This is a good conversation to have. We can start by pointing this out and encouraging broader interest. Zed has been my daily driver for over a year.
I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the incentives are not pointed in the right direction. Unless developers are paying directly for the functionality they want, that's misalignment. So enshittification seems probable, maybe inevitable, unless something structural changes.
OTOH, because they charge for their editor, JetBrains has incentives that are better in line with customers.
Exactly.
AI autocomplete I just don't care about. OK, but they do offer an AI subscription service. I'm using LLMs almost not at all currently, but at least right now this does seem like a viable path to getting a lot of money. I worry, though, that in the long run, the margins will just get squeezed by competition here, especially when a lot of deep-pocketed competitors can charge nearly nothing and get away with it. Zed also very nicely offers the ability to drop in an API key for their AI agent features... which is awesome and the right thing to do, but not good for profitability.
Obviously, the issue with simply charging money like Jetbrains is that Jetbrains already has built a world where they have a super complete IDE package and even then they only really charge a relatively small amount per month for the privilege. It works because for software the development costs for a given piece of software is relatively "fixed" (not entirely, but close enough) whereas the revenue you get grows as you acquire users. But now that the market is saturated, it's going to be hard for someone to jump in and try to be like Jetbrains in any way, and if you're charging money it's even harder to compete with most of the other code editors that are ~free.
Worse, it's hard to charge money and remain completely open source. Linux users will mostly not even realize you're doing it because the packages will just keep working for free since the software is open source. And Zed really does benefit from being open source, maybe more than many other open source offerings; it really seems like the community did a lot of work on making Zed work well on Linux. (By the way, if any of you who worked on the Wayland support for GPUI happens to read this, thank you very much for the excellent work.) So it's hard to say "just go closed source!"
I hope Zed Industries got a good deal on whatever funding they received and are being somewhat conservative with their funding too. Even though it's hard to compete in this market, they've built something that is very hard to build and basically not paralleled as far as I'm concerned. There's clearly something here and finding a less shitty path to monetizing it would be very, very good for us all.
(And I am willing to pay, though I know they need to find something that will make a lot of people want to pay, not just people like me.)
I did not contribute anymore after seeing the CLA
Pretty obvious what's going on here. I hate seeing it happen, though.
I have only tried it a couple of times, but Zed's AI assistant view indeed works as promised, doing about as well as Cursor does.
Now there's just one thing that is a bit annoying... It's kind of heavy on the GPU. I mean it looks and runs great, but it really loves to suck the battery out of a device that's running on battery. But frankly, I've been ready to ditch text editors based on web browsers basically since they became "in vogue" and have just been waiting for the right thing to show up. As time goes on, I think it becomes more and more obvious that Zed is "the right thing".
I don't know if there's anything we can do to make sure Zed succeeds sustainably and doesn't eventually get enshittified, but I'm crossing my fingers that for once we can have nice things.