I'd wish a better model or system would go live for the inline suggestions. The Zed ones are so trash compared to Cursor's it is just laughable.
An example is that when I have a module like Namespace::SuperAbcModule in a file at namespace/super_abc_module.rb and I rename the file to namespace/super_module.rb, Cursor will immediately suggest to change the module name to `Namespace::SuperModule`, Zed won't.
Also Cursor will suggest updates to lines throughout a file whereas Zed sometimes doesn't even look ahead 1-2 lines.
Having Claude Code and Codex built into the sidebar is hardly better than having them running in a terminal. I wish they'd invested all this time and effort improving the inline suggestions.
Right click on the file in the project tree -> rename will rename references. Or in the code right click -> rename symbol. Not sure why you need to bring AI into it.
Why is that something AI has to do? PhpStorm does this, without Ai, since forever ago. And updates references everywhere, even inside strings or doc comments.
Firstly, I don't care what tech does this, as long as I can get good suggestions.
Secondly, it was just one example that came to me from comparing this the other day. You could compile a long list of examples where Cursor gives better completions than Zed does.
It's better to learn the tools that you are using. Renaming is part of LSP servers and Zed has no control over them. They are unique for each language. Using AI for this is a waste of resources, especially when renaming affects tens of files. It's not reliable, slow and not determenstic.
They were just giving that as an example that Zed's inline suggestions aren't very good for basic tasks. There are hundreds of othersmall tasks like this that can't be handled by the language server.
Yes, elsewhere in this thread someone is complaining about lousy C# language server performance relative to IDEs. These swiss-army-knife programmer's editors will always be at a semantic language tooling disadvantage relative to IDEs.
I know that days of yak-shaving with LSP and emacs only gets me to a janky imitation of Visual Studio/XCode semantic search on my C++ work codebase. "Fuck it, let an LLM auto-complete based on vibes" has some appeal when you just get sick of trying to arm-wrestle clangd into ... whatever XCode or Visual Studio are doing to have functional semantic search across the project.
Although I have to say LLMs were a disaster at vibe-auto-completing in VSCode. So I mostly stick with semantic search in the IDE and editing in emacs like I always have.
I otherwise like Zed way more than the vscode-derivatives but yeah, the edit predictions are just not even close. And it's laggier feeling despite the lower quality.
While your example is not AI related (should be handled by the LSP integration with "Rename Symbol") I agree that Zed's Next Edit Prediction model is *extremely* subpar. Imho they should either scrap it and just work on having a good integration story with third party models for the next edit (and maybe propose by default a partner model I don't know) or invest a lot more efforts into it.
But currently I sadly have to say the model's "help" is often a net negative.
It's human nature to start trusting AI suggestions just because they look good enough without actually checking them. That's going to lead to massive issues down the line the more it goes on.
Snippets are more useful.
If you're doing something repetitive, a vetted snippet does wonders. Learning how to make your own snippets with appropriate tab stops is a seriously underrated skill.
High competence in regex search-and-replace, multi-cursor, and snippets is an amazing combination.
Improved inline suggestions are under way if you search the PRs on GitHub for zeta2. You can also bring your own edit prediction provider by configuring copilot or supermaven. Codestral edit predictions were merged last week
An example is that when I have a module like Namespace::SuperAbcModule in a file at namespace/super_abc_module.rb and I rename the file to namespace/super_module.rb, Cursor will immediately suggest to change the module name to `Namespace::SuperModule`, Zed won't.
Also Cursor will suggest updates to lines throughout a file whereas Zed sometimes doesn't even look ahead 1-2 lines.
Having Claude Code and Codex built into the sidebar is hardly better than having them running in a terminal. I wish they'd invested all this time and effort improving the inline suggestions.