With the AI stuff, it feels like they invested a bit prematurely. When the Agentic editing demo came out (6 months, 10 months ago? It’s a blur), it felt right. Accepting and reviewing edits, live tracking ..etc., felt like pair programming. The ACP addition felt like a natural evolution .
With the continuous improvement in CLI tools and people’s experience with them, it feels like doing a live review or edit-by-edit approvals all feel like a drag. I personally have come to avoid using the IDE/Editor. I just kick up Claude code - plan mode, auto-accept edits. Once the session is done, switch to the editor and make necessary adjustments. I suspect people with Max subscription and “dangerously-skip-permissions” …etc won’t even care if an editor has AI integration or not.
The only editor integration I think is semi useful is wiring it into Diagnostics/Problems data that the editor has from extensions. Speeds up the agents flow quite a bit when it leans on that to check its work vs always executing (say) “eslint” directly.
But that can be done easily enough with an MCP extension for your editor/IDE of choice
I used to only use JetBrains for AI stuff, now I just open everything in Zed because of its Claude Code integration. Especially with the linters and other nice to haves. I am insanely close to cancelling JetBrains.
Theres a plugin for Claude Code and you can use Claude models from Copilot in IntelliJ. Are those options worse than Zed, especially considering other comments about Zed missing basic editor stuff?
The copilot plugin with Claude models (Sonnet models) is very integrated in the IDE, and so is Jetbrains AI (even more integrated than Copilot) which I believe can also use those models. So I wonder what's the actual difference.
The plugin just opens a terminal whereas in Zed you get a more natively feeling experience. In JetBrains they do support it as one of their agents but now you have to buy into JetBrains AI credit system instead of just using your Claude subscription.
Theres two ways to use Claude Code in JetBrains and instead of helping them make their plugin better they opted to try and make money off of it. Which Zed could have done the same but instead lowered their monthly to let you use your own Claude Code subscription.
With the continuous improvement in CLI tools and people’s experience with them, it feels like doing a live review or edit-by-edit approvals all feel like a drag. I personally have come to avoid using the IDE/Editor. I just kick up Claude code - plan mode, auto-accept edits. Once the session is done, switch to the editor and make necessary adjustments. I suspect people with Max subscription and “dangerously-skip-permissions” …etc won’t even care if an editor has AI integration or not.