- open-source vs closed fork of vscode

- transparent assistant panel vs opaque composer. you control your own prompts (cf. [0])

- in Zed the assistant panel is "just another editor", which means you can inline-assist when writing prompts. super underrated feature imo

- Zed's assistant is pretty hackable as well, you can add slash commands via native Zed extensions [1] or non-native, language-agnostic Context Servers [2]

- Zed's /workflow is analogous to Cursor's composer. to be honest it's not quite as good yet, however it's only ~1 week old. we'll catch up in no time :)

- native rust vs electron slop. Zed itself is one of the larger Rust projects out there [3], can be hard to work with in VS Code/Cursor, but speedy in Zed itself :)

[0]: https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/prompt/

[1]: https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/slash-commands

[2]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/context-servers

[3]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2024/08/15/this-devel...

Two areas where I think Zed might fall behind: Cursor Tab is REALLY good and probably requires some finetuning/ML chops and some boutique training data.

For composer, there's going to be more use of "shadow workspace" https://www.cursor.com/blog/shadow-workspace to create an agentic feedback loop/ objective function for codegen along with an ability to navigate the language server and look up definitions and just generally have full context like an engineer. Are there plans for the same in zed?

Also, cursor has a model agnostic apply model, whereas you all are leaning on claude.

Cursor is electron/vscode based. Zed uses a custom built rust UI and editor model that gives 120fps rendering. (Or was it 60fps)

It is really smooth on a Mac with ProMotion.

They just launched it a few minutes ago. It's going to be a a while for a good review.

Hey! I'm Nate from Zed. There are a lot of questions about this, here are some quick thoughts...

Cursor is great – We explored an alternate approach to our assistant similar to theirs as well, but in the end we found we wanted to lean into what we think our super power is: Transforming text.

So we leaned into it heavily. Zed's assistant is completely designed around retrieving, editing and managing text to create a "context"[0]. That context can be used to have conversations, similar to any assistant chatbot, but can also be used to power transformations right in your code[1], in your terminal, when writing prompts in the Prompt Library...

The goal is for context to be highly hackable. You can use the /prompt command to create nested prompts, use globs in the /file command to dynamically import files in a context or prompt... We even expose the underlying prompt templates that power things like the inline assistant so you can override them[2].

This approach doesn't give us the _simplest_ or most approachable assistant, but we think it gives us and everyone else the tools to create the assistant experience that is actually useful to them. We try to build the things we want, then share it with everyone else.

TL;DR: Everything is text because text is familiar and it puts you in control.

[0]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/contexts.html

[1]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/inline-assistant

[2]: https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/prompting#overriding-template...

How do I enable Zed AI?

I'm logged in, using Zed Preview, and selecting the model does nothing. In the configuration it says I "must accept the terms of service to use this provider" but I don't see where and how I can do that.

I'm having the same problem.

Ditto.

EDIT: figured it out. My Zed settings was broken, because it tries to create a settings file in "~/.config/zed", and my entire "~/.config" directory is symlinked somewhere else, so macOS permissions broke Zed's ability to create that config file. So I gave Zed full-disk access in the macOS "Privacy & Security" settings, Zed is now able to make a config file (which is where the model is set when you choose one), and everything is hunky dory.

Hey! I really see the power in Zed and the extensibility and simplicity. Great approach.

I posted this above, but want you to see it:

Two areas where I think Zed might fall behind: Cursor Tab is REALLY good and probably requires some finetuning/ML chops and some boutique training data.

For composer, there's going to be more use of "shadow workspace" https://www.cursor.com/blog/shadow-workspace to create an agentic feedback loop/ objective function for codegen, along with an ability to navigate the language server and look up definitions and just generally have full context like an engineer

Also, cursor has a model agnostic apply model, whereas you all are leaning on claude.

Any plans to address this from the core team or more of a community thing? I think some of this might be a heavy lift

I really like the shared context idea, and the transparency and building primitives for an ecosystem

Thanks, I'll take a look at these. We aren't done–A good amount of the Zed team uses our assistant heavily every day so we'll continue to refine it.

I shared this with the team. I need to spend some time in Cursor to understand their mental model, it seems a lot of folks have come to enjoy using it.

We do also have extensibility planned for the assistant, you can see a taste of it in the slash command code if you want to check it out.

AFAIK you can use `/workflow` with some other models other than Claude, but I can't speak to which off the top of my head.

Great. They also have other blog posts with product roadmap and research directions https://www.cursor.com/blog/problems-2024 you should look at, and an AI engineer conference talk which goes into their vision: https://youtu.be/6g28WpZbF1I?si=MkHgxMDMjxxOHtcZ