Parallel agents in Zed

Posted by ajeetdsouza 21 hours ago

243 points | 135 commentspage 2

sync 20 hours ago|

I'm having a hard time adjusting to the Project Panel on the right (and, at least for me, hidden by default) - seems like they're trying to bury the concept of a 'file'?

It's certainly interesting though, and I'll give it some time - the post says "It feels more natural once you've spent a little time with it"

qn9n 1 hour ago||

I think it's more that you don't need to look at the actual tree structure all that often, especially when most codebases follow logical and conventionalised structures you remember these structures and can use Command-P to search for files individually to open and the tree structure becomes something you peek at infrequently to ensure that everything is going in it's right place.

KetoManx64 9 hours ago||

You can move it to the other side panel by right clicking the Project icon that toggles the view.

jotato 20 hours ago||

Yesterday, I determined to move to Zed because they weren't pushing this stuff :(

rtfeldman 20 hours ago||

You can disable all AI features in Zed with a single setting: https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features

throwatdem12311 19 hours ago||

It doesn’t mean the bulk of their effort isn’t going to AI slopshit.

indra_varta 16 hours ago|||

I disagree. All their "AI slopshit" features are useful, and the fact that you can just.. turn them off and get a great editor regardless is what I like about it.

KetoManx64 9 hours ago|||

As compared to the slopshit that you'd rather have them working on to fit your personal needs?

tailscaler2026 20 hours ago|||

zed's got about 60 billion reasons to add an agent panel

Groxx 19 hours ago|||

Zed was one of the very-early editors to jump on adding AI. Might want to look elsewhere.

acedTrex 18 hours ago||

They are at least more tasteful about it, but they do have to keep getting VCs. And no one has ever accused VCs of being smart or technical.

Frannky 17 hours ago||

I would love to unleash parallel agents, but I am still checking every single edit while enforcing minimal, stateless, modular code, and I have the AI check in with me before writing the next file.

A lot of times, I find it has incredibly stupid ideas and tends to make the code very messy. I would love to figure out how to stop that from happening automatically.

The upside of checking in on the code, though, is that I can come up with smart directions for the AI from both a product and tech perspective. This is especially helpful when the dumb suggestions add a lot of complexity.

I think it's like when a product person asks for a new feature, or when a founder building their own product selects which feature is smarter to build and how.

mswphd 15 hours ago||

I'm expecting we'll likely end back up on agents making PRs, and having to review them. Either that or giving up on quality etc/dealing with very messy code. I've been trying various automated testing/linting/etc strategies, and they only work so well.

Frannky 15 hours ago||

That would be a nightmare. One thing is to review a PR generated by a human using AI and caring about the code; another is reviewing wild agents, especially when they make changes everywhere

mswphd 15 hours ago||

I'm not excited about it, but the only main way I've been able to discover LLM-isms that sneak in are

1. via seeing them glimpse by in the agents' window as its making edits (e.g. manual oversight), or 2. when running into an unexpected issue down the line.

If LLMs cannot automatically generate high quality code, it seems like it may be difficult to automatically notice when they generate bad code.

paulddraper 17 hours ago||

> I would love to figure out how to stop that from happening automatically.

AGENTS.md

jazzypants 16 hours ago|||

> AGENTS.md

-- which will be ignored just often enough that you can never quite trust it.

theowaway213456 15 hours ago|||

Yup. No matter how much you tell it to keep things simple, modular, crisp, whatever, it generates tons of garbage much too often.

bigmadshoe 15 hours ago||||

Btw it may be obvious but afaik claude by default only reads CLAUDE.md and not AGENTS.md

paulddraper 15 hours ago|||

And yet still less often than the average developer.

Frannky 15 hours ago|||

I think the issue is deeper than prompts, agents.md, smart flows, etc. I think the problem is that LLMs are searchers, trained on preferring some results. So, if the dumb solution is there, and the smart solution is not there, they won't spit it out.

tengbretson 18 hours ago||

I really want to like Zed, but for some reason the way it interfaces with the TypeScript language server is dog slow compared to VS Code and its derivatives.

tecoholic 15 hours ago||

Check the lsp servers that run when you are editing TS file. I noticed something like 5-6 when editing a TSX file. There was even tailwind thrown in for a good measure (the project has no tailwind). All that buttery smooth 120fps wasted on poor resource management when it comes to LSPs.

habosa 16 hours ago|||

Same. Zed is so fast it's shocking. But it was using 2-3x as much RAM as VSCode or Cursor with TypeScript and the language server crashed a lot. Given that work is a TypeScript monorepo, that was a dealbreaker for me.

xpe 18 hours ago||

I'll bet if you point out the issues where this is described and measured, you'll get some eyeballs.

aeneas_ory 7 hours ago||

What are parallel agents worth to professional engineers if reviewing the code is a pain (aka non existent) in Zed? Please add proper code review tools (compare with branch|file|revision) and GH pr review tools like IntelliJ!

qn9n 1 hour ago|

It has decent git tools, it has had so for a little while now https://zed.dev/docs/git

fishgoesblub 19 hours ago||

I remember when Zed's main thing was "collaborative" editing. Not as profitable as AI I suppose.

giancarlostoro 18 hours ago||

Zed is probably the best text editor in the last 10 years. It has quirks, but it is insanely powerful and capable out of the box. I don't even bother trying to setup Neovim because of Zed. They let people for PRs for missing vim features for their vim emulation, and its insanely capable.

I hope someday they get the funding they deserve, because it has insane potential. It's why I subscribe to their pay plan, even if I dont use it all the time, I want them to succeed.

theappsecguy 17 hours ago||

I do wish they'd focus on closing the gap to Jetbrains by implementing the QOL features that are missing. I understand they have to do what VC wants to see, but this agentic stuff is so tiring.

zackangelo 15 hours ago|||

I give them a try about twice a year. I write a lot of Rust which should be squarely in their wheelhouse.

This last time I was pleasantly surprised to find they mostly fixed their SSH remote editing support. But then it started truncating rustc inline error messages and I couldn’t figure out how to view the whole thing easily. When you’re just trying to get something done little bits like this can add up quickly. Punted back to Cursor for now.

donmcronald 14 hours ago||

I don't like the way remote editing works with plugins. IIRC, the remote agent pulls the plugins from the connecting client. I get why it's done like that, but I'd way rather have it go the opposite direction.

I want a setup where I can have an immutable devcontainer with local copies of everything I need to develop 100% offline; dependencies, tools, etc.. Having my local editor pull plugins from a devcontainer for the project seems to make more sense to me.

I didn't dig in too much. Maybe there's a way to make it work somehow.

dalenw 16 hours ago|||

Agreed. It still feels like Zed is only good for writing scripts.

the__alchemist 12 hours ago||

I give them props for writing a truly responsive editor that's easy to use, and can switch to keybinding sets from other editors. (So you don't have to learn new ones) And I find it works more naturally for multi-file projects than VsCode, and Sublime.

In terms of in-line instantaneous error highlighting, introspection, refactoring, and autocomplete, it's not on the same level as JetBrains.

cdrnsf 18 hours ago||

If Cursor is worth $60bn, how much is Zed worth?

conqrr 16 hours ago||

Love Zed for my personal projects at home with Openrouter. But I cant use it at work as I'm forced to use claude code at work and find the VSCode+claude code combo better. I know zed has claudecode integration, but I found it to be very weak compared to zedagent+claudemodel. Has this improved?

Petersipoi 15 hours ago|

Do you mind sharing what your spend is like on Openrouter? I pay for the $200 Claude Code plan just so I never have to think about usage or feel like I'm paying per prompt. But I nearly max out my usage each week and I have no idea what that would cost me on Openrouter. I hear a lot of people are using MiniMax of Openrouter. Is that what you do?

lerp-io 5 hours ago|

tried using zed but when i use codex cli, when agent updates file, it doesn't even register in the "buffer" (why call it buffer? trying to be different?), i have to close the file and open it back up again for it to update the file contents which creates bugs where i edit some other thing in file and save (no "overwrite warning" which i get in vscode) it just overwrites the file....so the editor is just plain buggy.

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