Zed is our office
Mood
excited
Sentiment
positive
Category
tech
Key topics
code editor
productivity
collaboration
The authors of Zed, a new code editor, share their vision for the tool as not just a code editor but as a collaborative workspace or 'office'.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
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Very active discussionFirst comment
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Key moments
- 01Story posted
11/13/2025, 3:41:26 PM
5d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
11/13/2025, 4:22:17 PM
41m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
153 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
11/15/2025, 4:51:11 PM
3d ago
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Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
When learning a new way of thinking or moving (i.e. martial arts) people often really benefit from high-bandwidth, low-latency, shared-viewport-onto-reality interactions. Watching someone's cursor move while they talk is one way to get a window into their problem-solving toolkit.
or at least that's what i've heard, no idea if they actually do it.
it is nice to see a crdt backed editor tool for markdown and code though. gdocs markdown support has been lacking for years.
Yeah, we used to do that back when I was in college. It's only for certain classes and most people usually kept their own notes too (or instead, why write twice). Or some classes ban laptops so you'd write on paper anyway.
The experience was actually quite nice for two-three people but we always had the "ok let me type now" flow. Multiple changes happening at once sounds hyper distracting.
I could also see it as a potential productivity aid. Person 1 sees Person 2 is writing something and they don't want to be seen as idle, so they start working as well. This might sound oppressive but a lot of people who struggle with ADHD/procrastination/akrasia actually receive great benefit from that structure. Similar to that startup that forces you to code while screensharing with a stranger in order to push you to work, or people who code in cafes/libraries to be more productive.
As long as it's not an organization requiring it for senior engineers, I could see promise to it as an eventual common new paradigm.
This would be good for code-walks too though. Instead of having to share your screen and hope the video comes through well. Everyone can follow along in the comfort of their own editor.
it's probably subjective, but I find these collaboration features can be overused for this kind of thing.
If someone is walking me through something, I just want to see what they see so I can focus entirely on what they're saying and no part of me is distracted by having to follow along or seeing other code.
I know typically these collab modes have an auto follow feature, but it's not as simple as just read only video being streamed to you, there's loads more ways it can go wrong and add noise / distraction that provides no benefit.
I agree being able to see the pointer is important, since not everyone is good about moving the cursor around.
I think the fundamental flaw that dooms this feature is non-developers. Do teams and orgs want more than one chat system? I suspect not. It will be very hard (impossible) to convince people who can pay back the VCs to switch zed as the basis for their chat for all employees.
> video comes through well
I cannot recall the last time resolution or latency was an issue (zoom/meet)
> Everyone can follow along in the comfort of their own editor.
With different screen resolutions, you cannot be sure everyone sees the same code. Video guarantees this
Let's lean into the chaos and see what it might give us. Imagine a production application deployed directly from a non-version-controlled directory. Anyone on the team can edit the files, at any time. Insane? Probably. The disadvantages are easy to see.
But the positives are really compelling: 1. make small, granular testable changes; 2. use feature toggles; 3. refactor intensely and concurrently; 4. always work on the latest code; 5. use in-code documentation instead of GitHub/etc workflows; 6. explore continuous, incremental, hot-swappable code deployment.
Doesn't thought of ditching all the wasted motion and ceremony around logging async work and just coding sound glorious? I'm actually not a "move fast and break things person" usually. But the idea of moving so fast that broken things will only stay broken for a tiny fraction of the time is pretty compelling. There is also an intensity that comes from real-time interactions where a team needs to reach consensus quickly.
Feature Toggles: https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
BEAM (Erlang, Elixir) provides hot-swappable code and lots more
Self hosting will be a vital feature for users and enterprises though, we’re planning on revisiting it once we have a few more features settled :D
https://github.com/delta-db/deltadb?tab=readme-ov-file#-upda...
Here's our overall pitch: https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed#introducing-deltadb-o...
Also the name, I thought it was a database with CRDTs due to the "DB" at the end of DeltaDB, but it's a version control system, I thought that was somewhat misleading, any reason why it's named so?
I'm really rooting for you guys, and your direction and quality is exciting to see.
For instance, collaboration is a huge topic. You can have coding collaboration on the file, and that would be basic and appropriate, you can then replicate slack and you'll have chat rooms, which is entering creep territory, but it's natural! Then soon the chat room will need to link with issues and you can now have TODOs linked to some kanban board and we should be able to speak while we code on the same file! And this goes on and on.
It's exceedingly rare that the organization found hard courage to specifically avoid features that looks like easy pickings for the purpose of avoiding them.
I think Tuple is a better collab app, but far more expensive.
Also Zed was announced as a closed source comercial tool.
But. There are now two times I see Zed going in the wrong direction. The AI integration was one. This feels like the wrong direction again.
I never really liked the AI integration. It felt off to me. I do love coding with Claude and I think I know why. It presents the "information I need to know" in a way my puny brain can handle it. Colored diffs. Summaries of what happened. It isn't perfect, but it has been incredibly productive for me. I never got that from Zed's AI integration; perhaps this has been improved, but I was up and running with Claude in a way that I never was with Zed.
This write-up sounds like "slack in my editor." If it is that, I hate it. Slack has destroyed company culture and communication. People, who are inherently lazy (I'm an old Perl programmer, so I can say that), have stopped thinking carefully and writing carefully, and in that void just throw the first thing in their head into a slack channel and think that is "collaboration" and "communication." It's toxic.
For example, this comment rubs me the wrong way: "Staff members hop in, volunteer to show off a cool feature or bug fix they worked on, and get real-time feedback from the rest of the team." I don't think our human brains work well with "real time feedback" UNLESS we have the information presented in a way that gives us massive clues on what's right and what's wrong. Reading a wall of text is not the way. A colorized git diff, or a video, or an entirely new way of presenting information might make real time feedback possible, but I am highly skeptical a text editor is the way or place to do that. And, I'm an emacs user and love text UIs, don't get me wrong.
Do I want to have "generalized one off rooms for things that don't fit anywhere?" I definitely don't want that. I want you AS THE AUTHOR to be really intentional about what's important and fit that into the proper channels. I need to know that information, but I don't want to know about, nor have the unspoken expectation that I SHOULD have known, about the other stuff. And, I want "managers" (if that still exists) to be carefully thinking about those channels and how the company is organized and push that structure down to people in the organization.
As Zed is the office, having one off rooms instead of in person coffee time feels very dangerous. That's the world a lot of people live in, but I don't like that office.
If this comment is the guiding light, then I'm worried: "We're building toward a future where collaboration is continuous conversation, not discrete commits—where every discussion, edit, and insight remains linked to the code as it evolves, accessible to both teammates and AI agents." I'm human, I have kids, I have other interests. A continuous conversation is impossible for me. I want discrete ideas, and right now, discrete commits and PRs are better, IMHO, than what I hear here. It's hard, but setting the expectation that to be successful I need to be paying attention to a river of information flowing by seems like a bad idea to me. I don't buy that Zed solves the problem of hiding the pieces of information that I don't need to see.
Oh hey! I have an idea. Why not use AI to summarize those conversations into discrete pieces! </joke>
I do love Zed. It is the best GUI editor out there. I know they will get it right. I just am skeptical about this direction and feel it misses the forest for the trees.
But, also, after reading your comments, I'm just not sure I need an "editor" anymore. I love that I can npm install claude anywhere. Zed does not exist for ARM servers yet, but I can install claude there, and it can troubleshoot my database connections, and edit code, and grep files. Those are all the things I used an editor for, because an editor has better ergonomics than using the CLI. I'm sad to say "misspelled prompts" might have better ergonomics for me.
Slack revolutionized this for me because I can turn it off anytime I want. When I want focus, I close it and it cannot reach me for some time. Then I pull it up and read all the threads while taking a poop.
Having it in zed is the same: You can just log out of collab anytime you want! You would only use it if you _want_ to use it. When you do want to use it, it's incredible. Someone can just join your channel and work on a tricky problem with you and you don't even need to screen share. It's like the best of discord and slack available at the touch of a button. It's much lighter weight than slack. Slack huddles are super annoying to me. I want it to behave more like discord, and that's what zed does!
But I still think it is impossible to manage all the things happening in slack. And the expectation is that it was said in slack, so you should know about it! Whereas, I definitely go through and review PRs and if there is a culture and management agreement around good PRs, then I can easily understand how things work, how things have changed, etc. I never get that from slack. And, I never got it from email either, fairly.
In any circle of "what makes a good commit message and why even do it" discussions, invariably the recommendation is to explain the "why" and leave out the self-evident "what".
If your stance is that commit and commit messages can be automated away then we might as well not even have them.
I don't share this view, but yeah in this world we don't need AI to do things that shouldn't be done in the first place.
You can't see any value in being able to see the "what" in a short bit of English at a glance vs having to analyze a 300+ line diff to figure out what it's doing?
They would look like noise.
You would be the source of that noise.
One commit per edit? Nonsense.
Me and any other developer would hate to share a repository with you.
Even your comment is also noise =)
for example it’s not out of the question that we could end up with tooling that does truly continuous testing and integration, automatically finding known-good deployments among a continuously edited multiplayer codebase
we’d have to spend a lot more energy on specifications and acceptance testing, rather than review, but I think that’s inevitable - code review can’t keep up with how fast code gets written now
Codex already has a fantastic review mode, and gemini / claude are building tools around pr review that work no matter how that pr was produced, so I think this interface is going to get baked in to how agents work in the near term.
You would need to either have separate versions running at the same time or never do breaking changes or devise some other approach that makes it possible.
It's not always feasible to do it this way
Here's a thread where the person replying to me makes this case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45455963
Doing away with check-ins entirely is the extreme end-game of that pov. I'm in product and every day and every week yes we very much continually change the product!
But I'm growing less convinced that the natural end-state of this methodology produces obviously better results.
What you describe sounds like a security nightmare to me.
Maybe you are using a remote dev server, and every change you do needs to be committed before you see the result?
Please setup a local environment instead. Not even F5 should be required, you save a file, you see the result in the browser.
When your work is finished, and only then, you should commit your changes.
If you've been a developer long enough, you might recall the teletype package for Atom—both built by Zed's founders.
Appropriately working together on a truly collaborative tool, Martin Ott, Martin Pittenauer, Dominik Wagner, and Ulrich Bauer of Technische Universitat Munchen won the Best Mac OS X Student Project for Hydra 1.0.1, a Rendezvous-based text editor that enables multiple people to contribute to a shared document. (Adam and about ten other attendees at MacHack used Hydra to take notes during this year’s Hack Contest.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit
https://tidbits.com/2003/06/30/apple-announces-design-awards...
As time goes on it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster. I'm also a fan of Zed and everything they're doing, but it's notable that shipping next-gen editor software takes a lot more developer effort now than it did in the 2000s.
The Graphic Editor workspace, in fact all the Adobe programs alternatives is quite open.
I remember using Paint Shop Pro, and it was bought and killed by Corel. I would prefer to keep using Paint Shop Pro, instead of Photoshop, because it was super fast and had all the features I used and wanted.
Ask people why they can't migrate to Linux, and half or more of the answers are: Adobe.
Yes, the scope increase is vast, due to more languages, more tooling, more features, higher expectations, and more competition.
Yes I agree but so many things that might seem "done" (and in someways I think software/SaaS as an ecosystem is "done" compared to where we came from).
BUT - so many companies just bloat themselves and their products. I think the end of ZIRP is going to have an effect on that (more enshitification / rent seeking for sure) and I think there will be an opportunity to iterate and make copyware that doesn't take the higher development efforts.
We really need a winning electron alternative that is more resource friendly. That, IMO, will be a big game changer and I know there are lots of promising alternatives already.
I'd say CRDTs are also a big change. CRDTs make live collaboration much more robust for all parties involved, and they only started to reach maturity in the mid-late 2010s
While I do not work at Zed, I'm curious to hear more about this use case for my own company needs.
Code wise I guess you can could be working with any agency or contractors and you could collab on PR reviews? No idea to be honest.
Is it just my vision, or are websites getting super low contrast these days, esp the text-heavy ones?
Could be your monitor as well.
It's probably not an issue the Zed team will experience as they're all naturally using their own editor. Hopefully it's on their radar though.
Network effects are probably a strength for a company, not a drawback (which it is for the user of course). Even VSCode has some notion of network effects, such as their proprietary extension store.
- On my Tablet, which is too slow for Jetbrains IDEs to run smoothly
- On certain projects I have which choke Jetbrains IDEs. (Due to macro use maybe?)
I'm also trying their GPUI library, but am in the early stages, so can't really comment on how it compares to EGUI.
I'll always remain someone plugged into vim because I need it sometimes when shelled over a terminal. Editing files over SSH can work with editor support, but is often less reliable or fast than jumping through whatever hoops I need to to get an SSH connection once and then doing everything from there.
Sadly my workflow of using `!` to get back to my terminal and things like `!make` or `!cargo build` is fucked in neovim. So I do a lot of ctrl-z and the a lot of killing stopped processes I forgot I suspended. I've complained about this in various threads and chats, but the developers aren't interested in letting us use the old vim `!` which is super lame.
I'm sorry... what?? I still use vim as I haven't found a reason to jump to neovim, but you're telling me external commands don't work properly? That's wild.
Another way of stating this: It's a general purpose portable computer; not specialized coding PC.
It's true, most of them are bad. Galaxy Book5 Pro or Microsoft Surface are OK.
* Has the same level of performance
* With the same or better battery life
* With the same quality of screen
* With the same quality of speakers and touchpad
* Runs as quiet or as cool
as the Apple Silicon macbooks. If you add in "needs to be able to run Linux" your choices go down from maybe 1 or 2 to 0.
They all have some sort of compromise. Either the speakers, screen, keyboard, touchpad, build quality, battery life, or thermals.
I have a Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon X Elite, and it's pretty close. Checks the boxes for Screen, build quality, and touchpad. Loses out on speakers and battery life, and the fans need to run a lot more than my M4 Pro MBP does. It also loses on performance, and it doesn't run Linux. Windows on Arm also still has a lot of little quirks and bugs that start to become daily annoyances.
It's incredibly frustrating. I want, essentially, my 14" M4 MacBook Pro, but in a Linux laptop, and there's no OEM out there that's fulfilling that need without compromises.
Apple keeps pulling ahead in silicon and every other laptop OEM is just being left in the dust, shrugging their shoulders, and putting out the same old 1200p 16:9 plastic garbage they have always been putting out.
Zed and the current crop of AI editors (including VSC itself) are that toothbrush.
> Collaboration as it stands today is considered alpha, and for the time being, is free for all to use! Peruse the source code.
Don't bring the attention economy to my cave of solitude, it's where I go to escape all that noise
I find Zed's feature choices to be really poor, and then I probably made a poor association based on his talking about zed
I have worked quite heavily with Terraform and went through the trough of despair myself. But after a while I realized
1. It does quite a good job at what it does, given the complexity it's handling for us.
2. We have been expecting more and more from the tool.
Mitchell himself called Terraform stuck in the past in some social media platform. However, I don't see Terraform sucking up all the interest and cash in infra, making the landscape barren so nothing else can grow. So, I hope something better will pop up. Until then, Terraform is good for what it does.
A monnumentous yak shave.
I've never used or cared for multiplayer in VSCode or JetBrains. It's silly.
I've never been the pair programmer type. The only time I've needed to share an IDE is during a SEV or ridiculously complicated systems bug, and that's 1% of the time.
1. Until this is possible without lock-in to a specific IDE, it's going to be heavily gated by adoption and network effect.
2. What are you going to do about communication with non-devs who don't use any IDE? Do I now have multiple chat tools I need to give attention to?
3. Bringing the attention economy to our primary work tool is probably a bad idea in the long run, given the evidence we have more broadly about the impact of the attention economy
4. They are also proposing a new version control database, which makes adoption and interoperability an even harder task. https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed#introducing-deltadb-o...
5. We are in an AI hype cycle, which comes with a lot of experiments and baggage. We're seeing both fandom and rational pushback against this experiment (and others)
A lot of my IDE choices are about extensibility and flexibility more than perfection for my preferred coding approach. After all, until I only work for myself I need to be ready to accommodate the needs of others as part of my job.
This feels like an attempt at deflecting blame. VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom. There's another Electron adjacent application that has good performance, the one you're probably using right now to read this page.
Depending on page content of courseI run update and Collab requires you to sign in... which again, it is fine if you want it. I don't, so it can be dormant, icon is really tiny, doesn't take much space.
The feature of Zed that is most annoying yet essential is frequent updates. Pretty much daily when I switch to Zed window, I can expect update and restart, which messes up my window layout, so this is annoyance. Getting updates and knowing you guys are shipping good stuff is what is essential.
I think integrating terminal ai's is great move and useful. Sometimes I use it like that, often I use it in terminal (like the outside of the editor terminal) and switch to editor to review or update stuff. Same with git. I am old-fashioned.
I do wonder if we need a term for shoe-horned dogfooding though. Like sure, you can do this. You could do this in Figma! Or in Notion! Or in LEETCODE if you wanted to.
At least with Zed though, its plain text. If you find another way to collab realtime on plain text, you're not bound to 1 vendor.
The multi-user editing is kind of cool... there's an ANSI art tool (PabloDraw) that you can run a host session so multiple artists can create text art, and I thought back when I first saw it, that it might be cool to be able for multiple editors to work on a project. I've used some of the collab stuff with VS Code, but haven't done enough to even begin to compare.
Not to mention that in a lot of workplaces, self-hosting or otherwise layers of bureaucracy stand in the way.
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