Of course that is what he says publicly. Can you imagine him saying anything different on this already very heated PR comment section? Those would be quoted in a headline in a news article the next second.
That is "does not work" for most people, including on HN. Nobody should be expected to spend half an hour installing vidual studio and building a project before they can start to use an IDE.
So why not fix that? You can absolutely build a binary and release it and save thousands of people that effort.
Comments like this remind me of people who complain about an error they saw on Wikipedia: "So, you're going to fix that, right?"
If you have a pain point in OSS that you care about, you can fix that. Yes, you the person reading these words right now. That's the entire point of OSS.
I could, but nobody is going to trust my binary. And they shouldn't.
The build should come from the official maintainer. Period.
And participating in open source? Oh, I can assure you I am a seasoned open source contributor, but I am not going to just contribute to a random project. Wasted too much time on issues and pull requests that nobody looked at.
Easy to criticize other people, right? What have you done?
So help the official maintainer. Become the official maintainer of the Windows build.
If you don't want to, or can't be bothered with the time commitment, that's fine, but realise that every time you complain about an OSS project's failings, you're really complaining about your own inability to contribute, not their's.
You're taking offence where none was intended. I was not referring to competence, as I have no means to judge, your inability was a reference to your decision to not to contribute for whatever reason you have chosen.
You've made clear that you are not going to do this. Fine. My point is that this failing you perceive then, is about your decision/inability/choice/forced situation/whatever you want to call it, to not fix it, not theirs.
If you're anywhere near as experienced as you state you are at maintaining OSS projects, you'll know the issue I'm referring to here: entitled armchair quarterbacks telling maintainers what they "should" be doing, but not doing anything to contribute themselves.
Your original remark was that kind of entitled snide, back-handed, snarky comment that deflates OSS maintainers every day.
Engage with it, or accept that's where it is. Don't race around pointing out all the things it doesn't do that you want, that you're not prepared to make happen. You could offer time, you could offer actual hard cash, you could just move on and decide not to care.
That's my point. If you have maintained OSS, you know that's the point, I even contextualised it with an easy to understand metaphor in the form of "broken things" on Wikipedia that literally take seconds to fix.
If you didn't get that on the first or second pass, perhaps you're not quite the experienced maintainer you claim to be, in which case, just hold off criticising for a beat next time, and think about what you could actually do, and if it's nothing that's fine. Move on.
If Zed wants to treat Windows as a second class citizen, I don't want to change their mind. I am sure plenty of people other than me are willing to help and have the ability to contribute. The fact that there is no official build for Windows for so long says plenty about the project. The writing is on the wall.
I am not an idiot. Recent developments in the open source world should already give everybody a better idea of where they should spend their time and energy.
That's a lot of accusations without evidence. VSCode does questionable things, but nowhere near the levels you are describing.
And is there any evidence that VSCode is not secure, by Node.js standard? Has there been significant security incidents that were not handled properly? Has VSCode been neglecting security issues?
No to all those questions, based on my experience. Node.js inherently is loose on permissions -- by default you can do IO/connect to Internet however you want -- but that's not VSCode's fault. Otherwise, VSCode team has been very responsive at handling security issues.
(Saying this as an experienced VSCode user and extension developer.)
This is much less likely in a company. Any sane company decides on a clear direction which way to go. Either do X and put resources in it, or not and instead focus on something else. They may change directions, but never "maybe X" at a specific point in time. Someone at the company makes a decision on this.
Of course, with notable exceptions. See Apple Car, Android tablets etc.
> At least, it was exactly that environment that gave us the amazing product that has changed the world.
You need some extraordinary evidence to claim things like that.
To stretch things a bit, it's like saying, while male dominated the field of engineering in the 60s (and still do), it was exactly that kind of environment that made it possible for humans to get to the moon. Can you actually prove it? Really?
It's hard for me to imagine using git will slow down kernel development compared to sending patches in emails.
> You need some extraordinary evidence to claim things like that.
No. It's a legitimate possibility. Maybe it wont happen. But maybe it will. There's a reason that military training is meant to be hard though, and not filled with comfort and affordances for personal feelings.
> To stretch things a bit, it's like saying, while male dominated the field of engineering in the 60s (and still do), it was exactly that kind of environment that made it possible for humans to get to the moon. Can you actually prove it? Really?
No human has been back to the moon since that male dominated field sent them there. And when they added women, they couldn't produce a shuttle that could work without huge budget overruns, or reliably. And the only example of a real surge in a return to space, is run by an asshole dictator at Space X.
> It's hard for me to imagine using git will slow down kernel development compared to sending patches in emails.
No, that definitely worked out great. It was created by a gruff guy who was an asshole to everyone, and wrote the basics of Git by himself in a week.
> But if my computer can quickly realize that I'm deleting every odd-numbered page of a PDF, or renaming every file to add a prefix, or following each link on a website and saving an image... and then just instantly automate the next 100 times... that's going to be huge!
The first two tasks could be easily done by asking ChatGPT to write a script for you. Scraping a website can be a bit more tricky. Still, I don't see why you have to rely on "computer use" for these tasks -- there are much more efficient and reliable approaches to the tasks.
Those are just simple examples. Most of the clicking I do on my computer doesn't have a command-line equivalent. Nor do I want to have to type out a request to ChatGPT, even if there is one.
There's a gigantic area of productivity improvement around repetitive actions that aren't easily scriptable or no scripting interface exists. But where an AI assistant that interfaces with your screen, pointer and keyboard would be a huge help.
* you can always choose to self a small model, although it probably doesn't work as well
* it's not a "random third party". You know to whom the data is being sent, and at least according to service agreements, most services don't use your data for training. If you don't trust Claude, you could trust AWS hosted version, or GPT/Deepseek hosted on Azure. Well, if you think Amazon/Microsoft is not trustworthy and they may misuse your data in these cloud services (not some random consumer facing service where you are the product), you might as well give up your digital life.
