Zed, a fast new Rust-based text editor aimed at programmers, now lets you totally disable LLM bot integration. We’re sure some users will rejoice – but how many?
“You Can Now Disable All AI Features in Zed,” the developers announced late kast week, and by the time you read this, it should be available in the latest build of the editor. At the time of writing, it’s in Preview build 0.197.
It’s an interesting move, given that the Zed Industries homepage puts AI integration front and center. Even so, Zed users have been calling for this for about a year, citing issues such as corporate rules forbidding use of public LLM tools, so they can’t risk installing it.
We wrote about Zed a year ago when the first Linux version appeared. Text editors are old news, but Zed has a few interesting characteristics. It’s written in Rust, so it’s a compiled native app on the two OSes it supports so far. It’s smaller, although not by much – the approximately 100 MB Linux Flatpak brings in about a gigabyte of dependencies. And it’s fast, which is one reason generative AI skeptics like it. Internally, it’s built around conflict-free replicated data types, which means collaborative online editing without being built around any particular cloud provider. (This also means a built-in chat tool, which seems a bit like overkill to us, but what do we know?)
Notably, several members of the team previously developed the Atom editor, the app that brought Electron apps to the world – those built in JavaScript and bundled with a very cut-down instance of Chromium. Electron apps are everywhere now. They deliver the “write once, run anywhere” promise Java made 30 years ago, but with a high price. Rather than Java’s system-wide JVM, every Electron app must embed its own copy of the huge runtime.
We do mean huge. For instance, Balena Etcher, one of the easiest FOSS tools for writing disk images onto USB keys, is an Electron app, meaning that there are versions for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and they’re functionally identical. But the compressed downloads are in the region of 150-200 MB. By comparison, the Rufus tool for Windows is about 2 MB (1 percent the size), and the cross-platform USBImager is under 200 kB (which is about a tenth of Rufus).
For the vendor, Electron means building and offering separate downloads for each OS. For the user, it means there’s no way to update them all at once.
GitHub owner Microsoft killed Atom three years ago in favor of its own Electron-based editor VS Code. Zed was announced the next day.
Native app, smaller, faster, built-in collaboration – all good things. That it’s from the people who created Atom is a fun footnote. Still, it did strike us that it’s a sign of the times when “now available without AI” takes a year to develop and is seen as a significant advance.
The Register frequently reports on problems under the tag of AI-pocalypse, and recently covered a study that found developers were 20 percent slower using GenAI assistants, although they thought they were that much faster. Executives are losing faith, too.
Last month, the excellent Pivot to AI reported that GenAI is similar to gambling addiction – the same sort of behavioral patterns that lead gamblers to just one more bet, the big one that will pay off all their debts and make them rich. Instead, LLM-addicted vibe coders fervently believe that “just one more prompt” will give them the killer app that will make them rich. It’s like digital cocaine. As Natalie Ponte put it on LinkedIn, to understand the hype, try replacing the abbreviation “AI” with the word “cocaine.” For example:
There’s some reason to think that the hype bubble around GenAI may soon deflate. There are reports that the AI bubble is now bigger than the dotcom one, a quarter of a century ago. Maybe a bot-free Zed will remain useful once all those cheap subsidized LLMs in the cloud go away. ®