I have been hearing a lot of good things about Zed recently, so I thought I would try it out instead of VS Code. I have spent a lot of time setting up VS Code, but even on my fast Mac it seems quite slow.
Zed in comparison has been ridiculously quick, but I haven't been able to make the switch completely yet.
In case you are thinking of making the switch too, here are some of the features I like and what is missing.
Good points #
As mentioned Zed is very fast. I think that is mostly down to it being written in Rust instead of being an Electron app like VS Code. It starts instantly and just feels a lot more responsive compared to VS Code.
Zed is also completely open source unlike VS Code which is mostly open source but with a lot of closed source code as well.
Everything mostly just works without the need of too many extensions. You get git blame (knowing who committed a line of code), out of the box without requiring GitLens.
It also comes with agentic coding like Copilot. I have been using the Cline extension in VS Code, but the Zed offering seems more polished. I haven't used the AI tools much this week, but I plan to try them out more.
I have also tried out the remote tools with my own home server and that seems to work just as good as with VS Code.
Bad points #
The main point against Zed is it hasn't got the extensive plugin collection that VS Code has. I installed all the extensions I require for the languages I use most such as C#, Terraform, Python, but there are still a few I am missing such as TypeSpec and SqlFluff. I am sure more extensions will come out as more people start using it. I should probably look at building my own extensions instead of complaining about the ones that are missing.
C# didn't work out of the box but was a relatively simple fix. I am not sure if this is a Zed problem or a Microsoft problem but at least it was a quick fix.
The second major point against Zed and the reason I will still need VS Code installed is the lack of a debugger. I don't have to debug code that often but when I do having to go back to VS Code is a pain. Hopefully they will roll out a debugger in the near future.
There are other small annoyances such as lack of test runner but most of the time I run my tests on the command line anyway.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article — LegoGPT: Generating Physically Stable and Buildable Lego — I loved Lego as a kid and as an adult to be honest. This is a really cool use of AI. It is still a bit basic looking at the examples, but a nice idea.
🛠️ Tool — Gmail to SQLite — I can see quite a few uses for this. For example, you could give an MCP server access to the database so it knows about your emails without giving it access to send emails.
🎓 Tutorial — Plain Vanilla Web — I am big advocate for keeping it simple. If you just have a simple website then using something like React is likely to be overkill.
🛠️ Tool — Scraperr – A Self Hosted Webscraper — This is cool web scraping tool. Obviously only use this ethically and be mindful of excessive scraping! Not all data is available via an API so its great there is an alternative if you need one.
📝 Article — How to make a Link Aggregator in Obsidian — I use Obsidian to write this newsletter as well store all of my notes. I am currently using Karakeep for storing articles I want to come back to, but I can see the appeal of using Obsidian.
📝 Article — Embeddings are underrated (2024) — This is a good explanation of how text embeddings work. I haven't played with embeddings much, but I wonder if they can be used to give AI a history of previous conversations.
🛠️ Tool — FastVLM: Efficient vision encoding for vision language models — I have said many times before that the future of AI is in personal on device models. This is really cool to see how quick it can understand images. This could be good for real-time translations or giving an AI more context of its surroundings.
📝 Article — Stop Using Docker Like It's 2015 — I noticed a lot of my new docker compose files no longer have the version at the top. I should go round and delete it on all of my services. There are a few good tips like health checks that I need to implement too.
📝 Article — A Programmer's Reading List: 100 Articles I Enjoyed (1-50) — There are some interesting reads on this list, worth a look.
📝 Article — Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android — I have looked at these AR glasses in the past, mostly in relation to gaming. I am not sure if I could use them for coding though. I would prefer to have the ones that float the window in space rather than follow your eyes around.
📝 Article — Human — This is similar to the theory that we are all in some intelligent beings' simulation. It was fun to read though.
📝 Article — Stack overflow is almost dead — I am not surprised by this. I have pretty much stopped Googling for problems now and use AI when I get stuck. Given a lot of the AI was trained from StackOverflow we may find AI getting worse at solving problems if fewer people are posting about how to fix them. Especially with newer technologies.
📝 Article — The unreasonable effectiveness of an LLM agent loop with tool use — These agentic loops are getting pretty good, especially when they have the ability to self correct.
📝 Article — After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain — Vibe coding while good at produce quick prototypes doesn't do that great when it comes to large scale projects. I think a lot of this is the LLMs inability to cope with large context sizes. As the project gets bigger it gets harder for it to keep a complete picture in memory.
📝 Article — Why I’m meditating 300 hours — I have tried meditating a few times, and it has always been beneficial, but I struggle to make it a habit. Maybe it is time to try again.
📝 Article — Thoughts on thinking — I do wonder as we really on AI more and more will we lose the ability to think critically and creatively. You need to enjoy the process not the outcome (see my horrible art below).
🛠️ Tool — KVSplit – Run 2-3x longer contexts on Apple Silicon — I have been impressed with the ability of my Mac to run AI models. Anything above 14b tends to use too much memory, but it looks like this could improve things.
📝 Article — O2 VoLTE: locating any customer with a phone call — They have now patched this, but it is interesting to see how this was done.
📝 Article — am i supposed to meet no one? — I mentioned last week that my colleagues took a Waymo, a driverless Uber. This does seem to be the way the world is going, self-checkouts, deliveries by drone and driverless cars. As an introvert, if it wasn't for my family I probably wouldn't talk to anyone for weeks on end.
📝 Article — Ditching Obsidian and building my own — I don't think I have the time to build my own Obsidian, although if they do a rug pull at least all my notes are in an open format.
📝 Article — Don't Guess My Language — I have had this a few times when travelling abroad, and can see the frustration. No I don't want this page in Japanese, and thanks for translating the language selector too.
🛠️ Tool — Zod 4 — Not to be confused with Zed, Zod is a TypeScript first validation library. I have been using version 3 for a while to validate API responses, and it has been pretty slick.
📝 Article — Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game — I did my final year university project on simulating animal social networks. I had to learn a lot of game theory then including the prisoners' dilemma. This is a good illustrated explanation.
🛠️ Tool — Claude Code SDK — Claude are doing some pretty impressive things when it comes to AI and code. With this release I can see Claude becoming the default for a lot of AI developer apps.
🛠️ Tool — Jules: An Asynchronous Coding Agent — When this came up on my feed I didn't realise it was Google to start with. I haven't got round to try this yet, if you have let me know if it is any good.
🛠️ Tool — Devstral — Another local AI model that is supposed to excel at coding. I wish these didn't need to consuming all my RAM. Hopefully they will become more efficient in future.
📰 News — Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot — I used Pocket for years, but I have since switched to self-hosted solutions. I am using Karakeep at the moment, but I have heard Linkwarden is pretty good too.
👨💻 Latest from me #
Apart from this newsletter I have taken quite a long break from posting stuff online. I have been trying to get back into my hobbies a bit more which for me includes playing guitar and drawing. I have always been quite good at art but never really practiced enough to get really good.
I have been trying to practice my drawing every day and posting the results on Instagram (no matter how bad). If you want to see some questionable artwork and hopefully see me improve then feel free to follow my art account: @alexhyettart
💬 Quote of the Week #
“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” — Lao Tzu
From the article How to Be Successful, Cobra Effects, & More by Sahil Bloom.
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