I love Zed. I, mostly, love the direction they are taking the editor in.
But. There are now two times I see Zed going in the wrong direction. The AI integration was one. This feels like the wrong direction again.
I never really liked the AI integration. It felt off to me. I do love coding with Claude and I think I know why. It presents the "information I need to know" in a way my puny brain can handle it. Colored diffs. Summaries of what happened. It isn't perfect, but it has been incredibly productive for me. I never got that from Zed's AI integration; perhaps this has been improved, but I was up and running with Claude in a way that I never was with Zed.
This write-up sounds like "slack in my editor." If it is that, I hate it. Slack has destroyed company culture and communication. People, who are inherently lazy (I'm an old Perl programmer, so I can say that), have stopped thinking carefully and writing carefully, and in that void just throw the first thing in their head into a slack channel and think that is "collaboration" and "communication." It's toxic.
For example, this comment rubs me the wrong way: "Staff members hop in, volunteer to show off a cool feature or bug fix they worked on, and get real-time feedback from the rest of the team." I don't think our human brains work well with "real time feedback" UNLESS we have the information presented in a way that gives us massive clues on what's right and what's wrong. Reading a wall of text is not the way. A colorized git diff, or a video, or an entirely new way of presenting information might make real time feedback possible, but I am highly skeptical a text editor is the way or place to do that. And, I'm an emacs user and love text UIs, don't get me wrong.
Do I want to have "generalized one off rooms for things that don't fit anywhere?" I definitely don't want that. I want you AS THE AUTHOR to be really intentional about what's important and fit that into the proper channels. I need to know that information, but I don't want to know about, nor have the unspoken expectation that I SHOULD have known, about the other stuff. And, I want "managers" (if that still exists) to be carefully thinking about those channels and how the company is organized and push that structure down to people in the organization.
As Zed is the office, having one off rooms instead of in person coffee time feels very dangerous. That's the world a lot of people live in, but I don't like that office.
If this comment is the guiding light, then I'm worried: "We're building toward a future where collaboration is continuous conversation, not discrete commits—where every discussion, edit, and insight remains linked to the code as it evolves, accessible to both teammates and AI agents." I'm human, I have kids, I have other interests. A continuous conversation is impossible for me. I want discrete ideas, and right now, discrete commits and PRs are better, IMHO, than what I hear here. It's hard, but setting the expectation that to be successful I need to be paying attention to a river of information flowing by seems like a bad idea to me. I don't buy that Zed solves the problem of hiding the pieces of information that I don't need to see.
Oh hey! I have an idea. Why not use AI to summarize those conversations into discrete pieces! </joke>
I do love Zed. It is the best GUI editor out there. I know they will get it right. I just am skeptical about this direction and feel it misses the forest for the trees.
Man, Im like the total opposite in terms of preferring the Zed UI vs claude code. I really try to avoid raw claude when possible. I very rarely pull it up to do concurrent sessions when I have Zed open already working on something else. Or if I need to do something quick while in the CLI in a random directory. Otherwise, I think just the "files modified" feature is worth using Zed as the primary interface.
You make some good points, and I need to revisit Zed+AI to see where things are at. This probably proves you are a better developer than me.
But, also, after reading your comments, I'm just not sure I need an "editor" anymore. I love that I can npm install claude anywhere. Zed does not exist for ARM servers yet, but I can install claude there, and it can troubleshoot my database connections, and edit code, and grep files. Those are all the things I used an editor for, because an editor has better ergonomics than using the CLI. I'm sad to say "misspelled prompts" might have better ergonomics for me.
If I were still hardcore avoiding a GUI Id probably be in the same camp. But I moved to VSCode as my primary interface a long time ago, and Zed is just a better version of my workflow when comparing against that.
100%. I also moved to VSCode years ago. Then, I got disillusioned by the performance, and by M$ telemetry. Zed is so much better in so many ways if you have to go with a GUI for all those reasons.
I agree about the bad side of slack culture, except when compared to how things were before slack: Horrible email threads, in-person meetings, phone calls, and people walking over to your desk to ask you stupid things they could have looked up themselves.
Slack revolutionized this for me because I can turn it off anytime I want. When I want focus, I close it and it cannot reach me for some time. Then I pull it up and read all the threads while taking a poop.
Having it in zed is the same: You can just log out of collab anytime you want! You would only use it if you _want_ to use it. When you do want to use it, it's incredible. Someone can just join your channel and work on a tricky problem with you and you don't even need to screen share. It's like the best of discord and slack available at the touch of a button. It's much lighter weight than slack. Slack huddles are super annoying to me. I want it to behave more like discord, and that's what zed does!
That's a good point. Email is much worse than slack.
But I still think it is impossible to manage all the things happening in slack. And the expectation is that it was said in slack, so you should know about it! Whereas, I definitely go through and review PRs and if there is a culture and management agreement around good PRs, then I can easily understand how things work, how things have changed, etc. I never get that from slack. And, I never got it from email either, fairly.
The topic of "expectation" is really interesting and worth discussing more. I refuse to accept the expectation of slack meaning I am literally always available to message, and also that I must read and keep track of everything in there. If somebody asks me about something and I suspect it might be in slack, I might do search for it to catch up on that topic if I am inclined. But obviously so many people feel the pressure you're describing (to know about everything said in slack)--- which sounds terrible!
But. There are now two times I see Zed going in the wrong direction. The AI integration was one. This feels like the wrong direction again.
I never really liked the AI integration. It felt off to me. I do love coding with Claude and I think I know why. It presents the "information I need to know" in a way my puny brain can handle it. Colored diffs. Summaries of what happened. It isn't perfect, but it has been incredibly productive for me. I never got that from Zed's AI integration; perhaps this has been improved, but I was up and running with Claude in a way that I never was with Zed.
This write-up sounds like "slack in my editor." If it is that, I hate it. Slack has destroyed company culture and communication. People, who are inherently lazy (I'm an old Perl programmer, so I can say that), have stopped thinking carefully and writing carefully, and in that void just throw the first thing in their head into a slack channel and think that is "collaboration" and "communication." It's toxic.
For example, this comment rubs me the wrong way: "Staff members hop in, volunteer to show off a cool feature or bug fix they worked on, and get real-time feedback from the rest of the team." I don't think our human brains work well with "real time feedback" UNLESS we have the information presented in a way that gives us massive clues on what's right and what's wrong. Reading a wall of text is not the way. A colorized git diff, or a video, or an entirely new way of presenting information might make real time feedback possible, but I am highly skeptical a text editor is the way or place to do that. And, I'm an emacs user and love text UIs, don't get me wrong.
Do I want to have "generalized one off rooms for things that don't fit anywhere?" I definitely don't want that. I want you AS THE AUTHOR to be really intentional about what's important and fit that into the proper channels. I need to know that information, but I don't want to know about, nor have the unspoken expectation that I SHOULD have known, about the other stuff. And, I want "managers" (if that still exists) to be carefully thinking about those channels and how the company is organized and push that structure down to people in the organization.
As Zed is the office, having one off rooms instead of in person coffee time feels very dangerous. That's the world a lot of people live in, but I don't like that office.
If this comment is the guiding light, then I'm worried: "We're building toward a future where collaboration is continuous conversation, not discrete commits—where every discussion, edit, and insight remains linked to the code as it evolves, accessible to both teammates and AI agents." I'm human, I have kids, I have other interests. A continuous conversation is impossible for me. I want discrete ideas, and right now, discrete commits and PRs are better, IMHO, than what I hear here. It's hard, but setting the expectation that to be successful I need to be paying attention to a river of information flowing by seems like a bad idea to me. I don't buy that Zed solves the problem of hiding the pieces of information that I don't need to see.
Oh hey! I have an idea. Why not use AI to summarize those conversations into discrete pieces! </joke>
I do love Zed. It is the best GUI editor out there. I know they will get it right. I just am skeptical about this direction and feel it misses the forest for the trees.