I've used zed both for work and personal projects. I'm not a fan of the direction they're going. I don't want "agentic" tools, I just want to back and forth with an LLM to get a better idea. I've specified in my markdown to not write actual code to files. Would be nice if this was togglable in settings.
Apart from that, it's a hell of a lot better than alternatives, and my god is it fast. When I think about the perfect IDE (for my taste), this is getting pretty close.
In the assistant panel there is a mode option - write / ask / minimal, it sounds like what you are looking for.
Anyway you can always make your prompts to do or not do certain actions, they are adding more features, if you want you can ignore some of them - this is not contradictory.
> I don't want "agentic" tools, I just want to back and forth with an LLM to get a better idea.
Ah! So you can get that experience with the agent panel (despite "agent" being in the name).
If you click the dropdown next to the model (it will say "Write" by default) and change it from "Write" to "Minimal" then it disables all the agentic tool use and becomes an ordinary back-and-forth chat with an LLM where you can add context manually if you like.
Also, you can press the three-dots menu in the upper-right and choose New Text Thread if you want something more customizable but still not agentic.
Apart from that, it's a hell of a lot better than alternatives, and my god is it fast. When I think about the perfect IDE (for my taste), this is getting pretty close.