It really is concerning. I keep an excel sheet with links of all companies I could apply to whenever i change jobs, and checking it the other day practically every row was now selling an ai product.

Intellij wasn't immune to it either. Number of bugs has exploded since they started adding ai features to their ide, none of which I used for more than 5 minutes.

The roadmap on the other hand seems to have 4 things tagged AI on it. https://zed.dev/roadmap

The blog used to be really personal and nice but now it's all AI https://zed.dev/blog

I get it, pausing some work to ship AI integration plumbing is a good strategy to keep momentum up with competition.

I think after their Series B, looking at the roadmap, and now with this pricing featured it's pretty clear what their priorities have become.

I'm not against AI, I just feel like they can do better and their original mission is still a better long-term angle.

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I really do like the Claude code integration in zed. Conceptually it’s pretty well done. Provides some better visualization over running Claude code in the terminal and really aligns with the close supervisor style I like to work with. I really like the follow feature that brings the editor along with the agent.

My complaints:

No Claude code hooks support at the time of this writing. As someone who leverages this somewhat heavily this is why I don’t really use it all the time. I actually find it to be somewhat of a feature at times because I can simply run the thing through Zed if I want to temporarily run with no hooks.

Performance is noticeably degraded presumably because of the “ACP” protocol they invented. I usually work either directly in Claude terminal window using its edit tools or using repoprompt’s mcp editor tools and both are noticeably faster than running in zed.

What seems to be memory leaks in the agent window causes sluggish performance, especially when scrolling. It’s not bad enough to make it unusable, but for an editor whose main advertisement is speed it feels particularly painful.

I get what you are saying, and I think they are doing a good job there as well. That said, it still feels like something is missing in that whole workflow to me.

I sometimes worry if we are moving too fast for no reason. Some things are becoming standards in an organic way but they feel suboptimal in my own little bias bubble corner.

Maybe I am getting old and struggling to adapt to the new generation way of getting work done, but I have a gut feeling that we need to revisit some of this stuff more deliberately.

I still see Agents as something that will be more like a background thread that yields rather than a first class citizen inside the Editor you observe as it goes.

I don't know about you, but I feel an existential dread whenever I prompt an Agent and turn into a vegetable watching it breathe. — am I using it wrong? Should I be leaving and coming back later? Should I pick a different file and task while it's doing its thing?

It's not just on Mac. Zed's font rendering on Linux is also buggy and ugly. And they don't seem to care much:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/11676

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4334

Font rendering should be the most important feature of a text editor.

Sorry did not mean to hate on Sublime, it was pointed out in another comment that the comparison didn’t really match and I sort of agree. The mental model that brought that initially was the one-off use case of opening large files, for which I have traditionally done through Sublime in the past.

Sublime is great but falling behind. LSP support being a janky plugin instead of first party is a great example.

I don't think they mean "replacement" but rather "the sublime of ai editors"

I love Sublime. I have been using it for years and it's just fantastic software. I have no problems paying for it. But since it is such an important part of my toolbox, not having the source code is a liability. What if they decide to drop support for my platform? What if they decide to shift gears into AI and enshittify the experience?

Every other piece of software in my toolbox is open-source. The scenarios I've described happened to some of those tools, and I maintain my own forks. Currently, Sublime is the single point of failure on my toolbox.

I would buy a source code license if I could.

You can open large codebases in Jetbrains IDEs and it takes forever to index, but it shouldn't outright crash or completely freeze.

You can open the kernel in CLion. Don't expect the advanced refactoring features to work, but it can deal with a ~40 million lines project folder for example

IntelliJ IDEs are fine with huge files and projects. At certain sizes it'll disable intellisense in active files, but IME stuff like find and replace works fine regardless of size and you can still turn intellisense on if you want.

They'll index for a long time on huge codebases, but I only go through that like once a month max, I just have the editors as always open

> Why? Genuine curiosity, what's the angle for a market for sublime/zed alternatives? What are they lacking?

In my opinion, Sublime’s biggest gap is that it’s not open-source, and there aren’t many (if any) open-source alternatives that match its feature set, performance, and unique user experience, Sublime just feels especially nice. Zed comes closest, and I think it’s fantastic, but it’s VC-backed, so their focus on profitability will likely shape the user experience over time (as some users are already noticing). Every editor has its pros and cons, and preferences vary, but there’s always room for innovation. Even subtle differences can add up to a significantly better user experience. With ecode, I’m aiming to deliver a polished, enjoyable experience while subtly innovating on common editor features. That said, ecode is opinionated in some ways, so it won’t suit everyone, though it’s highly customizable and configurable.

> And congrats on your project, looks interesting.

Thanks! =)

Googling around a bit, Sublime Text doesn't seem to be particularly good at this: https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/unable-to-open-a-large-text-...

In my experience, BBEdit will open files that kill other editors: "Handling large files presents no intrinsic problems for BBEdit, though some specific operations may be limited when dealing with files over 2GB in size."

The open source CudaText has the same speed on opening huge files. It has slower rendering, but for huge files it is not the issue.