I suspect I'm not the only one experiencing "AI fatigue" as every single piece of software grows more and more useless "AI" features I don't want and which get in the way of doing what I actually want.
Nah, its the quiet majority, and AI posts on places like HN quickly create their own echo chambers with folks patting themselves and each other on their backs.
There is AI as a useful tool, maybe, which is at most few % of current hype. Most folks seem to end up babysitting it a lot to get something useful out of it.
And then there is everything else which is mostly hype or narrow use cases.
To proper typical senior managing a team I don't see much added value. It can help juniors churn out large chunks of the code but I haven't worked in 20 years in a place that values quantity of code and quick deliveries over quality.
Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used even as I write it now, all popular sites are blocked and there are strict policies against. Couldn't care less, coding is such a small part of my work I don't want to lose this creative outlet by delegating it to something I need to triple check for bugs afterwards. Also with any new stuff I learn way more by implementing it myself rather than looking at pre-made code.
> Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used
This is a huge thing tbh. I don't like these AI things in general so I wouldn't use them anyway, but I just can't imagine going to my clients and asking them, "Hey is it okay with you if I routinely upload all your code to these random American venture-backed start-ups?". And I really can't imagine just doing that behind their back. I couldn't really imagine doing that with an employer's code either.
Ideally I don't even use software where accidentally toggling the wrong checkbox in some settings screen results in automatically uploading client code to these American start-ups either. Now I won't pretend that my stance against AI is purely out of some principled cybersecurity concern, but it's definitely a factor.
In any case, what I see most people doing is integrating it with Claude/Copilot/etc. The security concerns specifically obviously don't apply when running it locally.
By default Zed has a user choose what type of configuration they want. That could be something like LM Studio, Ollama, or your own API keys to a provider you're already paying for.
AI also isn't shoved in your face when using Zed, there's one small button on the button right.
Wait there's an always-present AI button in the normal text editing UI? That's way more prominent than I expected, I assumed it was just an option in a settings screen somewhere. I definitely don't want an AI button that's always on screen.
I just downloaded Zed to see this for myself and found not only one but two AI buttons in the lower right, one for integration with chat bots and one for their "prediction" AI. Both try to get you to log in to online services (even though, yes, a local chat bot is an option for one of them).
It seems like you can remove the chat bot ("agent") button through their config file, but I found no option to remove the "predictions" button.
Man this editor is pushing "AI" way harder than I imagined. As I said I genuinely assumed that it was just like iTerm2's chat bot integration where you could enable it in a settings screen.
AI features are essentially non-negotiable for a lot of people these days, and a lot of companies too. It’s hard to deny that LLMs coding assistants are at a minimum pretty promising. More promising than many other LLM uses. Zed wants to be a professional IDE, not just a random text editor, and LLM services are (whether you like it or not) an important tool in that IDE toolbox.
It’s fair to have huge concerns over AI (I certainly do), but I don’t think it’s fair to expect IDEs to skip some of the only technology that developers (and companies, importantly) are willing to pay for in an IDE.
I strongly agree about the fatigue. I have extreme levels of concern, especially when the supposed top people are shooting their mouths off saying this stuff is doing material science, biochem, a million other things.
But all that annoying madness is distracting from how amazingly awesomely useful this stuff is. It's wild how many little quick projects I can kick out in a couple hours! Ideas just come out of my head with so much less fuss; when I don't like it I ask for something different.
My point is less to convince though about AI. I appreciate your starting sentiment here, but I really don't get the follow up?
> genuinely happy it works for you. I just don't want AI in my text editor, even if you're happy with it.
I don't see why it would bother you at all? There's a tiny little button in the status bar and a few scattered menu items that feel, to me, very easy to ignore.
It feels like someone being mad that their spreadsheet has I dunno, logarithms in it, but the person hates logarithms? It feels weird to opt in to caring against. I have a generalll abnner of thought which is "your anti-feature is not a feature", and this feels like one of those situations: i don't see why someone would cling to an editor not having a feature they don't use?
And I suspect you are an extreme minority. Among senior and staff engineers I barely see them leaving behind emacs, vim and jetbrains… none of them with ai plug-ins.
It's an unexpected position to take, though. You said you had been interested in Zed until they integrated AI. The response was "the AI is completely optional", which I'd expect would make you more likely to use Zed, since it removes your objection. But it doesn't change your position at all, which makes me suspect it's not that you're worried the AI would interfere with your workflow, but that it's there at all. So, is your position that the very fact that Zed allowed AI to touch it has infected it in some way?
So you're just here to be an AI curmudgeon with no valuable input to the debugger conversation topic whatsoever, with no experience with Zed and no intent to ever even try it? Thanks for all the relevant and useful hot takes I guess.
The way I see it, I shared thoughts on Zed, as someone who was once really interested in Zed and once tried to switch to it, in a discussion about Zed. It's not about the Zed debugger, but it's not like this thread is lacking in discussion of the debugger.
Am I an AI curmudgeon? I wouldn't necessarily use that word, but it's not entirely inaccurate.
