Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Basically what IntelliJ calls local history. It is a feature that has saved my bacon. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.htmlby esafak
- Ooooh, this is cool. I was unaware of this. Thanks for the link.by lemonberry
- Yes, I concur. Local History is wonderful; nice to see Zed getting its own version.by jasonlotito
- Similar, but not as polished, also exists in VSCode and derivatives, named the same way. Definitely saved me a few times as well.by vulkoingim
- > Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it
A total nightmare and imo every dev should push back using this stuff. You'd otherwise have management brag about you not being a good communicator with the ai agent, the same management that have no idea how to steer these tools.
I really like Zed the editor, I'm not sure I like the path they getting into
by hollowturtle - These sort of paper trails are for developers not management though, does your manager open all your commits and start commenting on them? If so, maybe apply somewhere else.
- I've been working on a somewhat related tool called Spor: https://github.com/emprcl/spor
It's primarily aimed at creative workflows. I mainly use it for creative coding, but I realize now it could also serve the same purpose for tracking changes made by AI agents.
by xvrgdrt - I really do like Zed, it's snappier than VS code and with pretty good vim emulation. Even through SSH, the native UI allows for no network latency, compared to something like vim+terminal. Like many other posters, I do feel like the core editor is getting worse.
Some issues I've encountered recently at work:
- Routinely encounter bugs with the python language server, it's particularly slow when compared to using VSCode. All that snappiest disappears when finding symbols after the '.' is considerably slower than my typing speed.
- I found similar issues with C++ code bases.
- It's also so hard to debug when something goes wrong. I was trying to find out why pyright keep spinning on startup, but the "LSP logs" never show anything.
- Connecting via SSH always opens the repo in restricted mode, even though I check the "Trust all projects in" checkbox. Never happened before.
- Debugger UI is a mess. Make a run, stop the run, edit the task.json, try running again, and 2 tasks show up. One for the old and one for the new.
--
I stuck with it because I really do like the UI, the performance, and initially it seemed to be an improvement from VS Code for my workflows, but lately I've been moving back to code as it seems more stable. I don't really use agent features, so I don't think I'm the target customer for this or other priority Zed features.
I do see the usefulness of something like this, I'm interested to see if the new agentic style of programming will result in the "code" part of editors becoming second class (for the better) and will allow for more rapid development. Although I'm not looking forward to read my coworker's "threads" of how a feature was made, I have a feeling that it will be more difficult to read than the raw code, as from my experience, LLMs don't really employ terse and effective communication (might not be entirely fair, I found ChatGPT /study mode pretty good.)
--
Anyone know of a good replacement editor that might meet my usecase? I'm really a batteries included type of developer.
by jackling - Yeah apparently Zed was engineered for speed but I find it very slow in general, especially on startup.
VS Code can slow down as you add functionality, but Zed often just doesn’t have that functionality at all. So the proper comparison is “VS Code minus all extension-provided features” which is actually pretty fast.
by nxc18 - A non-existent problem that nobody asked to solve...by pknopf
- VCs count as people unfortunately.
- I think that:
1. Commits are really just manual checkpoints while you’re working. Why not automatically checkpoint everything so you can actually go back to an older implementation without needing to remember to commit it?
2. Agentic workflows are so deeply single player. It’s very annoying, I want to collaborate with my team with agents, not review the output of one dev’s agent which they’ll just shove back into their existing agent.
by anon7000 - I disagree. JetBrains PyCharm has a similar "local history" feature that solves this very real and existing problem and has saved my ass more than once when accidentally overwriting changes before committing or fubar'ing a git reset.
- They say that "history between commits" matters.
If it's really so for some people, a case could be made that their problems can already be half-solved by changing the granularity of their commits: just commit more often.
- I really love Zed and I want them to really succeed. Unfortunately it seems that they are swamped with various things and the issue tracker is not a priority for the team, which fair enough. OSS is a gift and I take it as such. Wild proposal but if someone is willing to start a "user advocate" contributor, I'll be happy to donate monthly so user requests can be taken a look at :)
- Sounds like a side-effect of being VC-backed. Like what the ex GitHub CEO went on to build (Entire). Unnecessary.
- It also feels like his former company could implement his new company in a couple of weeks if they choose to.
- A lot of the copy on this page feels like the kind of copy an AI would produce. But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy so I don’t want to accuse them of doing that.
Marketing aside, this is the kind of thing (advancements in VCSes) that I’d usually be excited about, but which I’m less excited about coming from Zed because it makes me start to worry that they’re going to continue focussing less on the core editor experience.
I love Zed and I hope that it doesn’t start to go flakey.
by sarreph - You're too kind. It's obviously AI copy, and a huge negative signal (to me, anyway).by dilap
- The page design looks like it has Claude's fingerprints on it. Claude design is the new bootstrap.by gexla
- Anytime a company/group announces some random new project now, I tend to immediately suspect over-reliance on AI. From what I’ve seen, AI addiction frequently manifests as an explosion in scope, possibly because LLMs make so much initial “progress” on new projects which you can then demo and have resource allocators extrapolate to some glorious shipping version. But then you have to go back & clean up the slop, progress slows to a crawl, and it’s all way less exciting. That initial rush can be addicting. Ultimately a supercharged version of eternal human impulses I guess.by mukmuk
- Claude Design absolutely loves creating phrases like "Share the thread, not the PR". The amount of "do the xyz, not the abc" subheadings on docs in my workplace has exploded in the last 6 months, and it gets a bit tiring to see. I think it's a hard-coded alternative to em dashes or something.by mattstir
- > But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy
I've written my fair share of landing pages and copy lately. I start out with Claude for ideation and headlines it produces are almost always low effort word salads. Case in point:
"Software is made between commits"
It never fails to emphasize the last part, even if it bears no weight.
The only response to that headline is "Sure I guess".
It doesn't give you an idea of what problem it solves, doesn't sell you a vision or get you excited about the future. It's not even that insightful and is borderline factually incorrect.
by lopatin - Why develop this when the core editor is almost unusable? On Linux wayland, copypaste is broken, the file manager is laggy and snippets do not trigger before the heavy hint logic is done. This is just on top of my head, the list is longby yza
- What exactly is broken with copy-paste? I've been using Zed on Wayland (official install, not flatpak and not terra) and had no issues with this.by janilowski
- I started using Zed a couple weeks ago and immediately had issues with copy/paste/buffer on an M1 Mac. I tried a few suggested fixes and they didn't work.by dylanz
- It still doesn't actually display a window my end until I press a keyboard key or move the mouse. So very often I sit and wait for it to open, only to realize I have to press a random key for it to unhide.
Terrible Linux support.
by Daunk - Agree, copy-paste feels like it works 80% of the time, which is maddening when 1 in 5 copy paste attempts fail. (mostly from zed to something else) Why??
At least Excel has the courtesy to telling you "Hey the copy-paste buffer said it didn't catch that, can you try again?"
Linux Wayland (Ubuntu 26.04)
by NortySpock - I use it as a daily driver with few if any problems, but I'm on macOS. Maybe their Linux support is particularly crappy?by mosburger
- Just installed it, works on my kde and niri setups (I logged out and switched to each), copy paste works as well. File manager laggi-ness I didn't notice I don't use it, I use it mostly to type stuff out.
I have never used snippets so unsure about that too, going from command bar seemed to work.
I think it might be bad, but could also be it's not correctly configured maybe try asking codex/claude or something to check if it can fix/fine tune the config, if that doesn't work file issues?
I do suspect it might be working for me cause I got lucky I do see an open issue[1], but given Zed is used a bunch the lack of comments does suggest maybe it's not that wide spread either way not a good look.
[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/47004
Maybe I got lucky?? Does it not auto update on linux maybe I am on an old build... Very suspicious.
by minraws