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ammmir | 9 months ago

I was using Zed up until a few months ago. I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it. I switched to Cursor, but now I don't "trust" the the editor and its undo stack, I've lost code as a result of it, particularly when you're in mid-review of an agentic edit, but decide to edit the edit. The undo/redo gets difficult to track, I wish there was some heirarchical tree view of history.

The restore checkpoint/redo is too linear for my lizard brain. Am I wrong to want a tree-based agentic IDE? Why has nobody built it?

discuss

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senko|9 months ago

> I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it.

They fixed that with the new agent panel, which now works more like the other AI sidebars.

I was (mildly) annoyed by that too. The new UI still has rough edges but I like the change.

freehorse|9 months ago

Interesting. I actually like the editable format of the chat interface because it allows fixing small stuff on the fly (instead of having to talk about it with the model) and de-cluttering the chat after a few back and forths make it a mess (instead of having to start anew), which makes the context window smaller and less confusing to the model, esp for local ones. Also, the editable form makes more sense to me, and it feels more natural and simple to interact with an LLM assistant with it.

cedws|9 months ago

I’m on the opposite end, I hate the new panel. It’s less space efficient, slash commands are gone, and I can’t figure out how to clear the chat.

tgtweak|9 months ago

Been using cline and their snapshot/rewind/remove context (even out-of-order) features are really shining especially with larger projects and larger features+changes becoming more commonplace with stronger LLMs.

I would recommend you check it out if you've been frustrated by the other options out there - I've been very happy with it. I'm fairly sure you can't have git-like dag trees, nor do I think that would be particularly useful for AI based workflow - you'd have to delegate rebasing and merge conflict resolution to the agent itself... lots of potential for disaster there, at least for now.

mrorigo|9 months ago

omg. "the entire AI panel being an editable area" is the KILLER feature for me! I have complete control, use my vim keys, switch models at will and life is awesome.

What I don't like in the last update is that they removed the multi-tabs in the assistant. Previously I could have multiple conversations going and switch easily, but now I can only do one thing at a time :(

Haven't tried the assistant2 much, mostly because I'm so comfy with my current setup

conartist6|9 months ago

Worry not, for it is being built.

You will not catch me using the words "agentic IDE" to describe what I'm doing because its primary purpose isn't to be used by AI any more than the primary purpose of a car is to drive itself.

But yes, what I am doing is creating an IDE where the primary integration surface for humans, scripts, and AIs is not the 2D text buffer, but the embedded tree structure of the code. Zed almost gets there and it's maddening to me that they don't embrace it fully. I think once I show them what the stakes of the game are they have the engineering talent to catch up.

The main reason it hasn't been done is that we're still all basically writing code on paper. All of the most modern tools that people are using, they're still basically just digitizations of punchcard programming. If you dig down through all the layers of abstractions at the very bottom is line and column, that telltale hint of paper's two-dimensionality. And because line and column get baked into every integration surface, the limitations of IDEs are the limitations of paper. When you frame the task of programming as "write a huge amount of text out on paper" it's no wonder that people turn to LLMs to do it.

For the integration layer using the tree as the primary means you get to stop worrying about a valid tree layer blinking into and out of existence constantly, which is conceptually what happens when someone types code syntax in left to right. They put an opening brace in, then later a closing brace. In between a valid tree representation has ceased to exist.

pierrec|9 months ago

Representing undo/redo history as a tree is quite different from representing the code structure as a tree. On the one hand I'm surprised no one seems to care that a response has nothing to do with the question... on the other hand, these AI tooling threads are always full of people talking right past each other and being very excited about it, so I guess it fits.

gnrlst|9 months ago

I've very interested in this, and completely agree we are still trying to evolve the horse carriage without realizing we can move away from it.

How can I follow up on what you're building? Would you be open to having a chat? I've found your github, but let me know how if there's a better way to contact you.