alt Hacker NewsWhat an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.
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What exactly is phenomenal and novel about Zed? I've tried it a couple of times for a week or so, didn't see the point, and moved on every time.
And I'm not luddite swearing by vi or something, I use VSCode and Idea, and have used Sublime for many years, Xcode on/off for some Obj-C/Swift dev, Eclipse for 5-6 years in the 2000s, and vim for everything cli/lightweight since forever.
Is the GUI tech what's supposed to be novel? I couldn't care less about that backend in my everyday editor use as long as the editor is fast enough. Which on modern hardware, even Idea is.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good editor still.
There is this big recurrent misunderstanding with zed's ToS that produces some extreme, misinformed reactions. Zed (the ide) is open source ("GPL v3 with Apache 2.0 for certain components"). The ToS are only applicable for the services they provide when you subscribe for an account and use them [0]. Some people read the ToS, think they apply just for the editor, and think that zed is stealing your source code and whatnot, because it would indeed be weird to have these ToS for just editing stuff locally, without any of the additional services provided. However, if one actually reads the ToS instead of nitpicking a paragraph, it is very clear what it is about.
Any ToS for a company that you send data to process includes similar terms that just allow it to process the data as you are expecting them to in order to provide these services. Eg for the AI tab-completion, they process part of your source code on their servers and provide a tab-completion suggestion ("derivative data"). Some people are evidently either unfamiliar about how these things work or about the data-related legalese terms used (barring any bad intentions assumed). If anything, paragraph 4.2 [1] makes it clear that any data output is owned by the user (and not by zed). This whole discussion made me read the terms and (apart from the arbitration thing imo, though not uncommon), I couldn't see any kind of dark pattern or issue.
I like zed a lot, it works great, I am definitely cautious about the fact that they have received VC money which holds me from getting "all-in", but criticism that is based on misunderstandings or on obviously factually wrong arguments is not very useful.
[0] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/50568#issuecomm... (could be some better source than a github comment but it has been repeated many times)
From what I can see, one of the top comments (at the time of this comment) is worried about legalese claiming to have "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable" access to your source code. I think it is very fair criticism to not want to give away your source code.
yeah, all forms of criticism, all feature suggestions, any comparisons to other products/solutions, etc. should be outright banned by HN. if you aren't praising the thing, get out!
(do you comment this same type of thing on github, microsoft, apple, etc. posts? all of these comments seem absolutely tame compared to the vitriol in those threads. most top comments here are supportive. most of the negative ones are constructive.)
Maybe this wasn't true an hour ago, but all the top 3 comments right now look supportive (if I am to count yours), and the next few are just mildly critical.
Maybe they'd be better if the title were informative.
^^the #1 reason I limit my daily time allowance for HN
Maybe they shouldn't be releasing it with anti-consumer terms of service? People's objections are legitimate. Where else should they be discussed?
I think the Zed team's enthusiasm adds a lot of momentum to the product, on top of their indisputable engineering capabilities.
I agree, the toxic trolls focusing on minor nitpicks like a license agreement that allows your text editor to steal all your source codes really harshes the vibes.
I hope HN can appreciate what a game changer (and paradigm shift) Zed can be.
To the Zed developers: CONGRATULATIONS! I have been following your project with great interest since your speed demo years ago. And since it’s AI-first, I’m interested to see how we can integrate it with https://safebots.ai (Safebots, Safebox, and Safecloud).
I would love to see how we might be able to increase the safety of agents in Zed, use local models like Qwen/Deepseek and we also have Grokers which can turn any codebase into a graph with tree-sitter and help your agents far more than RAG and similarity search (https://grokers.ai/deck.pdf)
What’s the best way of getting in touch? (If you want, my profile has a way of emailing me).
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I haven't read them because they're now buried, but whatever those top comments said can't be bad enough to warrant your vitriol. Abysmal means bad, not pessimistic. It's inappropriate for the (currently) top comment to be casting such judgment in its preface.
I don't think overly-opinionated meta-comments are inherently bad, but I don't come to this site for them. I don't even think your comment is bad; I'm mad that this is what the people of HN have decided is the most important remark on the matter. It tells me something unfortunate.
FWIW, the top comments at the time of my comment (one hour after yours, two hours after the article was posted) are all complimentary. You commented one hour after the article was posted; it's worth waiting a bit for the comment voting to shake out.