Zed has announced Zed AI, its new AI Assistant powered by Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Zed Editor has announced Zed AI, an AI assistant integrated into its code editor and powered by Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This collaboration emerged as Anthropic engineers saw the potential in Zed's text-centric interface, with contributions from Anthropic’s Rust engineers to Zed's open-source codebase. Zed AI aims to enhance code editing by leveraging large language models (LLMs) for improved developer productivity.

Zed AI includes an assistant panel for AI interactions and inline transformations for code editing. The assistant panel allows for the editing and refining of LLM requests, offering transparency in AI interactions. The introduction of slash commands such as (/tab, /file, /terminal, /diagnostics, and /fetch) provides context for AI assistance. The folding mechanism in Zed helps manage large codebases by allowing developers to fold and unfold text, balancing detailed and big-picture views. Inline transformations, triggered by ctrl-enter, enable natural language-based code changes with quick feedback and token-by-token streaming edits. Zed AI supports recursive text transformations for refining context and improving prompts iteratively.

Additional features include a private beta for Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s Fast Edit Mode, offering rapid code refactoring, and the development of a (/workflow) command for orchestrating codebase changes. During the initial launch period, Zed AI is available for free, with limited access to the Fast Edit Mode beta, though efforts are underway to expand access soon.