Stream: interviews

Topic: 640: Building Zed's agentic editing

Logbot (May 07 2025 at 21:50):

Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE. :link: https://changelog.fm/640

Tim Uckun (May 09 2025 at 04:39):

This was an interesting and it triggered a weird thought in me. Languages like ruby and lisp allow you to change the running AST. In other words you can create and change code that's running. I thought how crazy would it be if the AI was running as a part of the program and rewriting the program as it was running. AI-ception.

Also fireship had a funny quip in his last video. To paraphrase:

ChatGPT says their AI is amongst the top fifty programmers in the world so why are they paying 3 billion dollars for an IDE, couldn't their AI just write one?

Matthew Sanabria (May 09 2025 at 13:13):

Haha. Because they are paying for the users and data, not the IDE.

Jerod Santo (May 09 2025 at 13:15):

What's weird about the Windsurf acquisition is that I literally no zero people who use Windsurf...

Daniel Buckmaster (May 09 2025 at 14:38):

This episode reminded me to try Zed now that I am using Linux (previously Windows) and wow, I am liking it after a quick look. It is really tasteful in the way it's implemented things. The UI is as snappy and minimal as promised, but there are a _lot_ of features. I love they built in Vim mode. And, as a nix-shell user, I also love that the editor inherits the environment of the terminal I opened it from.

AJ Kerrigan (May 09 2025 at 15:33):

Same here, I tried it a while back and I don't remember what specifically was missing. But I know my thought was "it's very fast at doing less than I need to do" :sweat_smile: . Which is honestly a much better starting point than slow at doing more than I need! Definitely queueing up a fresh exploration.

Dustin (May 09 2025 at 18:40):

For me the biggest blocker was a lack of SSH remote editing and since they’ve added it, I’ve been full time Zed user. (Only exception is it reformats the yaml config files at work and i haven’t figured out how to do a per language autoformat off)

Matthew Sanabria (May 09 2025 at 19:02):

Jerod Santo said:

What's weird about the Windsurf acquisition is that I literally no zero people who use Windsurf...

Same here honestly. I mean it was Codium before right so anyone you know use that?

Tim Uckun (May 09 2025 at 21:39):

I had the codium extension installed on vs code and occasionally tried it but cody was better even though I need to figure out how to use the completion better. Sometimes cody suggests weird completions but they all do I guess.

I am now trying some vibe coding AI and it's been a weird adventure so far.

Maroš Kučera (May 10 2025 at 12:07):

@Dustin: I found this in my Zed config, a small modification should help you achieve what you're looking for:

...
    "format_on_save": "off",
    "languages": {
        "Rust": {
            "format_on_save": "on"
        }
    },
...

Dustin (May 10 2025 at 13:10):

Amazing @Maroš Kučera thank you!

Scott Chamberlain (May 11 2025 at 19:05):

thanks, enjoyed the interview :pray:

James Thurley (May 21 2025 at 14:51):

I'm also having another serious go at switching from VSCode to Zed after this episode. So far, after a couple of days, I think it might be at a point where I can stick with it.

James Thurley (May 21 2025 at 15:01):

Ooh, I just found you can do this...

  "diagnostics": {
    "inline": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }

...for ErrorLens style inline diagnostics. I was missing that feature!

AJ Kerrigan (May 21 2025 at 16:51):

Yeah this episode motivated me to both take another look at Zed and also take a hatchet to my list of VS Code extensions

Maroš Kučera (May 21 2025 at 17:17):

Thanks for the snippet @James Thurley, that looks really handy! I'm going to try using it for a while and see whether it sticks.

Matthew Sanabria (May 21 2025 at 20:34):

James Thurley said:

Ooh, I just found you can do this...

  "diagnostics": {
    "inline": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }

...for ErrorLens style inline diagnostics. I was missing that feature!

Oh what the heck!? I need to spend far more time configuring Zed to find all the gems like this.

Jordi Mon Companys (May 24 2025 at 18:18):

Glorious interview. An fascinating views Nathan has about AI native environments and software engineering. Had a tonne of fun

Jordi Mon Companys (May 25 2025 at 07:28):

Jerod Santo said:

What's weird about the Windsurf acquisition is that I literally no zero people who use Windsurf...

I know plenty of people using Codeium/Windsurf. Having said that, it does feel indeed like a risky purchase (certainly at that price point) considering a relatively small user and customer base.

Tim Uckun (May 25 2025 at 21:47):

Spending 3 billion dollars on windsurf stinks of some sort of a backroom deal or corruption to me. It's just a VS fork FFS and it's not like they are buying 300 million users who will be forced to use openAI now. The product is not sticky either. You can download competitors product in a minute and of course just enable the AI of your choice in your VS code in ten seconds.

Look at how easily I am jumping from product to product with my vibe coding experiment. The minute they attempt to lock me in or charge me I'll drop it like a hot potato. Actually I will probably drop it anyway because it did such a crap job in my test. Sketch kicked it's ass in performance even if it was more awkward to use.

Ron Waldon-Howe (May 26 2025 at 00:46):

and if you depend on certain VSCode-only extensions, then it might be harder for you to be productive in a VSCode fork: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/448

Last updated: Jun 28 2025 at 13:25 UTC