The Workflow of the Future With Zed

Nathan Sobo: And that taught me so much. I got I became such a better software developer so rapidly. Um but I always wanted a tool that could replicate that experience that we had in this shared office, like over the internet, and turn the internet into that whole experience. And Zed is as close as I've ever gotten um until what comes next.

Nathan Sobo: the trade-off that we made, the devil's bargain that we made was that um the overhead of the browser and sort of the abstraction that it presents, which is this kind of lowest common denominator common standard that needs to run in a backward compatible way on all these different browsers. Well, all of that is reducing down, but still it's like it really put a a limit on the performance of and the user experience that we could yield. And so, after Atom sort of ran its course and Microsoft acquired GitHub and uh I was sitting there using Visual Studio Code, I just wasn't happy. Like I just couldn't see a future where I continued writing all my software in this web browser masquerading as a desktop app. Um just what the performance wasn't there, the aesthetics weren't there for me, this collaborative dimension even though they did introduce live share, like it never really worked as well as I wanted it to. Um and so that led me to one inexorable conclusion that we had to get closer to the metal.

Nathan Sobo: we use AI a lot. Um at least I do, and I think it just it varies across the team and obviously most of the well, everybody on the team is an engineer back from the days when you didn't have an agent to write any code for you. You were typing it out and you know, you were lucky if you could get a auto complete. Um so, I'm really glad that I have that pre-training of my neurons in place to really understand software. Like I I think it would be a different story if I were getting my start now. Some things would be easier and then certain kinds of lessons might be harder. Um but I I write a ton of code agentically these days. Um and I used it in the pull request review process. When I'm reviewing pull requests, it's amazing to get some help interpreting what the heck is going on in this diff.

Nathan Sobo: the ultimate user interface is basically language. Um and you know, for the longest time for the last whatever 50 years, 40 years, like the only people that could really use language to talk to a computer were people like us, software developers. And uh even then it was like pretty grueling brutal process of memorizing a menagerie of commands and flags and programming languages and tags and all of it, right? Um so, I think now that language natural language is like opened up as a way of interacting, like it's such a superior means of expression over essentially like gestural user interfaces that we've been confined to use in the previous era.