AI Models / Providers as extensions #33180
Replies: 10 comments 19 replies
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Related: #25498 |
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@maxdeviant I'm guessing this is your domain – and perhaps this is coming in wit/since_v0.7.0 ? The Claude Code case is kind of an extreme one, as the communication and control can work both ways. But I suspect there are other integrations that would benefit from an agents extension API. |
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I had been thinking of this for a few weeks, and was just about to create exactly the same feature request. Implementation may be a little difficult though, considering extensions are WASM and presumably cannot interact with the GPUI app context whatsoever, which is currently passed in all calls to language models. I'll look into it tomorrow. Ensuring that the language model provider UI can be extended through the extension API is also certainly necessary, Zed should be able to also move existing providers which may be more niche and/or have fewer maintainers (e.g. OpenRouter, DeepSeek, etc) into extensions which can be maintained separately from the editor, similar to how language support is currently handled. Completion providers (e.g. Copilot) should also be brought into this in my opinion. |
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Agree on the niche providers angle. For an MVP, I think you'd mainly want to
For MVP +1 I'd add
For Claude Code specifically, the Zed -> CC control could use this new extension API, and the CC -> Zed control would be via an MCP extension (would have to be accessible via from CC via local socket or some other method, and would need to be able to write a lock file to the local FS for CC to read). |
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Adding one more potential plugin that would use this API: Gemini CLI I haven't dug into how it works yet, but it would be nice to bring it into Zed. Currently supports VS Code and Jetbrains, like Claude Code. |
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One more API feature to consider: permission delegation. https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sdk#custom-permission-prompt-tool |
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So correct me if im wrong. What your pushing for is to allow another agent in zed. At this rate how do you expect the company to successful financially?. You would rather pay $100 to anthropic to use their agent while giving zed $0 per month. Why not we contribute to making zed's agent better than claude code so you pay one agent provider? If im missing anything lemme know. |
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Your Apple analogy is equivalent to zed supporting many languages and tooling with full extension support. It’s not the same when talking about agents because the agentic ide is the software itself. Or let’s say it’s the apple hardware. Hence, I’m not against extension support but pointing out the fact that an agent is not a mere extension its literally a whole new paradigm. You don’t see cursor or windsurf bragging about Claude code support they are literally competitors e.g Samsung vs Apple, and the fact that an agent is not a mere extension meaning it is the software is the main reason vscode has been forked at least 3 times. Check out cursor’s latest release to understand more. Again here is my argument zed is free and to stay free, open sourced and not die like atom, money has to be made and right now they can make that money if you and I pay $20+ a month for their agent. How do we get there? Why do we have so many people upvoting willing to pay $100 for Claude code and $0 for zed. Why do we have people upvoting to spend developer time to integrate an agent into the zed ui rather than making zeds own native agent better. Why does cursor based on a free IDE have 40,000+ enterprise customers when the roo code and cline agentic extensions exists. You want people to come to zed to see the value in paying directly for zed because they bet their future on it. Again I’m not against extension support that is clearly needed but when talking about agents saying stuff like support extensions so antropic can create a claude code extension so people can use zed and pay $0 but pay $100 to antropic just sounds funny when we are using a product created by a for profit company thats trying to build an ide for the future of programming. |
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Zed is VC funded. They need to build a product that has a lot of growth and the potential for future profits, not try to make a little bit of money now.
Can they? What Zed sells today is access to LLMs routed through their servers, metered by the prompt. Which likely loses them quite a bit of money on heavier users unless they have a truly incredible sweetheart deal from Anthropic. They don't sell access to "an agent", code for the agent is contained within this repository, given to everyone for free under the terms of the GPLv3. I think it's highly likely that Zed will begin to offer different services in the future, those which are more profitable than reselling access to incredibly expensive LLMs.
Nobody is 'betting their future' on a text editor which happens to have a chat pane that gives an LLM a few tools to call. There are many tools which do this. Cursor doesn't have business customers because of an agent, they have them because their tool integrates a bunch of different LLM features, including much more useful ones like their own proprietary tab completion model, a code review tool, etc. The very fact that you've just been able to name 5 or so 'agentic' coding tools shows that this is not a differentiating feature of a product. They are all effectively the same thing. Not really sure what this strawman you've created is either. This discussion is about extensions providing LLM providers, not about them providing "new agents", whatever that may mean. |
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Ok clearly you dont know what an agent means. OP is literally talking about providing a ui for claude code which is a cli agent.
Wrong again you dont know what an agent is what you just described is what ollama does two different things. Ok pls go to the official zed channel in zed there is an agent v2 document the beginning says `# Agent v2 What are we launching next? We should think deeply about where we can get leverage and what we'll need to compete: Launch post:
What you just listed are the features of cursors agent. Again not understanding that an agentic Ide is the product. And if a company mandates all devs to use cursor and not intellij thats literally betting their future. Do they have many competitors? of course, and thats why they try to innovate as fast as possible. No need to continue this discussion as you dont know what an agent is please dont reply comments with half ass knowledge, its not productive. The zed founders have written and talked about this a lot, get updated then come back and open discussions on how zed can build that product that has a lot of growth and the potential for future profits or else you will end up using a vscode clone in the future. Take care |
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I interpreted what was said as wrapping the Claude Code SDK to make effectively another LLM provider, not to 'provide a ui'. From what I've seen relating to Claude Code in VSCode, it effectively just opens a terminal pane on the side anyways, rather than providing any real UI.
Please avoid hallucinations. Ollama is a tool that allows you to run LLMs on your own device, not a service that charges for access to LLMs hosted elsewhere. Again, the code for Zed Agent is in this repository. They're selling it for exactly $0 and anyone can use, modify, and redistribute the code or binaries produced from it under the terms of the GPLv3. The $20 service provides access to LLMs; swapping another LLM provider in and paying someone else instead does not materially change its functionality. I was not aware of the Agent v2 document. It appears, then, if that's to be believed, that Zed is planning to provide an even larger amount of extensibility than what is requested here. If you have an issue with that, take it up with the Zed team who of course sets the direction of their project. I'm not sure what I said that this disproves, though. The code for the agent is still contained within this repository and still given away for $0.
That is not true. "Agent" refers to an LLM using tools in order to autonomously make changes or perform actions without user interaction. A tab completion model is not an agent. An LLM code review tool is not an agent (referring to their BugBot, which leaves comments on PRs and doesn't even integrate with the editor). This is akin to calling ChatGPT an agent.
That would be incredible hyperbole even if an editor wasn't something you could quickly switch between. And even if they're signing contracts for a decent amount of time, a couple years of commitment is not a company 'betting their future' on a product. If the product turns out not to work out that well down the line, it's a relatively small amount of money to write down (how much is each engineer paid, compared to Cursor? You're not hiring anyone for $20/month, you're paying hundreds of times that)
Indeed, in different areas, not in their agent. Their code review tool is relatively new. And their proprietary tab completion model is a key differentiator, which they've clearly put a massive amount of money into (including buying out a competitor that did exclusively that). I think it's extraordinarily likely that Cursor's business customers, or really any of its customers which haven't fallen into the strange idea that an LLM, which may or may not be able to tell you the number of The recent changes to Cursor's pricing prove just that. The handful of vibe coders costing them hundreds or thousands of dollars a month by trying to maintain entire codebases they don't understand whatsoever with the most advanced and expensive LLMs could be rooted out by them limiting LLM usage to the cost of the subscription, on exclusively the plans for individuals. They haven't needed to make that adjustment for plans sold to businesses because effectively nobody in those organizations is using the agent regularly and for large tasks. There's only so much you can do with an LLM that's only so accurate at its function--autocompletion. They can make the experience a few percent better here and there, but they can't make it fundamentally different from the competition that relies on the same models. If you look at some of the recent "innovation" cursor has made with their agent, you see things like the LLM creating a todo list for itself, and creating embeddings with PRs. Both of which have already been done by competitors, A feature which takes 10 minutes to implement and can be immediately reimplemented by competitors isn't going to give any product a competitive advantage. |
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Ahhh wait @lj3954 I see your point. Indeed you pay $20 to use zeds servers and can also opt to use Amazon bedrock and not pay zed $20 hence the agent code that orchestrates all this is legit $0. I’ll drop the word agent maybe something like developer ux for building software. This probably captures what I’m trying to get thru. What is that thing zed should become that people pay money directly to zed so zed becomes a profitable company is the thing I’m trying to touch on. I used IntelliJ nd thought I was probably gonna die using IntelliJ until this new shift in dev ux came about. You can look at the ratings yourself how bad jetbrains implementation has been. This has caused long time users to leave to platforms like cursor and windsurf. Like you said zed is vc funded, the money is not infinite. Profit has to be made, if the text editor is $0 where will the income come from |
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@JPBarringer id rather this energy be spent making zed v2 agent better so you don’t even care about Claude code. I’m ready to put money down for contributors who will help the zed team on this. Please I don’t want to use vscode. I just left IntelliJ cause those people are confused |
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Or spent on a full fledge extension support in zed. Which from my knowledge is already underway. Cause if you still want other agent providers to support zed full extension support will be needed. E.g they will need to inline text and add options to dropdown |
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@JPBarringer, since it looks like you have a working solution, would you be willing to share it? I understand you might not want to make a pull request, but for those of us who don’t mind patching and rebuilding it ourselves, it would be great just to try it out. Thanks! |
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I'll see about cleaning it up and sharing something. Probably this coming week. It is working and it allows you to select Claude code as an option in the agents panel. I have a few decades of experience as a developer but am very new to Rust: I would describe myself as amateurish at best when it comes to rust, so I'm also a bit anxious about sharing something that might reflect poorly on me among my peers here. I've been leaning pretty heavily on LLM help for this. IMO this should really be an extension. |
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Thanks a lot! And no pressure at all, if you’re not comfortable sharing it, no worries. As for the code quality, I honestly don’t mind at all. I’m not a programmer, just a security researcher. My motto is: “Hey, as long as it works!” xD |
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@JPBarringer You might want to check out what the Zed team is cooking on the
Haven't tested it, plus it's all still work-in-progress and I don't know what exactly is the plan here, but looks like something that might potentially allow for more similar integrations in the future, e.g. with Claude Code, which is what you've been working on. 🙂 |
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Some more updates from the Zed team:
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Very much so. |
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👋🏽 Newbie to Zed here—since these PRs were merged, does that mean it's possible to run Claude Code with a tighter Zed integration now? Or do we need something else to happen? Thank you! |
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Yeah some people have been able to test it. But you can't get it of the regular download have to build from source |
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I can do that! Are there instructions anywhere for enabling that feature in the source? Or is it a DIY kind of thing? |
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I've been working on a Claude Code integration for Zed, and it's working, but as a PR it would have a lot of files. It might be better implemented as an extension – but there isn't currently an API for this as far as I know. Is the AI models extension support coming soon?
If not, perhaps it would make more sense for me to implement this as PR for a basic model extension API and then package the Claude integration code into an extension?
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