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With so many new AI editors popping up, it feels like the Zed team is in a tough “lose/lose” spot.

If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With that kind of momentum, Cursor can now buy their way into a superior product.

On the other hand, if Zed takes more VC money, it likely means doubling down on AI in ways they clearly don’t seem eager to—but at least it would give them a fighting chance.

I really feel for this team. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and from the few interactions I’ve had, they strike me as incredibly talented, kind, and genuine folks. I truly wish them the best.

I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up).

Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.

Sublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model.

It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.

There was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021.

I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?

I've been a registered user of ST for long long time, and I thought if anything hurt them in the marketplace, it was taking several years off from the end of 2013 until late 2017 with hardly anything being released that opened the door to Atom and other editors to catch up.

Yeah, as others already mentioned, I think they sat on their laurels for a bit too long and let VSCode overtake it.

For what it's worth, I went from ST3 -> VSCode -> ST4, and have been happy since. I've found that I prefer my text editor with minimal extensions, and with Sublime Text's LSP Plugin, I'm pretty content. The performance and customizable UI make it more worth it to me than VSCode.

It's the LSP plugin that finally drove me to leave ST4 for Zed. Language integration is table stakes for an editor now. The fact that ST support is behind a volunteer plugin instead of integrated directly in the editor just means it's never going to be as good as a editor that does have first class support. The ST devs need to actually improve the editor, but I haven't seen any material updates in years.

Agreed, LSP has replaced Linter extensions and the TabNine LLM which is nice (and snappy). Even if some of the lsp servers are clunky to use.

I don't get this Sublime is dead nonsense. It's still being updated and works great. It's been my editor of choice for years and I happily pay for my license. I'd probably pay more if they asked me, it's tremendous value for money in my opinion.

I dislike "$x is dead" as much if not more as you do, and I'm sure it works fine as something doesn't need to be the most popular choice to be working.

With that being said, just a quick look at, for example Stack Overflow 2025 survey tells me it doesn't have the same mindshare it once had.

Plugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.

The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?

I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.) Eclipse had a robust architecture, but writing plugins for it was a dispiriting slog, even when I got paid for it (again, my experience, many years ago.)

> What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?

Unironically, maybe VS Code.

Everything simple you can do with it, either comes built-in, or within Github/Microsoft ecosystem, or has an official plugin that gets recommended and featured by the editor itself. Plugins from individual hobbyist developers I have, I can almost count in one hand. (VSCodeVim being the most important one)

Now I compare this to my Neovim setup, and that one is basically running on charity from OSS developers.

What about writing a quick ad-hoc command? Something I would have found useful today, which I would have done in emacs fifteen years ago, was writing a command to parse a file in a log, generate a curl command from it, and copy the command to the clipboard. Could I do that in VSCode without creating an entire project?

Emacs has eglot built in these days and it works quite well as an IDE

good question. I think the community fell off and many plugins were left unmaintained. I was using it for over a decade up until recently. ST4 had so many plugin issues and it stopped being worth manually fixing.

For me, it was that the maintainer of a language plugin I used was, um, challenging to work with. I wanted to contribute to add some much-requested functionality and he talked to me like I was a toddler and warned me not to waste his time.

Well, OK then. Back to Emacs I went.

Yeah Atom and then VSCode killed it. Turns out being able to use JS to extend your editor is quite valuable. Essentially every JS devs have their own Emacs without having to learn Emacs and Lisp

It does, or did, use dark patterns when showing upgrade notices -- prompting you to upgrade to a version that you don't own yet, without telling you you don't own it, leaving you with an unlicensed version. I was happy to use 3 but that felt really off.

Yeah, I wasn't happy about that. Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted.

Although at least to me, Sublime Text 4 feels like a "finished" product.

Zed works on Linux/Win/MacOS. I'm also frankly skeptical that ST feels that much faster, Zed is pretty darn fast, far faster than any Electron app.

ST is not electron..

How is Sublime faster?

Yup, I was playing around with Zed and kind of liked it, and even debated switching over. But this kills it for me.

It was a cool idea while it lasted, I hope other editors embrace the learnings once zed is gone.

I doubt anyone will follow this.

1. Everyone else is building on Electron.

2. People still sleep on or dunk on Rust. There's a great deal of negativity here on HN for the language.

3. There's only so much Rust talent out there.

The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.

Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.

I might HAVE to learn EMacs (prefer over Vim) because I think eventually everything else will be tainted by mandatory AI features and/or subscriptions.

And Zeds multiplayer features might make it so your workplace mandates Zed if you're unlucky and Zed succeeds with their plan.

Zed is fully open source. Fork it. The code is pretty nice, too, easy to understand.

VSCode is open source, too, but it's been pretty easy for them to keep forks from taking off by having proprietary extensions, a "markeplace", and other lock-in.

All they have to do is only permit official builds to talk to official builds (for security, of course ;-), and forking Zed becomes a lot harder.

if you haven't checked neovim out, the Lua based config is really nice and easy to grok these days. 10x better than classic vimscript!

A year or two ago I moved away from one of the neovim distros when they randomly changed all the keybinds on an upgrade (such things really anger me) and set up my own config. Funnily enough, I preferred vimscript. I still do use lua of course for various things, but those just go in lua EOF blocks in the vimscript. Vimscript is really terse and convenient for many things, I love it.

I’ve always maintained my own configs for (neo)vim. The only area where I prefer vimscript is with certain incantations for which there are no lua-based alternatives. And those are increasingly rare.

Authoring plugins is a lot more attractive in lua, imho.

Nothing against emacs, but check out NeoVIM. If you like Emacs, you might like NeoVIM and its powerful extensibility features.

What makes NeoVIM emacs-like?

It's not emacs-like. But a lot of plugins wants to adopt the emacs philosophy of having it open for the duration of your login session. Instead of the quick edit and be done of standard Vim.

I hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).

classical AI and modern generative AI are VERY different beasts. also, there isn't any AI in emacs itself. It was a tool built to make a job easier.

That’s fine as long as they don’t force AI prompts to me.

To clarify, I use AI agents, but I absolutely hate them submitting code in my editor. Chatting is fair enough and useful, but I need to turn off the auto-generating code part.

Sure, but given the existence of vim/nvim, emails, visual studio code, cursor, etc the price for editors has largely been driven to zero, or at least capped by what JetBrains charges. My concerns are more this is a big bet on a different thing, not the editor (which is quite nice, even if using typescript regularly makes it balloon to 15gb of ram), making them a giant pile of money. With the editor as a free complement.

Note to Zed: I prefer paid products to enshittened ones.

Please please please, get paid rather than holding on too tightly to making things free forcing future enshittening.

We're working on it! :)

You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).

This will sound a bit odd, but I don't necessarily want to pay in a way that makes it look like I'm paying for the AI rather than the editor.

No, it's not odd, I like this take a lot. They almost need a dropdown menu indicating where you'd like your money to go to (editor, LSP, etc).

I'd also much rather have a means of paying a single flat fee to indicate my support than yet another subscription which is misleading because I have zero interest in the AI components of Zed.

Yeah, same here, the least interesting aspect for me.

I already pay for Zed Pro, but my fear (and likely GP's as well) is that this doesn't provide enough revenue for the team.

Since switching from Emacs last year, I have absolutely loved how this editor has evolved, and I am looking for any way to directly support the effort. I have been a Zed Pro subscriber for quite a while now, and I have started trying to contribute to the codebase, but I really wish there were monetization options beyond making a spread on Anthropic API pricing.

I would also pay for Zed (the editor) and not the AI. But I also don't want to pay just make Zed more attractive for VC acquisition.

You don't have to give me any more features than what's in the free editor. I would gladly pay up to $300 just to have a "license".

I'm enjoying using Zed, and I do pay for tools I use regularly. It's now approaching a month of daily use for me and I don't see that changing. But to echo the other replies, I'm uninterested in the LLM tools. I don't use those normally and paying for that as a way to support Zed would send the wrong signal. You have to be careful when you restrict what people can pay for, because that will become what you optimize for which may not be what your users actually care about.

Zed is fast, easy to configure (so far, maybe some hard parts I haven't run into yet), works well with the languages I care about via LSPs, and the collaboration features are compelling. I want to pay to support that, I don't want to pay for an LLM feature I don't care about that ends up distracting from the progress on the things I want to see maintained or improved.

With Shaun Maguire's recent behavior associating with Sequoia is gross

Big fan of Zed. I want to echo a sibling comment that I don't see that as paying for Zed, I see it as paying for LLM usage. And since I already have my own LLM keys, I just use those instead.

I'm a big fan of Zed and having met much of the team I think it's some great people building a great product. But I do echo concerns that while the intentions are all honorable the incentives of the pricing structure, business environment, and now a funding round are concerning in the long term. I don't think anyone at Zed has a single ill intent or a secret master plan but these days anything I'm not paying for I just assume is going to be enshittified eventually. Especially for an app where the only paid features are AI-centric and there's a VC expecting to make multiples on a $60m investment.

So here's my ask: let me pay for it without paying for AI! None of my use cases will stress your servers; I have `"disable_ai": true` in my settings.json. Give me a $5/mo "support the devs tier" or a $10/mo tier with some random app quality-of-life features and I'm there. I specifically want to pay for good software without paying for AI to signify the value proposition that still exists there cause I don't think a VC would believe me otherwise.

Unless they have very unusual terms on their funding, it isn't really entirely in their control in the long term. Hopefully they find a way to make their investors whole that doesn't suck for everyone else, but if not, well, I at least appreciate that the editor is truly open source, since at least it offers a contingency plan in the worst cases.

If I'm wrong I'd love to know, but I think that we need to start talking about what funding really implies more honestly. It's traditionally met with unabashed enthusiasm and congratulations, which I totally understand, but it's a mutual exchange, not an award or a grant. I absolutely believe that everyone wants to make good on their promises, but promises made to users are not legally binding, and the track record for upholding those has not been great. Plus, as a user, I want to pay for software, but nothing feels worse than paying, then watching enshittification unfold anyways... When this happens, the investors should send you a nice postcard thanking you for paying back some of their money.

Can $20/mo sustain a text editor company with a massive multimillion dollar valuation? Well, we'll see. Good luck Zed Industries, we're all counting on you.

you don't have to choose. paid things get enshittified just as easily as free things

I mean, eventually, sure. It took Uber around 15 years to get to profitability. ChatGPT came out in 2022, so get your predictions for 2037 in now.

Please, tell me what it's like living in your free-as-in-freedom house, feeding your free-as-in-freedom offspring? Eventually demanding a return on your investment? The audacity!

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Same. Especially not having been familiar with who Sequoia is. Altman, Huang, Musk, etc.

What do you mean by that list? They pretty much have every single big tech company in their portfolio.

They have some house cleaning to do in their leadership before I am willing to use a product they back.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

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> "I don't think an editor should be VC backed"

it's a software company. they sell software.

Then sell software, not equity

This quote slaps!

Whether this is good or bad for Zed remains to be seen.

I wonder though what the play is here for Sequoia - like all VCs they’re looking for the possibility of a huge return.

I don’t see how “just” an editor (even with paying users) can generate a 10x return. So what is the larger vision here?

JetBrains would be a good case study. They also arguably have a lot more IP.

I love working in Zed. It really is a delight to use, and I think the Agentic coding integration is really well done. I'm excited to see them investing in this space more.

I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product!

Zed being OSS is a gift to the community, and I suspect DeltaDB will be as well. And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.

Congrats, Zed!

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I think a lot of people are missing the sarcasm here. that said, I agree that its absolutely horrific. yesterday I saw a video where a girl who couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 years old carrying water was hit by an idf strike. Poor kid was basically rendered into chum. The fact taht this stuff is going on right in front of our eyes and our government is complicit in is horrific.

I have heard of worse. Check out recent podcast with Tony Aguilar or the Theo Von podcast with a doctor. Boys shot in the testicles. Children shot longitudinally (bullet went through head and lodged in the abdomen)- raising concern if they were shot from choppers or drones. The aid distribution sites are basically hunger games- people only go there if they have death wish, and it is run by private military- you know, the infamous ones from Iraq, Afghanistan or Abu Gharib.

> And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.

Hate cancel culture as much as the next techbro, but since y'all point out they're "a delightful human", it'd be interesting to see how Nathan then responds to concerns raised in some quarters: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

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Can I replace "islamophobic" in your comment with "antisemitic" and not have my comment deleted or my profile banned on this site?

> being "islamophobic" is actually the right thing to do from a humanitarian perspective

  Every perpetrator of terrorism sees himself as a victim. Such is the case not only with individual terrorists, who often compete with their enemies over who is more victimized, but also with terrorist groups and nation states.

Related ongoing threads:

Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916

Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366

Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative?

This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view

Not many people are willing to pay ~$300/year for an IDE. And Intellij didn't take any VC funding.

So at some point Zed will likely need to pursue monetization more aggressively than IntelliJ does now.

IntelliJ has always been extremely slow for me, even on my beefed up mobile workstation for work.

It’s refreshing to see an editor that’s built with performance as a priority.

DeltaDB sounds of being a >git innovation for coding itself, and would fulfill Zed's promises in Nathan Sobo's debate/discussion with Steve Yegge recently.

Seems to solve a real problem which is growing rapidly, both in the old way and in the new way ... if it can overcome _slop_ in LLM chats, and the sheer enormity of code/data ahead. Trying to picture how coherence will survive.

With claims/hype/concern floating around that >90% of code will be LLM-generated within 3-6 months, with the insinuation/tone [1] that the same amount of code will be written by humans as now ( at least at first ) but LLM code will radically grow to dilute the space ( as is happening ) ... seems like DeltaDB being done right/well is going to be do-or-die on whether coherence remains possible!

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...

For anyone not clicking through the link: it's from 5 months ago, predicting 90% of today's code will be from LLMs.

>I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code.

They're going to keep saying it because it's a juicy sound bite and they're sales people. That doesn't make it any more true than "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our socks" or how we surely have all had flying cars for decades now.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...

https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...

I had a week where I embraced and went deep on ai first coding (not vibe, that'd be crazy)

The thing wrote at least 80%, so we aren't far off in this anecdotal instance. There are citizen devs who are building fun things for themselves where the AI does 100%

It made me realize these things are more capable than I knew, though they still do dumb stuff reliably. But, it is easy to undo those changes, so the productivity boost remains

By sheer volume, that 90% number might be right.

I agree. The level of dilution is becoming obvious and a big problem... code is becoming predominantly disposable

Despite the article being salesmanship hype ( at WEF no less ) we are now in the time mentioned, and can feel this

The idea that the code is GOOD or even being used is not necessary to be saying that it exists, strewn everywhere

Have they fixed the big/feature where it insists on downloading entire distributions of Node.js for running it's language server functionality?

This is basically my main gripe with Zed atm — it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries.

I have a light fork that tries to nullify this, but I don't think I've managed to catch all the instances.

Other than that, it's a very nice editor in my opinion.

Easy fix:

{ "server_url": "", }

I comment out that JSONC line periodically when I feel like cherry-picking updates

> it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries.

I hate this pattern in software so much.

That is the great thing about Zed. Stuff just works.

That's not great at all. It's not acceptable to "just work" by downloading and running third party software without asking the user.

Exciting ideas! I'll take a look at this again in several years when they aren't trying to rebuild everything from the ground up from first principles.

Met the CEO of Zed. Very humble and deeply technical. Glad to see they're doing well!

I don't know what's DeltaDB, but if it will be able to show when a commit is simultaneously a refactoring and a change of code being refactored (moved into another module) – I would love to see that! At the moment if you refactor you punish the people reviewing the code, which reverses the motivation for cleaning things up.

> To make this possible, we're building DeltaDB: a new kind of version control that tracks every operation, not just commits.

Let me guess: DeltaDB is free to use as long as we host your data and have free range on training AI based on your editor interactions.

Not sure what this guess is based on. Would that be a guess for git also, if mentioned by a company versus an individual?

My read was that they are pulling a Linus Torvalds with the Linux->Git move where both are innovations on their own, but work great together ( without dystopian universe instantiation )

CRDTs mentioned: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts

Definitely sounds very eerie. Luckily there are open source solutions that do just this with no AI integration:

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

this doesn't seem related to the above post

that said atuin is excellent

how is atuin doing what deltaDB does?

ah not much at all, did too much selective reading on my end. Should have read the entire blog and not the quoted selection.

zed is just on the hype train, obviously very talented people, they are thinking hard about LLMs but I'm not really sure where they are going, their pivot is probably going to be more interesting...

Data harvesting and non-ownership.

> we've been building the world's fastest IDE

Any data to backup this?

Well, last year, Nikita Tonsky measured it and it did worse than Sublime: https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/112146684329230663

It's funny how often people buy into the marketing and say "blazing fast" without actually questioning it. FWIW, I still prefer Zed because its LSP integration and vim mode are better than Sublime's.

It's commendable to try and challenge Sublime, the undisputed performance champion in GUI text editing, but making false claims is a massive red flag.

I know it probably didn't, but I wonder if part of Sequoia's decision to invest had anything to do with these false claims?

I really love Sublime. If it had a solid "remote-ssh" type integration and a more straightforward way to manage plugins/extensions that isn't a rats nest of random directories with similar names - I would return to using it. I purchased every upgrade from like 2012 to 2022 or so.

Yes if a software markets itself like this without backing up I smell BS.

Like any company now is "global leader in X market".

You can try it out. I would say it’s aiming to be a more modern Sublime Text, which is a win to be considered in the same category imo.

I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.

The modern Sublime Text is Sublime Text. There is way too much "extra" in Zed to compare it. If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.

Slower than VS Code?? I guess it's just poorly optimized for Linux. On MacOS, I find it to be significantly faster than VS Code, and the only alternative I've found that's in the ballpark of Sublime (from the performance aspect).

I'm on Linux and performance is the reason I switched from VSCode to Zed. It works great for me.

Perhaps the same issue that had Zed fail to recognize their GPU also tanked their performance.

This is accurate. I came over from Sublime Text because it had become laggy over >5 running instances, and native LLM integration. Even VS Code doesn't actually have that... where everything is an extension versus seamlessly/perfectly fitting

As mentioned in other comments, it actually outperforms window management in general in many/most cases. Radically flexible and almost never gets in the way

What on earth do they need this kind of money for?

The beginning of the end.

You know where this goes.

Oh well, back to Sublime Text.

RIP Zed, you had a good run.

It’s sounds very similar to Google wave, if anyone remembers that, but for code.

That came back as Slack and other similar products

Nothing since then really recaptured what I personally liked about GWave or let me use their tool in similar ways to how I used it. YMMV, of course, more so than most of my comments.

This sounds interesting. Which aspects?

“ never-ending stream of conversations”

Sounds like a noble goal.. but I'm skeptical. I normally don't care about every single edit I've done, and don't want to store them and certainly don't want to see other people's character level edits.

Also how on earth do you handle conflicts?

This sounds most similar to IntelliJ's local history tracking, but that is local only which makes sense.

Still, more IDEs is always good so I wish them luck and will wait and see. (As with Zed - I keep trying it but it's still very alpha quality so I always end up back in VSCode.)

feels like we are giving up privacy for productivity.

wouldn’t be the first time a massive investment from someone like sequoia sparks the death of a previously great tool/service

Yea, this announcement makes it less likely I will try Zed

I don't want chat with coworkers in my IDE, nor do I feel the pains they describe with conversations spread between tools. It's not a top 5 problem

For the record: I have never used the collaboration aspects of Zed

What I also have not used is vim emulation, though I have a vim background

As mentioned elsewhere, Zed is still very configuration-dependent to get the full power of it, and a lot of its functionality is never discovered for that reason

What pushed me to try it was Ollama integration which is not an afterthought, then I realized I loved it _way_ more than SublimeText, especially on performance, at first, then everything else once that won me over

I have ~10 running instances at any given moment, and >99% of the time never feel any lag, whatsoever

Another unexpected benefit is that terminals, code editor panels, and assistant chats, get to be sized and fit wherever you want, so it is also kind of a window manager... I often have more terminals open in Zed than in the Window Manager of the OS itself

> then I realized I loved it _way_ more than SublimeText, especially on performance

I currently have 19 instances of Sublime Text open, each to a separate folder containing a mix of C++ and Python code bases (some tiny some huge). Like ~8 of those have the clangd LSP plugin enabled. I don't think I've ever experienced lag in Sublime. KDE System Monitor is reporting 2.0 GiB of ram being using by sublime currently.

The clangd LSP plugin in Sublime isn't perfect, and it does occasionally break, and rarely spikes in CPU usage for no reason (although the editor always remains responsive). But, if I ever switch away from Sublime Text, I cannot imagine it ever being due to performance reasons.

I do all those same things in VS Code, especially the vim bindings, wouldn't give those up, but did recently leave the vim ecosystem because I had to spend too much time making the IDE work or enable features that are out-of-the-box in a code-oss based IDE

You probably give up just as much privacy with VS Code as you do with Zed, no? Just sent to different overlords?

what? I didn't comment on privacy

I give lots of feedback to Copilot in the hopes it makes the agents better in the long-run. I want them to read my code and train on it, along with the interactions with copilot, which is the next frontier in (post) training

although I tried the collaborative features I unfortunately cannot say that I used these extensively for now. Although I found them quite nice, well integrated, seamless, and straightforward!

The issue is again people, they don't wanna change their _archaic_ workflow, stuck with inefficient -copy/paste- loop to the chat (ie. Slack) and back.

The story in the article went a bit too far that I agree, but I guess that is their north-star vision. Current implementation allows you to "join" a workspace session shared by someone, edit the same or different file, follow/watch a certain person, as well as have a chat (without requiring copy-paste) about certain piece of code. (both written or via voice)

If something, large enterprises generally don't support smaller and ambiguous licenses. Therefore, if Zed will allow enterprise licensing (ie. via on-prem license server or volume ordering, SSO, whatever) that would increase their adoption quite well...

That's true. Sequoia is often a death sentence for power users. And a huge gamble for the founders

If you're using it at work, the company might decide the risks are outweighed by the increased productivity.

While i am sure this sounds insane i had to drop zed due to lack of the “last file dif” button gitlens vscode plugin provides.

It is a godsend on quickly debugging the why of things. If anyone knows how to replicate the same functionality with the same number of clicks in zed, id happily switch back to it.

i use the gutter markers, where a click shows the chunk-diff.

there is also inline-blame, both are native (ie. no plugins required)

Aw man :( I too loved the promise of Zed.

Well done I suppose to the Zed founders as they're on the Sequoia gravy train now. But as others have noted this puts an inevitable clock on the enshittification no matter how hard the team crosses their heart and truly believes otherwise (or not, I mean maybe this IS the gameplan).

Hopefully Zedless [0] gets some community steam behind it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916

I think they're tackling a real problem that is revealing itself via agentic coding, and I think they've positioned themselves in an interesting spot.

I'd be interested to know how much data DeltaDB accumulates over time - because the level of granularity is so high - and are they going to want to use that data as training data?

Zed defaults don't seem to capture the full value of what it offers. For instance, edit predictions via tab completion are documented yet I've never experienced them. I need better settings, I guess.

On the bottom right, there is a button looks like magic emoji (). Click that and it will show general AI settings. You can choose _Eager-Completion_ rather than trigger-based one.

As a user, most IDEs/Editors currently show in _eager_ way. For example, VSCode by default shows ghost-text as well as Amazon Q extension too. Usually disabling those disables the AI completion completely.

Meanwhile I like Zed's approach that you can trigger completions with Alt+Space, not burning through your "tokens" in free-tiers. They also provide a free-tier completions, as well as _next-edit suggestions_.

*) Next-edit suggestions: When you edit some piece of code repeatedly, it suggest to do similar on the next few instances, with context awareness, quite nice feature saving several keystrokes every single time.

deltadb sounds interesting. AI editors should look into letting you operate on multiple git branches simultaneously, like isolated browser tabs where the AI gen doesn't contaminate the other.

One of the reasons I find LLMs don't increase productivity much is that I can't switch branches to multitask while it's processing. Context switching isn't always useful but there's still lots of opportunities for rapidly experimenting or ticking off a couple small bugs quickly while AI takes the first pass on something more complicated.

Each "branch tab" could have a sort of TODO list or plan.

I have been running multiple instances of the Codex CLI tool in several terminals to do different stuff. You can even checkout the repo several times, write the todo to a file (or ask the agent to do so), if you need.

> AI editors should look into letting you operate on multiple git branches simultaneously

Git worktrees are great for this. I built a little tool to make them more ergonomic: https://steveasleep.com/autowt/

You really don't need every LLM vendor to build their own version of worktrees.

VC backed? Zed's dead.

Cool, I basically get the same effect with "code snapshots" with using jj so I wonder if this will be different.

I love Zed, but this makes me worry for its future. VCs are not the end user, and thus don't understand the perils of enshittification.

Should bring some interesting new features to Zed quickly. Glad to see it.

Great, maybe they can finally make Zed start maximized instead of this small window and add a picker for recent files (not projects)! ;)

OK they touched Unity and now Zed. I’m sure it’s going to be good.

The problem I see is the VC involvement...

VCs operate from the goal of xtreme high user market share as the problem..

As frameworks get better, the audience using the IDE changes...

Both are misaligned before even meeting and it will get worse once VC money control is added.

My bias, I am a flutter framework user and MS VSCode user.

VC backing apparently has the power to move the standard from "hodge-podge 800-line commit must have an issue key" to "track every damn interaction and back and forth".

That and the ever-trailing "especially now with AI".

Butch: Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead.

bad news

"total funding to over $42M"

the enshittification it'll take to extract $400m of value out of a text editor will be dismal

Code of Conduct Violation discussion opened against the Zed repo, in light of this taking place after Maguire's very public Islamophobia and pro-occupation/pro-genocide stance, which is arguably against the CoC. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

The mods deleted another comment that brought this up, and probably will delete this one too.

HN mods don't do that. What comment are you referring to?

Maybe this one? It was flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962907

Users flagged that one, and other users vouched for it. Mods didn't touch it.

Not a good move. Evernote went that path and then turned an otherwise very useful app into a VC bet that forced the founders to pivot the app into something nobody wanted. Same happened to Soundcloud.

Congratulations!!

I do like Zed very much. Fast, good UI, decent set of features.

Still missing some key features to get parity for python with PyCharm, and git features need more love, but pace of development has been blistering. Kudos to the team for building something really solid.

I don't use the agentic stuff though -- I have a ClaudeMax subscription and use CC or more recently opencode (the only non-CC that works with a ClaudeMax sub); I don't want to pay another sub for Zed and the free model use that comes with Zed runs out very quickly (understandably so, no complaints there). If I could connect my ClaudeMax sub to it then I'd maybe use it, though CC and opencode are pretty good.

The code completion is decent and I especially like the "subtle" mode saves a lot of backspacing (no, dammit, that's not what I wanted!).

I understand Zed needs to make money, but VC backed, especially Sequoia, doesn't inspire any love, tbh. I don't care what platitudes VCs say about independence their love for the product etc., they need their 10x return and if it means enshittification, so be it, they don't really care.

That's the end of Zed for me. After Sequoia partners made Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani [1], and have been racist and pro-occupation for 2 years [2], all of which was literally just in the New York Times(!) [3], now they announce this? Come on.

[1] https://shaunmaguire.fyi/

[2] https://genocide.vc/meet-shaun-maguire/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/technology/sequoia-capita...

I don't know why you are being downvoted. This is a real issue and a legitimate concern to have as a user of this software. I feel the same way (never used Zed in the first place because they are VC backed, but this would have been the final straw for me, too).

Because dragging politics into things is fucking obnoxious. It's off-topic, it gets people riled up so they are arguing about politics instead of having substantive discussion, and it degrades the community by threatening to destroy the focus on tech in favor of political slap fights. In short, going out of your way to bring up politics is being a jerk, and people don't appreciate that.

Because Paul consistently violates HN guidelines:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is VC funding not political?

It's not possible in today's world and not be political. People who say they are apolitical are also political. Silence is also communication.

Pointing out that Zed has taken money from a company that openly supports one of the biggest genocides in recent history is not a "political battle".

This flagging is pretty obviously the actual violation of the guideline.

Hard to take their Code of Conduct seriously anymore https://zed.dev/code-of-conduct

[flagged]

A sibling comment claims that making a comment like this constitutes waging a 'political'/'ideological' battle that 'tramples curiosity', because raising a legitimate concern is inherently ideological, but silencing any and all scrutiny of a VC is not.

Yeah, pretty ridiculous... maybe we can move off of hackernews too.

Am I the only one that associates "Zed" and "development" with Zed Shaw? I don't think he has anything to do with zed.dev, unfortunately.

I really appreciate Zed Shaw for walking his own path and sticking to his guns.

I miss some of his old posts that he took down from his website, in particular the one on learning statistics, that was a great one.

You’re not. Everytime I see him on Twitch I have to do a double take.

Did not know he was a streamer now, thanks!

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[flagged]

[flagged]

Does an anti-palestinian fund investing in the company really count as harassment of the community?

Let the enshitification begin.

That brings them to 120x the amount of money I've invested in the same problem, and still they're only just announcing that they're intending to start trying to do something that I've already done better

Can we see?

It's apparently this but I can't really say that I get it: https://bablr.org

He seems to be saying he spent $350k making this. I guess it's some tooling for writing parsers.

He has this to say about Zed:

> Zed: Founded by Atom’s dev team, Zed was the rewrite that Atom always wanted to be able to do but couldn’t when Microsoft bought Github and made the executive decision to kill a product it might otherwise have had to compete with. Unfortunately Zed decided to do that rewrite in Rust. This has slowed their iteration speed, caused much of their dev effort to go to cross-platform support instead of innovation, cut them off from being able to offer their experience on the web, severely limited their hackability, and generally made theirs a niche tool for enthusiasts. What’s worse, their reliance on LSP — a product which believes that the presentation layer should be the primary abstraction layer — means their product is forever doomed to look like a VSCode knock-off. [1]

1. https://docs.bablr.org/architecture/prior-art/#ides

IMO in the 12 months or so I've been aware of the BABLR work and observed the author's comment contributions, they've never really substantiated why BABLR would be preferable to tree-sitter, or how a JS-based implementation of parser tech can fulfill any of the same niches. Most consumers of tree-sitter leverage it via FFI or native code, not an embedded or external JS runtime.

It's not clear to me how you could substantially replace the capabilities/benefits of what LSP provides with BABLR either.

We have some meaningful advantages that help us gain a practical edge on Tree-sitter:

- Our core and grammars are relatively tiny and can easily be loaded into any web page as a syntax highlighter, except actually a bit more: more like being able to embed ASTExplorer directly into your docs page or blog post to help people understand code examples.

- We support runtime extensibility of languages, e.g. TS can extend from JS at runtime. Tree-sitter only supports static linking, so every shipped language extended from their JS grammar contains a complete copy of the JS grammar.

- Our grammars are much easier to debug. They're written as plain scripts, and they can be run and debugged in exactly the form they're written in.

- We can parse inputs with embedding gaps. An example of such an input would be the content of a template tag before interpolations have been applied. Parsing after interpolation opens the door to injection attacks, but parsing before interpolation allow safe composition of code fragments using template tags.

- We emit streaming parse results on the fly, and can parse infinitely long data streams with ease or syntax highlight. within large single-line files without freezing up

- Tree-sitter is half an IDE's state solution: "just add text buffer". Our solution is the whole thing. One stop shop. IDE in a box.

- CSTML lets us do round trip serialization of any tree and also gives our trees stable hashes. Tree-sitter could trivially represent its parse results as CSTML if it cared to, giving it competitive compatibility with BABLR. A rising tide lifts all boats.

- While they're setting out to make version control for the first time now, we're already basically as powerful as git thanks to the combination of hashed trees, immutable data, and btree amortization within nodes for maximum structural reuse of data.

- Did I mention you don't have to deal with this? https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-typescript/blob/m...

- We can probably literally just run the Javascript source code for Tree-sitter grammars on our runtime. The only problem is the C lexers, but C lexers are one of the great annoyances of tree-sitter anyway since any context in the grammar requires you to hand-write the lexer

I don't think they are doomed to be a VSCode knock-off due to their technical decisions. I think they decided to be a VSCode knock-off by design. I mean they follow the same project oriented GUI design that VSCode and Sublime helped make popular. There is nothing inherent to their tech that required that.

Haha yes I wrote that, thank you for sharing.

We're approaching the problem by drawing from browser design. We want to see an editor with a DOM API for code documents. BABLR is a parser framework meant as a direct answer to Tree-sitter.

Myself and most people I know that switch to Zed (many from Sublime) did it because we DON'T want a DOM in our text editor. Webtech makes for crappy text editors.

Sorry, I didn't make that very clear. I'm not talking about the HTML DOM, which exists as an API to control the 2D pixel rendering layer.

A standardized DOM for code would provide a universal way of changing code documents using scripts and would allow many different code-oriented tools to interoperate naturally where they never could before.