What's needed today is a nice way to orchestrate agents and do some manual tweaks there and there to the code.
Specifically for me that means that after I create a worktree I get some local config files copied over and Postgres duplicating my local dev and test databases so I can test in isolation, and then when I close out a worktree it deletes those databases.
The best at that that I've found is Conductor, but I can't use it at work because we only have Copilot and they're locked to a Claude/Codex backend. Arbor is close, but it's not under as active development and has a lot of rough edges. Opencode GUI has create hooks but not teardown.
If Zed can hook that up _and_ also keep its great editor roots, that'll definitely be a game changer.
And then I guess setting up tasks for the cleanup part, but it'd be great to see that get automated too so I don't need to remember it.
FYI, you can use Copilot directly in Zed!
The key advantages Zed has are being agent-agnostic (so not a first party UI like Claude/Codex/Cursor Desktop), supporting multiple repositories on the same agent via creating a worktree for each automatically, and having a high quality custom agent UI rather than wrapping over CLIs (I've used their IDE's agent UI in the past and it's great). AFAIK, this is the first mainstream tool that supports all of these features.
A lot of times, I find it has incredibly stupid ideas and tends to make the code very messy. I would love to figure out how to stop that from happening automatically.
The upside of checking in on the code, though, is that I can come up with smart directions for the AI from both a product and tech perspective. This is especially helpful when the dumb suggestions add a lot of complexity.
I think it's like when a product person asks for a new feature, or when a founder building their own product selects which feature is smarter to build and how.
AGENTS.md
I hope someday they get the funding they deserve, because it has insane potential. It's why I subscribe to their pay plan, even if I dont use it all the time, I want them to succeed.
I really like Zed, I use it every day. But, if I'd seen this layout when I first installed, I never would have taken it seriously
I imagine this will push some new users away
I suspect it will gain them more users than it will lose
Most other tools doing this are heavy, buggy, and built on electron
⌘B : toggle the left dock
⌘R : toggle the right dock
Its multi buffer and speed sound trivial but using anything else feels wrong now.
But now using claude-code,gemini-cli,codex,etc it just seems less relevant. Just opened nvim with lazyvim and it feels nice, since I'm in terminal anyway it just feels more natural.
Still have zed opened, still like it but I guess honeymoon is over.
It's certainly interesting though, and I'll give it some time - the post says "It feels more natural once you've spent a little time with it"
Love your editor again
Zed is a minimal code editor crafted for speed and collaboration with humans and AI.
Search for font size in preferences.
You'll see a 'font size' under 'buffer' (editor), under 'UI Font', and under 'Agent Panel' to let you control font sizes in all of those places independently.
> Is there any editor still being being developed and focusing on the experience of coding by hand?
Zed lets you hand-edit too! It's fast and decent. vim, neovim, Emacs, Helix, and JetBrains products continue to do that well too. There are still more traditional IDEs/editors than pure AI ones.
You can also toggle AI features off in Zed from preferences if you want to.
I do use Zed without AI features, it's just a bit of a disappointment (though understandable) since it was originally marketed as just a nice speedy editor.
https://zed.dev/docs/icon-themes
I don't think changing icon size independent of UI font size would be a dealbreaker for many. (I'm quite happy having icons that scale in line with font size, but then I use the Material Icon Theme, which is easy to scan at most sizes.)
Is Zed lacking any feature you need?
I end up doing things in the terminal tab because its faster than the ui or is more clear.
The basics are good but thats about it.
And Zed lets me do that while remaining fast and minimal.
As for (even more) minimal editors, perhaps just Gnome Edit? Or Kate?
such a dark and gloomy quote as the mission statement.
And if you want AI integration at your choice and control, agent-shell (and chatgpt-shell, which is LLM-agnostic despite the name) are great packages. They’re totally hackable with elisp like you’d expect, which I personally haven’t done a ton with, because I use AI pretty sparingly, but I imagine the crowd here could come up with plenty of ideas for how to program your editor and your agent interface together.
Do you really think Zed's focus on AI is just about money? You do realize software engineering is in the midst of a tectonic shift?
As an everyday user of AI, both at work and privately, I am not that convinced. The biggest effect I've seen so far is demand for faster work because "everything is faster with agents", but software quality is slowly dropping in software I see around me.
Current AI is very useful as a trivia engine and as a language manipulation tool - i.e. it can quickly extract information from a huge amount of text. But it still sucks when writing new things.
Admittedly, here has been much progress, but it seems to be slowing down. Money is drying out, models are getting nerfed, and only better scaffolding and workflows are making it better. Unless they build 100x more data centers, I don't see models getting significantly better.
Like this.[1]
> AI-assisted coding has become the norm and with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, we are increasingly letting models touch our code.
... how is it good literaly style to both (1) assume that something is the norm, and (2) use a long intro-sentence to state that something is the norm? Pick a lane—either it is the norm and you don’t need to state it or it isn’t and you need to set the stage. Stating the apparently obvious makes your (their) writing read like a eighth grade paper.
In short I’m agnostic as far as proclamations go. ;)
Yes? Legitimately curious what other explanation is there here, thats the reason all of these LLM integrations across all software is being pushed.
Edit: Although I can integrate an agent in NeoVim, I don’t do it. I want to use my editor solely for that purpose, while the rest (versioning, agentic coding, git client, etc.) is done in the terminal. My NeoVim setup is simple and fast, which is why I prefer it over any other IDE or editor. Especially with the native package manager in the latest version. I also replaced BBEdit by installing Neovide, a GUI version of NeoVim. It starts in a split second and is incredibly smooth and fast. And it’s so enjoyable to work with that I use it as my preferred frontend to Obsidian.