Bit premature to post this, especially without some manifesto explaining the particular reason for this fork. The "no rugpulls" implies something happened with Zed, but you can't really expect every HN reader to be in the loop with the open source controversy of the week.
I'm confused how the "contributors" feature works on GitHub, is this showing that this fork has 986 contributors and 29,961 commits? Surely that's the Zed project overall. I feel like this gives undue reputation to an offshoot project.
I don’t view Chrome and Chromium as different projects, but primarily as different builds of the same project. I feel like this will (eventually) go the same way.
> I’m gradually removing all the features I deem undesirable: telemetry, auto-updates, proprietary cloud-only AI integrations, reliance on node.js, auto-downloading of language servers, upsells, the sign-in button, etc. I’m also aiming to make some of the cloud-only features self-hostable where it makes sense, e.g. running Zeta edit predictions off of your own llama.cpp or vLLM instance. It’s currently good enough to be my main editor, though I tend to be a bit behind on updates since there is a lot of code churn and my way of modifying the codebase isn’t exactly ideal for avoiding merge conflicts. To that end I’m experimenting with using tree-sitter to automatically apply AST-level edits, which might end up becoming a tool that can build customizable “unshittified” versions of Zed.
I'm glad to see this. I'm happy to plan to pay for Zed - its not there yet but its well on its way - But I don't want essentially _any_ of the AI and telemetry features.
The fact of the matter is, I am not even using AI features much in my editor anymore. I've tried Copilot and friends over and over and it's just not _there_. It needs to be in a different location in the software development pipeline (Probably code reviews and RAG'ing up for documentation).
- I can kick out some money for a settings sync service.
- I can kick out some money to essentially "subscribe" for maintenance.
I don't personally think that an editor is going to return the kinds of ROI VCs look for. So.... yeah. I might be back to Emacs in a year with IntelliJ for powerful IDE needs....
Just to echo the sentiment, I've had struggles trying to figure out how to use LLMs in my daily work.
I've landed on using it as part of my code review process before asking someone to review my PR. I get a lot of the nice things that LLMs can give me (a second set of eyes, a somewhat consistent reviewer) but without the downsides (no waiting on the agent to finish writing code that may not work, costs me personally nothing in time and effort as my Org pays for the LLM, when it hallucinates I can easily ignore it).
On the same day a Code of Conduct violation discussion was opened against Zed for accepting funding from Sequoia after Maguire's very loud and very public Islamophobia and open support for occupation and genocide: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
I welcome this, now we get Zed for free with privacy on top without all the AI features that nobody asked for.
As soon as any dev tool gets VC backing there should be an open source alternative to alleviate the inevitable platform decay (or enshittification for lack of a better word)
This is awesome, honestly with the release of Qwen3Coder-30B-A3B, we have a model that’s pretty close to the perfect local model. Obviously the larger 32B dense one does better but the 30B MoE model does agentic pretty well and is great at FIM/autocomplete
What I really want from Zed is multi window support. Currently, I can’t pop out the agent panel or any other panels to use them on another monitor.
Local-first is nice, but I do use the AI tools, so I’m unlikely to use this fork in the near term. I do like the idea behind this, especially no telemetry and no contributor agreements. I wish them the best of luck.
I did happily use Zed for about year before using any of its AI features, so who knows, maybe I’ll get fed up with AI and switch to this eventually.
I've been using AI extensivly the last few weeks but not as a coding agent. I really don't trust it for that. Its really helpful for generating example code for a library I might not be familiar with. a month ago, I was interested in using rabbitmq but he docs were limited. chatgpt was able to give me a fairly good amount of starter code to see how these things are wired together. I used some of it and added to it by hand to finally come up with what is running in production. It certainly has value in that regard. Letting it write and modify code directly? I'm not ready for that. other things its useful for is finding the source of an error when the error message isnt' so great. I'll usually copy paste code that I know is causing the error along with the error message and it'll point out the issues in a way that I can immediatly address. My method is cheaper too, I can get by just fine on the $20/month chatgpt sub doing that.
I on the other hand would probably only switch to Zed with the AI integration. Want to learn a new language? Using AI speeds it up by a factor of months.
The CLA does not change the copyright owner of the contributed content (https://zed.dev/cla), so I'm confused by the project's comments on copyright reassignment.
I always have mixed feelings about forks. Especially the hard ones. Zed recently rolled out a feature that lets you disable all AI features. I also know telemetry can be opted out. So I don’t see the need for this fork. Especially given the list of features stated. Feels like something that can be upstreamed. Hope that happens
I remember the Redis fork and how it fragmented that ecosystem to a large extent.
41 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 56.3 ms ] threadIf there’s a group of people painfully aware of telemetry and AI being pushed everywhere is devs…
https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed/graphs/contributors
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenless_Zone_Zero
> Since someone mentioned forking, I suppose I’ll use this opportunity to advertise my fork of Zed: https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed
> I’m gradually removing all the features I deem undesirable: telemetry, auto-updates, proprietary cloud-only AI integrations, reliance on node.js, auto-downloading of language servers, upsells, the sign-in button, etc. I’m also aiming to make some of the cloud-only features self-hostable where it makes sense, e.g. running Zeta edit predictions off of your own llama.cpp or vLLM instance. It’s currently good enough to be my main editor, though I tend to be a bit behind on updates since there is a lot of code churn and my way of modifying the codebase isn’t exactly ideal for avoiding merge conflicts. To that end I’m experimenting with using tree-sitter to automatically apply AST-level edits, which might end up becoming a tool that can build customizable “unshittified” versions of Zed.
The fact of the matter is, I am not even using AI features much in my editor anymore. I've tried Copilot and friends over and over and it's just not _there_. It needs to be in a different location in the software development pipeline (Probably code reviews and RAG'ing up for documentation).
- I can kick out some money for a settings sync service. - I can kick out some money to essentially "subscribe" for maintenance.
I don't personally think that an editor is going to return the kinds of ROI VCs look for. So.... yeah. I might be back to Emacs in a year with IntelliJ for powerful IDE needs....
I've landed on using it as part of my code review process before asking someone to review my PR. I get a lot of the nice things that LLMs can give me (a second set of eyes, a somewhat consistent reviewer) but without the downsides (no waiting on the agent to finish writing code that may not work, costs me personally nothing in time and effort as my Org pays for the LLM, when it hallucinates I can easily ignore it).
That's all I have to say right now, but I feel it needs to be said. Thank you for doing this.
As soon as any dev tool gets VC backing there should be an open source alternative to alleviate the inevitable platform decay (or enshittification for lack of a better word)
This is a better outcome for everyone.
Some of us just want a good editor for free.
Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366
Sequoia backs Zed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172
Local-first is nice, but I do use the AI tools, so I’m unlikely to use this fork in the near term. I do like the idea behind this, especially no telemetry and no contributor agreements. I wish them the best of luck.
I did happily use Zed for about year before using any of its AI features, so who knows, maybe I’ll get fed up with AI and switch to this eventually.
I remember the Redis fork and how it fragmented that ecosystem to a large extent.