the agentic stuff though -- I have a ClaudeMax subscription and use CC or more recently opencode (the only non-CC that works with a ClaudeMax sub); I don't want to pay another sub for Zed and the free model use that comes with Zed runs out very quickly (understandably so, no complaints there). If I could connect my ClaudeMax sub to it then I'd maybe use it, though CC and opencode are pretty good. The code completion is decent and I especially like the "subtle" mode saves a lot of backspacing (no, dammit, that's not what I wanted!). I understand Zed needs to make money, but VC backed, especially Sequoia, doesn't inspire any love, tbh. I don't care what platitudes VCs say about independence their love for the product etc., they need their 10x return and if it means enshittification, so be it, they don't really care.
- keybored 1y agoVC backing apparently has the power to move the standard from "hodge-podge 800-line commit must have an issue key" to "track every damn interaction and back and forth". That and the ever-trailing "especially now with AI".
- JSR_FDED 1y agoWhether this is good or bad for Zed remains to be seen. I wonder though what the play is here for Sequoia - like all VCs they’re looking for the possibility of a huge return. I don’t see how “just” an editor (even with paying users) can generate a 10x return. So what is the larger vision here?
- leoh 1y agoJetBrains would be a good case study. They also arguably have a lot more IP.
- charlie0 1y agoExciting ideas! I'll take a look at this again in several years when they aren't trying to rebuild everything from the ground up from first principles.
- tiffanyh 1y agoWith so many new AI editors popping up, it feels like the Zed team is in a tough “lose/lose” spot. If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With that kind of momentum, Cursor can now buy their way into a superior product. On the other hand, if Zed takes more VC money, it likely means doubling down on AI in ways they clearly don’t seem eager to—but at least it would give them a fighting chance. I really feel for this team. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and from the few interactions I’ve had, they strike me as incredibly talented, kind, and genuine folks. I truly wish them the best.
- chamomeal 1y agoI hadn’t thought about it that way but it’s an interesting point. The cursor folks probably have 99% of the work already done for them, for free, funded by Microsoft, probably in perpetuity. And on top of that, since it’s essentially just vscode, it costs users almost zero effort to make the switch. It’s the perfect crime!! I hope zed does well though. I love their blog, and all of the cool open source stuff they’ve made. I recently heard they added a “helix mode” which might be enough to get me to switch from vscode…
- failiaf 1y agothis is where the advances in collaboration come in; it's a way out for them because existing editors are largely stuck with git and are patching ai on top of everything. zed came at the incredibly (un?)fortunate timing where they were just able to build a solid base before the editor wars began. their only path now is to fully maximize the few advantages they do have: * a fresh base that is far more flexible * really good experience with performance, design, general craftmanship * a buzzy community and fresh/boldness that attracts vcs for zed to truly win (at least in sequioa's eyes) they will need to completely take over vscode as the new default, and that will require a big lead when it comes to collaboration and ai
- jen20 1y ago> Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there Revenue, not profit. I’d imagine cursor loses a dollar for every 50 cents of revenue and makes it up in volume. Meanwhile JetBrains is a profitable company not beholden to the whims of outside investors. I know which I’d rather work for…
- csense 1y agoI'm willing to accept this claim: - You can make money when your product is a text editor. I am very skeptical of these claims: - When your product is a text editor, $42 million in capital can be effectively deployed to make meaningful improvements to your product. - When your product is a text editor, your lifetime inflation-adjusted profit will eventually exceed $42 million. Sequoia is apparently not so skeptical, and willing to put the money on the table. That must have been a truly extraordinary pitch deck...
- dustingetz 1y agoAI text editor
- 542458 1y agoCounterpoint, apparently cursor's revenue is in the 300-400 million range. So it's not wildly inconceivable that you'd do 40m profit (although I too am doubtful).
- dkdcio 1y agohow much profit does Cursor generate on that revenue?
- blitzar 1y agoIf I had to guess ... I would say they spend more on Ai tokens than they take in in revenue.
- saxelsen 1y agoI strongly doubt that Cursor makes anywhere near 40m profit. All they're revenue is spent on tokens with the LLM vendors. I'd be surprised if they are even running at positive margin and not just subsidizing usage with the VC money. Unsure of what the end goal is, but I expect everything AI related to be a load-leader right now and then the goal being to figure out how to drive down costs or make even more money later. Maybe that's what Sequioa thinks too...
- 1y ago
- wolfcola 1y agowon’t be using the Zed IDF anymore… whoops i mean IDE
- huevosabio 1y agoI love Zed and I am glad they are getting funded. This allows them to truly polish both the remote collab and the AI features and compete with Cursor and friends. The product has improved so much in the last year, it's been a pleasure to use and get excited about new features.
- 827a 1y agoTbh: I think git is not the century-tool that a lot of people think it is, and we're in an era now where its decreasingly serving the needs of its users. I'm ready for deeper ground-up innovation in the space of code collaboration. Developers don't think in terms of commits; they think in terms of Tickets and PRs. Git doesn't have any native representation of either of these things. Getting tickets into the repository is something the community has talked about for years, and Linus himself has said he wants, but it hasn't happened yet. Branches work fine enough to start a PR, but then Github, again, has to take over for comments, CI execution, even the decision on how you want the commits on that branch represented on the main branch (squash? merge? rebase? why should I care?). LFS has been years in the making. Monorepos are still weird. Idk, I think there's capacity in the industry to take the concept of a repository back to square one and think more holistically about how we all interface with the repository. The way they talk about DeltaDB gives me hope that they'll start thinking more about this with this funding; commits just aren't a useful primitive anymore, and a repository, locally-downloaded, open source, ultratight connection between diffs, merges, communication, and automated tooling is how I want to be coding in 2030.
- zeddyyrud 1y ago> Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It just means that we will now see AI crapola being stuffed into this editor in the next few days.
- dcre 1y agoHave you heard of Zed before just now?
- kjgkjhfkjf 1y agoI enjoy the responsiveness of the Zed editor compared to VSCode, but I am concerned that it is a VC backed enterprise. For example, I don't like that I am forced to look at its "Sign In" UI, and that they have refused attempts to remove it. [0] Zed has some much more annoying bugs, and I am not excited to help fix them given the position of the code owners. [0] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12325 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12325
- VerminOctopus1 1y agoI have trouble imagining a world where I will ever pay for this. Unless it becomes as feature rich and powerful as an IDE like PyCharm, it’s not compelling.
- hdjrudni 1y agoYeesh. With every announcement, I get less and less interested in Zed. I've yet to use it because Windows has been on the "soon" list forever. "Fast" is what got me interested. All this other stuff sounds like "we want more money"
- failiaf 1y agofor those who just caught the headline, the real gem here isn't the investment, but what zed's doing different: rather than using git for version control, they're announcing deltadb which incrementally stores all changes as crdt [1] while being interopable with git. this feels pretty important; git is definitely not the right primitive for version control with ai and that pain is obvious with existing solutions. zed seems to be going all in on collaboration with realtime, git, and now something in between and it'll be interesting to see where they end up-to me three solutions feels overcomplicated but that may be necessary given how teams work now. - [1]: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
- yencabulator 1y agoEhh Zed tried to push the collaborative editing before the AI hype was thing (that blog post is from 2022), and seemingly everyone outside of Zed developers promptly ignored the idea. The Zed developers quickly refocused on milking the AI cow. I'll argue git is plenty good, and there are a lot of people who don't understand it very well. The ones talking about Github PRs as if they were related to Git in any way most definitely don't.
- TranquilMarmot 1y agoI wanted to try out Zed. It looked fine on my laptop screen but as soon as I tried it on a 1440p monitor, the font and icon rendering fall completely flat and are a blurry mess. If your product is a text editor focused on code, your font rendering better be *top of class*. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
- azhenley 1y agoI miss Atom.
- nik736 1y agoIs anyone actually using the collaboration features? Zed is my daily editor and I love it, but I've never touched the collaboration features, which is their "USP" when raising cash.
- raspasov 1y agoIs DeltaDB not open-source yet?
- philjackson 1y agoAs an aside, I really like the Zed website. Easy to read and pleasant to look at.
- ThinkBeat 1y agoFrom the description it seems my deveopment experience would become a lot more crowded and furstraiting. All the different actors sharing a live coding experience. I feel my focus will become fragmented like someone poking my shoulder frequently. Hopefullly intended use is to schedule a time for it.
- ThinkBeat 1y agoAll of this data is valuable for the Zed team and could easily be compiled into reports for management about developer's individual progress and productivity. I am certain the team will say that is not on the roadmap, but for me, it still sounds like a possible leak in the future. Or maybe a semi draconian "mandatory" extension your bosses will demand installed.
- skepticalswe 1y ago[dead]
- blitzar 1y agoI LOVE THIS FOUNDER I am a 10 out of 10 YES!!!
- v3ss0n 1y agoEnshitenfication gonna follow.I like the idea that Opensource software should be funed like public infrastructure - not by loanshark VCs.
- smashedtoatoms 1y agoUgh, ok. I just want an editor.
- vendiddy 1y agoThe vision sounds interesting but I think if they have two challenges they will need to overcome to compete in the IDE space 1) Their LLM integration needs to be at the quality of Cursor and VSCode to pull people away from those 2) Reduced friction to move over (keyboard shortcuts, common plugins, etc) I think the Zed team is perfectly capable of winning. The bigger risk would be them trying to tackle fancy stuff before making sure the basics are good enough to get developers to switch. They need to build up a deep understanding of why folks are sticking to Cursor/VSCode and not swapping over. P.S. I would love for Zed to win in the market because I'm sick of slow software and it's refreshing to finally see an intense focus on performance.
- weakfish 1y agoFWIW their default keybinds mirror VS Code nearly 1:1 with some (IMO) improvements
- vendiddy 1y agoI customized the hell out of my keybindings. I might be in the minority though! I was trying to give examples of (stupid) little points of friction that might prevent someone from taking the leap.
- 8758747654 1y ago[flagged]
- pprnm 1y agoIf you need a simple text editor without DeltaDB bloat, see CudaText. No so fast drawing speed because it does not use GPU. But drawing speed is not the decision factor for many tasks of text work. Zed has better drawing speed. But DeltaDB bloat, AI bloat, telemetry, need of modern videocard.
- firemelt 1y agois it means brainstorming? I think thinking in solitude is still better than that