I interned at zed during the summer of 2022, when the editor was pre-alpha. Nathan, Max, Antonio are great guys and build software with care. I'm happy to see the editor receive the success it deserves, because the team has poured so much world-class engineering work into it.
I worked with Antonio on prototyping the extensions system[0]. In other words, Antonio got to stress test the pair programming collaboration tech while I ran around in a little corner of the zed codebase and asked a billion questions. While working on zed, Antonio taught me how to talk about code and make changes purposefully. I learned that the best solution is the one that shows the reader how it was derived. It was a great summer, as far as summers go!
I'm glad the editor is open source and that people are willing to pay for well-engineered AI integrations; I think originally, before AI had taken off, the business model for zed was something along the lines of a per-seat model for teams that used collaborative features. I still use zed daily and I hope the team can keep working on it for a long time.
[0]: Extensions were originally written in Lua, which didn't have the properties we wanted, so we moved to Wasm, which is fast + sandboxed + cross-language. After I left, it looks like Max and Marshall picked up the work and moved from the original serde+bincode ABI to Wasm interface types, which makes me happy: https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-extensions. I have a blog post draft about the early history of Zed and how extensions with direct access to GPUI and CRDTs could turn Zed from a collaborative code editor into a full-blown collaborative application platform. The post needs a lot of work (and I should probably reach out to the team) before I publish it. And I have finals next week. Sigh. Some day!
I wish they would have stayed with the collaborative part a bit longer. Once the AI wave hit it feels abandoned with various bugs and hard to reproduce issues. I am a full time zed user converting from sublime only due to the collaborative features, but by now we don't even use the collaborative features anymore because it's unreliable (broken connections, sounds, overwriting changes, weird history/undo behavior), so will probably go back to sublime again. Note that all of us are sitting on fiber connections, so I don't believe the issues are network related.
I've been trying to be active, create issues, help in any way I can, but the focus on AI tells me Zed is no longer an editor for me.
Yeah, we plan to revisit the collaboration features; it was painful but we decided we needed to pause work on it while we built out some more highly-requested functionality. We still have big plans for improving team collaboration!
It would be interesting to (optionally) make the AI agent more like an additional collaborative user, sharing the chat between users, allowing collaborative edits to prompts, etc.
The long game of agentic AI seems to be giving them a working environment that is fast, accurately (and safely!) tracks changes, and enables humans to observe its edit history and thinking process. Zed's collaborative features seem serendipitous for this role.
Not sure what your budget looks like, but maybe its time to look for a new developer if its feasible? So you don't neglect a feature that's already in production and broken.
It's absolutely remarkable that these folks are writing this from scratch in Rust. That'll be a long-term killer feature for the editor.
Do you think GPL3 will serve as an impediment to their revenue or future venture fundraising? I assume not, since Cursor and Windsurf were forks of MIT-licensed VS Code. And both of them are entirely dependent on Microsoft's goodwill to continue developing VS Code in the open.
Tangentially, do you think this model of "tool" + "curated model aggregator" + "open source" would be useful for other, non-developer fields? Would an AI art tool with sculpting and drawing benefit from being open source? I've talked with VCs that love open developer tools and they hate on the idea of open creative tools for designers, illustrators, filmmakers, and other creatives. I don't quite get it, because Blender and Krita have millions of users. Comfy is kind of in that space, it's just not very user-friendly.
> entirely dependent on Microsoft's goodwill to continue developing VS Code in the open.
The premise of many open source licenses, including MIT, is that the user is _not_ dependent on the developer. No matter what MS does, the latest pulled version of VS Code will remain working and available. MS could license future VS Code versions under more restrictive licenses, however the Cursor devs can continue to use and themselves develop the code they already have.
To be clear, by "the user" I'm referring to the Cursor devs. This is the terminology of many F/OSS licenses.
They are dependent to the extent they won't put in the work to make those extensions at the same level Microsoft was pumping resources into them.
In theory everyone can fork Chrome and Android, in practice none of the forks can keep up with Google's resources, unless they are Microsoft or Samsung.
Isaac, that email that you sent to us (long after your internship ended) when Wasmtime first landed support for the WASM Component model was actually very helpful! We were considering going down the path of embedding V8 and doing JS extensions. I'm really glad we ended up going all in on Wasmtime and components; it's an awesome technology.
Yes, Wasm components rock! I'm amazed to see how far you've taken Wasm and run with it. I'm at a new email address now, apologies if I've missed any mail. We should catch up sometime; I'll be in SF this summer, I might also visit a friend in Fort Collins, CO. (Throwing distance from Boulder :P)
Hey Isaac! I was intrigued by the way Zed added extensions, and I think it turned out great! I ended up taking that pattern of WASM, WIT, and Rust traits to add interactive hot reloading in a few projects. It feels like it has a strong future in gamedev where you could load and execute untrusted user mods without having all your players getting hacked left and right.
Thank you Brian! I miss tonari, I hope you're well. Game mods seem like a great fit for Wasm! I'm excited about Wasm GC, etc., because it means you can use e.g. a lightweight scripting language like Lua to sketch a mod, with the option of using something heavier if you need that performance.
Hey! I was reading your extensions code a lot. The backwards compatibility is done in a smart way. Several layers of wit and the editor makes the choice based on wasm headers which one to choose.
I learned something from that code, cool stuff!
One question: how do you handle cutting a new breaking change in wit? Does it take a lot of time to deal with all the boilerplate when you copy things around?
I worked with Antonio on prototyping the extensions system[0]. In other words, Antonio got to stress test the pair programming collaboration tech while I ran around in a little corner of the zed codebase and asked a billion questions. While working on zed, Antonio taught me how to talk about code and make changes purposefully. I learned that the best solution is the one that shows the reader how it was derived. It was a great summer, as far as summers go!
I'm glad the editor is open source and that people are willing to pay for well-engineered AI integrations; I think originally, before AI had taken off, the business model for zed was something along the lines of a per-seat model for teams that used collaborative features. I still use zed daily and I hope the team can keep working on it for a long time.
[0]: Extensions were originally written in Lua, which didn't have the properties we wanted, so we moved to Wasm, which is fast + sandboxed + cross-language. After I left, it looks like Max and Marshall picked up the work and moved from the original serde+bincode ABI to Wasm interface types, which makes me happy: https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-extensions. I have a blog post draft about the early history of Zed and how extensions with direct access to GPUI and CRDTs could turn Zed from a collaborative code editor into a full-blown collaborative application platform. The post needs a lot of work (and I should probably reach out to the team) before I publish it. And I have finals next week. Sigh. Some day!