I wish they would have stayed with the collaborative part a bit longer. Once the AI wave hit it feels abandoned with various bugs and hard to reproduce issues. I am a full time zed user converting from sublime only due to the collaborative features, but by now we don't even use the collaborative features anymore because it's unreliable (broken connections, sounds, overwriting changes, weird history/undo behavior), so will probably go back to sublime again. Note that all of us are sitting on fiber connections, so I don't believe the issues are network related.
I've been trying to be active, create issues, help in any way I can, but the focus on AI tells me Zed is no longer an editor for me.
Yeah, we plan to revisit the collaboration features; it was painful but we decided we needed to pause work on it while we built out some more highly-requested functionality. We still have big plans for improving team collaboration!
It would be interesting to (optionally) make the AI agent more like an additional collaborative user, sharing the chat between users, allowing collaborative edits to prompts, etc.
The long game of agentic AI seems to be giving them a working environment that is fast, accurately (and safely!) tracks changes, and enables humans to observe its edit history and thinking process. Zed's collaborative features seem serendipitous for this role.
Not sure what your budget looks like, but maybe its time to look for a new developer if its feasible? So you don't neglect a feature that's already in production and broken.
It's absolutely remarkable that these folks are writing this from scratch in Rust. That'll be a long-term killer feature for the editor.
Do you think GPL3 will serve as an impediment to their revenue or future venture fundraising? I assume not, since Cursor and Windsurf were forks of MIT-licensed VS Code. And both of them are entirely dependent on Microsoft's goodwill to continue developing VS Code in the open.
Tangentially, do you think this model of "tool" + "curated model aggregator" + "open source" would be useful for other, non-developer fields? Would an AI art tool with sculpting and drawing benefit from being open source? I've talked with VCs that love open developer tools and they hate on the idea of open creative tools for designers, illustrators, filmmakers, and other creatives. I don't quite get it, because Blender and Krita have millions of users. Comfy is kind of in that space, it's just not very user-friendly.
> entirely dependent on Microsoft's goodwill to continue developing VS Code in the open.
The premise of many open source licenses, including MIT, is that the user is _not_ dependent on the developer. No matter what MS does, the latest pulled version of VS Code will remain working and available. MS could license future VS Code versions under more restrictive licenses, however the Cursor devs can continue to use and themselves develop the code they already have.
To be clear, by "the user" I'm referring to the Cursor devs. This is the terminology of many F/OSS licenses.
They are dependent to the extent they won't put in the work to make those extensions at the same level Microsoft was pumping resources into them.
In theory everyone can fork Chrome and Android, in practice none of the forks can keep up with Google's resources, unless they are Microsoft or Samsung.
I've been trying to be active, create issues, help in any way I can, but the focus on AI tells me Zed is no longer an editor for me.