Zed code editor hears your prayers, rolls out AI-free mode
- Reference: 1753892114
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/07/30/zed_without_llm_bot/
- Source link:
" [1]You Can Now Disable All AI Features in Zed ," the developers announced late kast week, and by the time you read this, it should be available in the latest build of the editor. At the time of writing, it's in Preview build 0.197.
It's an interesting move, given that the [2]Zed Industries homepage puts AI integration front and center. Even so, Zed users have been [3]calling for this for about a year, citing issues such as corporate rules forbidding use of public LLM tools, so they can't risk installing it.
[4]
We wrote about Zed a year ago [5]when the first Linux version appeared . Text editors are old news, but Zed has a few interesting characteristics. It's written in Rust, so it's a compiled native app on the two OSes it supports so far. It's smaller, although not by much – the approximately 100 MB Linux Flatpak brings in about a gigabyte of dependencies. And it's fast, which is one reason generative AI skeptics like it. Internally, it's built around [6]conflict-free replicated data types , which means collaborative online editing without being built around any particular cloud provider. (This also means a built-in chat tool, which seems a bit like overkill to us, but what do we know?)
[7]
[8]
Notably, several members of the team previously developed the Atom editor, the app that brought Electron apps to the world – those built in JavaScript and bundled with a very cut-down instance of Chromium. Electron apps are everywhere now. They deliver the "write once, run anywhere" promise Java made 30 years ago, but with a high price. Rather than Java's system-wide JVM, every Electron app must embed its own copy of the huge runtime.
We do mean huge. For instance, Balena Etcher, one of the easiest FOSS tools for writing disk images onto USB keys, is an Electron app, meaning that there are versions for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and they're functionally identical. But the [9]compressed downloads are in the region of 150-200 MB. By comparison, the [10]Rufus tool for Windows is about 2 MB (1 percent the size), and the cross-platform [11]USBImager is under 200 kB (which is about a tenth of Rufus).
[12]
For the vendor, Electron means building and offering separate downloads for each OS. For the user, it means there's no way to update them all at once.
[13]GitHub owner Microsoft killed Atom three years ago in favor of its own Electron-based editor VS Code. Zed was announced the next day.
Native app, smaller, faster, built-in collaboration – all good things. That it's from the people who created Atom is a fun footnote. Still, it did strike us that it's a sign of the times when "now available without AI" takes a year to develop and is seen as a significant advance.
[14]Devs are frustrated with AI coding tools that deliver nearly-right solutions
[15]Caught a vibe that this coding trend might cause problems
[16]Replit makes vibe-y promise to stop its AI agents making vibe coding disasters
[17]AWS slaps usage caps on Kiro as AI editor preview proves too popular for its own good
The Register frequently reports on problems under the [18]tag of AI-pocalypse , and recently covered a study that found [19]developers were 20 percent slower using GenAI assistants, although they thought they were that much faster. [20]Executives are losing faith , too.
Last month, the excellent Pivot to AI reported that [21]GenAI is similar to gambling addiction – the same sort of behavioral patterns that lead gamblers to just one more bet, the big one that will pay off all their debts and make them rich. Instead, LLM-addicted vibe coders fervently believe that "just one more prompt" will give them the killer app that will make them rich. It's [22]like digital cocaine . As [23]Natalie Ponte put it on LinkedIn , to understand the hype, try replacing the abbreviation "AI" with the word "cocaine." For example:
If you don't use cocaine, you'll be replaced with someone who uses cocaine.
You may not like cocaine, but it's part of the developer's workflow today, so you should learn how to use cocaine.
There's some reason to think that the hype bubble around GenAI may soon deflate. There are [24]reports that the AI bubble is now bigger than the dotcom one, a quarter of a century ago. Maybe a bot-free Zed will remain useful once all those cheap subsidized LLMs in the cloud go away. ®
Get our [25]Tech Resources
[1] https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features
[2] https://zed.dev/
[3] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/16750
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aIqV6VKwEP6FaQtMSQQDTQAAAIo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/15/zed_editor_arrives_on_linux/
[6] https://crdt.tech/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aIqV6VKwEP6FaQtMSQQDTQAAAIo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aIqV6VKwEP6FaQtMSQQDTQAAAIo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/releases/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/04/rufus_explorerpatcher_windows_11/
[11] https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/usbimager/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aIqV6VKwEP6FaQtMSQQDTQAAAIo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/08/github_atom_dropped/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/coders_are_using_ai_tools/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/opinion_column_vibe_coding/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/replit_saastr_response/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/aws_kiro_usage_cap/
[18] https://search.theregister.com/?q=ai-pocalypse
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_down/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/09/csuite_sours_on_ai/
[21] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/
[22] https://makemeacto.substack.com/p/is-genai-digital-cocaine
[23] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/natalieponte_try-replacing-ai-with-cocaine-in-all-activity-7336023313137229824-APP0/
[24] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/is-todays-ai-boom-bigger-than-dotcom-bubble-2025-07-22/
[25] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Indeed. I am not a fan of LLMs but one day being able to say "rewrite this Rust (and inevitable many hundred dependencies) into C" will be liberating for so many projects that are plaguing the open-source world currently.
Just think, minor Linux drivers without the shite and .... actually most Rust stuff is perpetually half-finished or irrelevant so it wouldn't really have that much impact come to think of it. Maybe librsvg?
AC because Rust discussions should be limited to niche Reddit groups.
Odd that they had to do something. I just haven't entered my LLM credentials into Zed and well... no LLM interactions from it. I guess they're talking about baked in autocompletes? "LLM stuff" does hog the Command-R shortcut, which I'd like to use for Symbol search (like VS Code).
Whenever I do want to interact with LLMs I fire up VS Code, but Zed is now my primary editor, as I was sick and tired of occasional slowdowns with VS Code.
It's not perfect - out of the box its Python auto-completion is sketchy at best, it lacks easy bookmarking and snippets (there are plugins, I think).
But it's very fast, clutter free and doesn't insist on rising above its station as an editor.
The snippet gap has been taken care of by finding a terminal snippet manager and then writing some glue code to point it to my existing VS Code snippets. My typical workflow is to jump from the terminal to the editor, rather than the reverse, so that works for me. The bookmarking gap is still outstanding.
I've used (recent ones only) Sublime Text, VS Code and Zed and a pre-release, still-not-always-stable, Zed is my preferred option for now. Older ones include KEdit, XEdit (MVS) and, shudder of shudders, Eclipse.
Can someone produce something that does this for Windows?
Selling at £10 a pop, you could buy your own island. Given away free, we would worship you.
AI and the future
> Can we have this as a global feature in all software? Please?
Sure, but you will need to wait a decade or two, till AI eventually becomes has-been.
Remember a couple years ago when tablets were all the rage? Everybody claimed desktops/laptops would disappear and tablets would replace everything . Microsoft even turned Windows 8 into a tablet OS... And what happened really? By now tablets are a niche product, for specific (mostly home) uses, and most people still work using desktops/laptops.
The same will happen to AI, eventually.
Re: AI and the future
Yep. Windows and Gnome 3+ interfaces are still suffering from the UI idiots from this era.
You should learn how to use cocaine
Never a truer word spoken
The speed of Zed is impressive. I'm looking forward to the Windows release to replace the little I use VS Code for. The ability to remove the AI agent will be really helpful as well.
Can we disable Rust? That'd be even better.