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Zed used to be a good editor but it is increasingly LLM infested.
by throwawa14223 1y ago
Zed used to be a good editor but it is increasingly LLM infested.
- Sparkle-san 1y agoJust disable it. It seems like they've made is as simple as possible to do so while also being realistic about what it takes to make a successful (read: profitable) IDE the year 2025.
- runarberg 1y agoGiven the state of information technology in 2025 I think your parent has a good reason to believe AI features ruins everything. It is common in well funded (read VC funded) technology to start with an easy toggle to disable, and then slowly make opt-out ever harder to completely accomplish. Disable 3rd party tracking ads on google platforms used to be a simple toggle as well.
- stavros 1y agoYou can think that AI ruins everything, or that tracking ads ruin everything, but the reality is that VC investment ruins everything, because it turns you from the customer to the product. I guess the eventual culprit is capitalism, where profit is the ultimate goal for everything, so there will never be a single product that is not enshittified in this way. The best part? If you don't like it, there's nothing you can do! It's the whole culture.
- stavros 1y agoI've found that the sort of people who complain about AI or cryptocurrency don't care if it can be disabled. The mere fact that such functionality exists taints the product for them. I can't say I understand the reasons (I like AI functionality), but that's what I've noticed.
- microflash 1y agoI do care that it can be disabled. My problem with such functionality is that it becomes the sole focus of the development team, drifting their attention away from improving core experiences, such as language and plugin support, polishing ergonomics, and pruning papercuts.
- stavros 1y agoThe focus of the team is gone. Their target now is not to make a great product, but to make an engaging product that makes money however they can. The AI is a symptom of the problem. If it weren't AI, it would be something else.
- throwawa14223 1y agoYes. I don't want to give support or market share to a company that is using AI as it is an unethical technology.
- stavros 1y agoDo you also refuse to use search engines, cars, phones, computers, etc? Or by "AI" do you specifically mean LLMs?
- runarberg 1y agoAI is such a bad and tainted term and since LLMs became so prominent it has kind of become synonymous with LLMs and generative AI more broadly. I honestly think this is for the better, (un)supervised learning models and other machine learning models with a reasonable number of parameters (k-means clustering, Markov Chains etc.) are usually not called AI any more (and honestly haven’t been for some time; machine learning has been much more popular for at least 10-15 years in my experience).
- maleldil 1y agoHow does the existence of LLM features impact the quality of the rest of the editor? It's a single toggle to disable everything [1]. [1] https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features
- throwawa14223 1y agoThe inclusion of an unethical tech is a deal breaker.
- suck-my-spez 1y agoOne line fix for you… https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features
- throwawa14223 1y agoDoes that button cause them to cease using LLM technology? My objection is on ethical grounds.
- jsheard 1y agoIt was always going to be infested with something or other, you don't raise $42M for just a text editor. Could be worse, a few years earlier it probably would have incorporated blockchains somehow.
- cameroncooper 1y agoSeems like a reasonable trade-off to me. I'm happy for them to have a sustainable business model and people seem quite willing to pay monthly for AI. As long as they keep the free version and the ability to disable AI features then I think everyone wins.
- jmull 1y ago> As long as they keep... The thing is, they will have to switch to maximizing monetization (or die trying). Those investors are ultimately in control, and while they are happy to gain market share for now, that's what they will demand in the future. They will keep a free version for as long as it's working for them, but you will be monetized, one way or another, sooner or later, and you might not enjoy it.
- cameroncooper 1y agoAgreed, but Zed is open source so I think that does offer some long term protection to users who like the editor and don't want AI.
- sexyman48 1y agoWe brought this upon ourselves. As much as we reviled forking over four hundred 1998-dollars to use Microsoft Word, shrink-wrapped closed-source was more honest way to make a living than the current surveillance schemes.
- simonw 1y agoI know what you mean. I used to like Emacs but then they added syntax highlighting for Rust and I don't use Rust so I'll never touch that editor ever again.
- ar_lan 1y agoThe deal breaker for me was when they introduced support for the "delete" key. A real developer should get it right the first time.
- Karrot_Kream 1y agoCan you believe they had the gall to even run code that allowed those vim heathens to feel comfortable in emacs? The horror /s
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]