While Im still personally skeptical on the ability of these tools to produce a GOOD software engineer, it’s something I should probably consider testing in a limited capacity.
I’ve noticed Deepseek has a few integrations, both official and hobbyist, with text editors like Claude Code. Plus, I’d rather not pay £20/mo for any of this stuff, let alone to any AI company NOT linked to the CPC.
I might consider a locally hosted model but the upfront cost for anything that can run it decently fast/high params are quite prohibitive. My home server isn’t really set up for good cooling!
There’s a single setting to turn off all the AI integrations if you don’t want them. I like Zed even without them because its very fast and lightweight, but still tend to prefer Kate for the same reason.
Its been a big focus of Zed’s development though. Hooking things up to VSCode and other IDEs can be a pain in the ass with tons of extensions, but Zed has built-in functionality for ollama, LM Studio, etc for local models. You can also connect them to APIs for ChatGPT, Claude, etc if you pay for pro accounts of those.