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Company & Vision
Vision
Our goal is to make Zed the primary tool software teams use to collaborate.
To do this, Zed will...
- Make collaboration a first-class feature of the code authoring environment.
- Enable text-based conversations about any piece of text, independent of whether/when it was committed to version control.
- Make it smooth to edit and discuss code with teammates in real time.
- Make it easy to recall past conversations any area of the code.
We believe the best way to make collaboration amazing is to build it into a new editor rather than retrofitting an existing editor. This means that in order for a team to adopt Zed for collaboration, each team member will need to adopt it as their editor as well.
For this reason, we need to deliver a clearly superior experience as a single-user code editor in addition to being an excellent collaboration tool. This will take time, but we believe the dominance of VS Code demonstrates that it's possible for a single tool to capture substantial market share. We can proceed incrementally, capturing one team at a time and gradually transitioning conversations away from GitHub.
Zed Values
Everyone wants to work quickly and have a lot of users. What are we unwilling to sacrifice in pursuit of those goals?
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Performance. Speed is core to our brand and value proposition. It's important that we consistently deliver a response in less than 8ms on modern hardware for fine-grained actions. Coarse-grained actions should render feedback within 50ms. We consider the performance goals of the product at all times, and take the time to ensure our code meets them with reasonable usage. Once we have met our goals, we assess the impact vs effort of further performance investment and know when to say when. We measure our performance in the field and make an effort to maintain or improve real-world performance and promptly address regressions.
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Craftsmanship. Zed is a premium product, and we put care into design and user experience. We can always cut scope, but what we do ship should be quality. Incomplete is okay, so long as we're executing on a coherent subset well. Half-baked, unintuitive, or broken is not okay.
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Shipping. Knowledge matters only in as much as it drives results. We're here to build a real product in the real world. We care a lot about the experience of developing Zed, but we care about the user's experience more.
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Code quality. This enables craftsmanship. Nobody is creative in a trash heap, and we're willing to dedicate time to keep our codebase clean. If we're spending no time refactoring, we are likely underinvesting. When we realize a design flaw, we assess its centrality to the rest of the system and consider budgeting time to address it. If we're spending all of our time refactoring, we are likely either overinvesting or paying off debt from past underinvestment. It's up to each engineer to allocate a reasonable refactoring budget. We shouldn't be navel gazing, but we also shouldn't be afraid to invest.
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Pairing. Zed depends on regular pair programming to promote cohesion on our remote team. We believe pairing is a powerful substitute for beuracratic management, excessive documentation, and tedious code review. Nobody has to pair all day, every day, but everyone is responsible for pairing at least 2 hours a week with a variety of other engineers. If anyone wants to pair all day every day, that is explicitly endorsed and credited. If pairing temporarily reduces our throughput due to working on one thing instead of two, we trust that it will pay for itself in the long term by increasing our velocity and allowing us to more effectively grow our team.
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Long-term thinking. The Zed vision began several years ago, and we expect Zed to be around many years from today. We must always be mindful to avoid overengineering for the future, but we should also keep the long-term in mind. Are we building a system our future selves would want to work on in 5 years?