A Week with Zed AI
How has AI in an editor helped me with my daily work
The other day Zed released their own assistant for their editor called Zed AI. If you don’t know what Zed is it is an editor built with Rust with high performance in mind. I’ve tired it out when they first released it but back then it was just an editor with no other features I was used to having on VSCode. Now after many months with the release Zed AI, I was curious to see how much Zed has advanced but mostly how such coding assistant would help me.
Assistant Panel
Zed has partnered with Anthropic to bring their latest Claude 3.5 model to Zed. It can accept 200,000 tokens as inputs which means we can dump multiple files or errors to ask for suggestions or diagnostics. On the assistant panel, you can ask your questions or you can include your current tab as part of the input. You can also customize some default prompts you would like to include for certain queries you may have. For example, if you are asking about CSS implementations and you would like the response to always use tailwind, you can create your prompt and reuse that prompt in your queries.
If you don’t want to use the AI model Zed provides, you can choose to use the other models but you need to configure it with your own API keys. At the time of writing Zed AI is in beta so it’s free to use the Claude 3.5 model Zed uses.
Inline Edit
Wouldn’t it be great if AI responds with answers and edit the file with the provided codes? With inline edit, you can tell Zed what to do and it will add the necessary codes. There is also a Fast Edit mode that is in private beta that I’m curious about but don’t have access to yet.
Why would I use this?
This applies to other editors like Cursor or extensions like Copilot. Why do I want to have AI in my IDEs let alone paying for it especially if I’m paying for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini? I think it’s all about context switching and how fast you can get things done. Most developers have their own workflow including hot keys, window management, or shortcuts that will greatly improve their productivities. Having an assistant that is always there in the editor without developers switching to another app for information keeps the developer’s focus on the task on hands and not get distracted. It gives you a sense that you are talking to the project and having another developer right at your fingertips.
How is Zed?
Unlike Cursor which is built on top of VSCode, Zed is a totally new editor built with Rust. The moment I start using it I can feel it’s very fast on most of the aspects including boot time, hints, and language servers. In VSCode I sometimes have that TypeSCript language server taking forever to load but I never experience that in Zed.
Zed has most of the basic features that I use daily on VSCode but it lacks some that I definitely miss from VSCode. For example, I could quickly switch to another branch but I can’t visually see the git diff and commit my changes the way I can with VSCode. Another thing I miss is I can’t easily organize the imports and remove unused imports. In Zed you need to go to that line and use hot key cmd + > to remove unused declarations which is not as intuitive and easy to use as VSCode.
Final Remarks
I am excited and looking forward to what Zed will become in the future and I also understand the team would need some way to monetize the product so they build the AI features first. Other essential editor features like full git integrations are still in the roadmap. It’s just the team needs to find a way to survive first. I am also liking the fact it is a contender to VSCode offering different and faster experience to the users. Overall, I would continue using it and keep track of its progress.