The topic of Your paid AI coding tools are overkill — here’s what I switched to instead is currently the subject of lively debate — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Whether you’re using Claude Code or Codex, or use them through another harness like Pi, vibe coding, and agentic development are here to stay. The thing is, unless you’re hosting your own local LLM models, the costs of that accelerated development cycle add up quickly. And sometimes, you just don’t need the additional help. There’s something to be said about a more traditional coding environment, where the AI is there to fix structure and expand function calls intelligently.
There’s something to be said about putting in the work and seeing code blocks that your own fingers type in. I know it helps me learn more than telling my personal clanker to figure it out, and I don’t particularly like reading code after the fact. I’ve gone back to the old school, although the program I’ve decided to use has plenty of modern conveniences there to be used when my brain needs a helping hand.
Coding environments span a spectrum, with hands-on, basic Notepad at one end and hands-off, AI-powered orchestration at the other. Zed is closer to the former side, but with an AI chat window that can draw from a multitude of providers, including locally hosted LLMs, to save cash and your privacy. That approach makes it great for learning, as you can write your code on one side, while asking for clarifications, examples, and optimizations in the chat window.
But it’s more than that. Zed can leverage AI and MCP servers to access immense amounts of on-tap knowledge. Add that to language servers to keep ahead of syntax changes and a robust theming engine, and it’s one of my favorite coding editors to date.
It uses AI to predict the contents of your next code block as you type, which is a marked change from Tab autocomplete of terms or known strings. It can do this at whatever pace you code, and uses CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) to add AI-created code into your file while you’re typing, without running the risk of overwriting human-coded blocks (or vice versa).
It feels like the best of both worlds to me. Hands-on experience to codify learning, while leveraging the best of AI models to enhance my skills.
It’s a sad fact that so many of the apps that live on our desktops are built with Electron wrappers, making them glorious web apps with associated sluggishness. It makes for quick multi-platform development (for the app developer, not you), but it’s a pain. Zed makes every other code editor look like a snail, because it’s built in Rust from the ground up.
That already makes it speedier, but the devs rethought how IDEs are rendered, and Zed treats your coding environment as frames in a video game rather than a web page. Same macro view of rendering before showing the page, but completely different outcome. Zed aggressively parallelizes its workflow across your CPU cores, pulling every available resource for hefty tasks while things like syntax highlighting are run in the background.
Zed takes a different approach to AI than Antigravity or its ilk. It doesn’t lean into agentic coding, though you can get LLMs to ideate, create, and fix things for you. But it does this from the code you can see, rather than abstracting it away in pseudo-code conversations, as harnesses do.
I appreciate this, because I’m still learning Jinja and YAML, and (reluctantly) Python. I’m not ashamed to say I’m not terribly good yet, but that’s par for the course. I know enough to not think that anything I one-shotted with Claude Code has any bearing on my reasoning ability, although something that’s been created over several days of agentic coddling does have merit.
But knowing the syntax and being nudged in the right direction when I typo is a good thing, giving me the underpinnings of the knowledge I’ll need to get better. To make better tools, even, once I get to that stage. And to be able to secure those tools against leaking credentials, ports, and other misconfiguration errors, the entire software market should be paying more attention to.
While I’ve been testing the Zed subscription plan, I’ve also got my own subs to Claude Max, and a couple of other providers that Zed also supports. That’s on top of the connector to Codex, Claude Code, and my local LLM endpoint, which has a multitude of downloaded models at my disposal.
The point is I’m not losing access to anything by using Zed, and in some ways I’m gaining as I can use those as a companion next to my code blocks as I stumble through learning, rather than asking for something, getting something in return, and having to work backwards to know if the code that the agent created for me is both correct, working, and secure.
Vibe coding platforms are powerful, but users often don’t know what they created.
The problem I have with agentic coding harnesses is that they don’t show me what’s going on, or prompt me to pay attention. I’m not a seasoned coder, and I want to learn, and have something or someone look over my work and suggest options or corrections, not do my work for me. That’s not a knock on the utility of AI coding tools that are set up that way, I still use those for some things, but I like seeing the ebb and flow of code, and a more traditional editor helps me immensely.
Why it matters
News like this often changes audience expectations and competitors’ plans.
When one player makes a move, others usually react — it is worth reading the event in context.
What to look out for next
The full picture will become clear in time, but the headline already shows the dynamics of the industry.
Further statements and user reactions will add to the story.