Sequoia backs Zed
82 comments
·August 20, 2025mccoyb
spudlyo
The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.
Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
parentheses
Note to Zed: I prefer paid products to enshittened ones.
Please please please, get paid rather than holding on too tightly to making things free forcing future enshittening.
rtfeldman
We're working on it! :)
You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).
jchw
Unless they have very unusual terms on their funding, it isn't really entirely in their control in the long term. Hopefully they find a way to make their investors whole that doesn't suck for everyone else, but if not, well, I at least appreciate that the editor is truly open source, since at least it offers a contingency plan in the worst cases.
If I'm wrong I'd love to know, but I think that we need to start talking about what funding really implies more honestly. It's traditionally met with unabashed enthusiasm and congratulations, which I totally understand, but it's a mutual exchange, not an award or a grant. I absolutely believe that everyone wants to make good on their promises, but promises made to users are not legally binding, and the track record for upholding those has not been great. Plus, as a user, I want to pay for software, but nothing feels worse than paying, then watching enshittification unfold anyways... When this happens, the investors should send you a nice postcard thanking you for paying back some of their money.
Can $20/mo sustain a text editor company with a massive multimillion dollar valuation? Well, we'll see. Good luck Zed Industries, we're all counting on you.
fragmede
I mean, eventually, sure. It took Uber around 15 years to get to profitability. ChatGPT came out in 2022, so get your predictions for 2037 in now.
danr4
> "I don't think an editor should be VC backed"
it's a software company. they sell software.
dymk
Then sell software, not equity
tjc2210
Same. Especially not having been familiar with who Sequoia is. Altman, Huang, Musk, etc.
pbiggar
[flagged]
pton_xd
> To make this possible, we're building DeltaDB: a new kind of version control that tracks every operation, not just commits.
Let me guess: DeltaDB is free to use as long as we host your data and have free range on training AI based on your editor interactions.
azemetre
Definitely sounds very eerie. Luckily there are open source solutions that do just this with no AI integration:
nerdypepper
how is atuin doing what deltaDB does?
azemetre
ah not much at all, did too much selective reading on my end. Should have read the entire blog and not the quoted selection.
decentrality
Not sure what this guess is based on. Would that be a guess for git also, if mentioned by a company versus an individual?
My read was that they are pulling a Linus Torvalds with the Linux->Git move where both are innovations on their own, but work great together ( without dystopian universe instantiation )
CRDTs mentioned: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
decentrality
DeltaDB sounds of being a >git innovation for coding itself, and would fulfill Zed's promises in Nathan Sobo's debate/discussion with Steve Yegge recently.
Seems to solve a real problem which is growing rapidly, both in the old way and in the new way ... if it can overcome _slop_ in LLM chats, and the sheer enormity of code/data ahead. Trying to picture how coherence will survive.
With claims/hype/concern floating around that >90% of code will be LLM-generated within 3-6 months, with the insinuation/tone [1] that the same amount of code will be written by humans as now ( at least at first ) but LLM code will radically grow to dilute the space ( as is happening ) ... seems like DeltaDB being done right/well is going to be do-or-die on whether coherence remains possible!
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
Groxx
For anyone not clicking through the link: it's from 5 months ago, predicting 90% of today's code will be from LLMs.
>I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code.
They're going to keep saying it because it's a juicy sound bite and they're sales people. That doesn't make it any more true than "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our socks" or how we surely have all had flying cars for decades now.
verdverm
I had a week where I embraced and went deep on ai first coding (not vibe, that'd be crazy)
The thing wrote at least 80%, so we aren't far off in this anecdotal instance. There are citizen devs who are building fun things for themselves where the AI does 100%
It made me realize these things are more capable than I knew, though they still do dumb stuff reliably. But, it is easy to undo those changes, so the productivity boost remains
adastra22
By sheer volume, that 90% number might be right.
decentrality
I agree. The level of dilution is becoming obvious and a big problem... code is becoming predominantly disposable
Despite the article being salesmanship hype ( at WEF no less ) we are now in the time mentioned, and can feel this
The idea that the code is GOOD or even being used is not necessary to be saying that it exists, strewn everywhere
arkits
Have they fixed the big/feature where it insists on downloading entire distributions of Node.js for running it's language server functionality?
reitanuki
This is basically my main gripe with Zed atm — it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries.
I have a light fork that tries to nullify this, but I don't think I've managed to catch all the instances.
Other than that, it's a very nice editor in my opinion.
decentrality
Easy fix:
{ "server_url": "", }
I comment out that JSONC line periodically when I feel like cherry-picking updates
aeon_ai
The beginning of the end.
You know where this goes.
kordlessagain
Am I the only one that associates "Zed" and "development" with Zed Shaw? I don't think he has anything to do with zed.dev, unfortunately.
_mu
I really appreciate Zed Shaw for walking his own path and sticking to his guns.
I miss some of his old posts that he took down from his website, in particular the one on learning statistics, that was a great one.
poetril
You’re not. Everytime I see him on Twitch I have to do a double take.
slig
Did not know he was a streamer now, thanks!
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segmondy
zed is just on the hype train, obviously very talented people, they are thinking hard about LLMs but I'm not really sure where they are going, their pivot is probably going to be more interesting...
k_bx
I don't know what's DeltaDB, but if it will be able to show when a commit is simultaneously a refactoring and a change of code being refactored (moved into another module) – I would love to see that! At the moment if you refactor you punish the people reviewing the code, which reverses the motivation for cleaning things up.
witx
> we've been building the world's fastest IDE
Any data to backup this?
square_usual
Well, last year, Nikita Tonsky measured it and it did worse than Sublime: https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/112146684329230663
It's funny how often people buy into the marketing and say "blazing fast" without actually questioning it. FWIW, I still prefer Zed because its LSP integration and vim mode are better than Sublime's.
witx
Yes if a software markets itself like this without backing up I smell BS.
Like any company now is "global leader in X market".
yurishimo
You can try it out. I would say it’s aiming to be a more modern Sublime Text, which is a win to be considered in the same category imo.
duped
I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.
The modern Sublime Text is Sublime Text. There is way too much "extra" in Zed to compare it. If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.
decentrality
This is accurate. I came over from Sublime Text because it had become laggy over >5 running instances, and native LLM integration. Even VS Code doesn't actually have that... where everything is an extension versus seamlessly/perfectly fitting
As mentioned in other comments, it actually outperforms window management in general in many/most cases. Radically flexible and almost never gets in the way
mandeepj
It’s sounds very similar to Google wave, if anyone remembers that, but for code.
tzury
That came back as Slack and other similar products
mtndew4brkfst
Nothing since then really recaptured what I personally liked about GWave or let me use their tool in similar ways to how I used it. YMMV, of course, more so than most of my comments.
Dowwie
Zed defaults don't seem to capture the full value of what it offers. For instance, edit predictions via tab completion are documented yet I've never experienced them. I need better settings, I guess.
I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up).
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.