Post #989102

2026-04-06 19:40 UTC

One question that has been on my mind since I forked Zed is why it's such a huge project. It's a text editor. What does all that code really do? I still don't know if I understand why. I have looked at a fraction of the code at this point. What does it all do? Fuck if I know. But here, take a look at this for example... Python support in Gram (forked from Zed) is mainly provided by python.rs, a single file containing 2865 lines of code (as of today). One part of that code is a function which lists virtual environments available to the editor. The code to actually discover which venvs are available is handled by a dependency (the PET library from Microsoft) but sorting the venvs in order of importance is handled here: https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram/src/commit/b0f5dd51829e2b63bd6ca2d4b39a8313c55522ae/crates/languages/src/python.rs#L1184 It's a single call to the method sort_by on a variable confusingly named toolchains, containing a list of virtual environments. I have been trying to make sense of it for a while. Like, one sort criteria is filesystem distance, which kind of makes sense. Wouldn't it make sense to primarily sort by filesystem distance, and a second sort by Python version? Instead this is primarily sorting alphabetically by executable name, it's looking at multiple environment variables for priority, it's sorting alphabetically based on conda prefix(?)... Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I am not galaxy-brained enough to sort virtual environments with the big fellas. But I then compare this to helix which has no special handling for virtual environments, you just configure the LSP to use the venv you want to use, and I feel like maybe it didn't have to be this complicated?

Replies (2)

@bjoreman@toot.cafe 2026-04-06 19:43

@krig I strongly suspect it's the big fellas who need to grow a lot before they can be trusted to use the kind of sharp tools you mastered back in 2006.

Open ##989107
@brib@bribstodon.xyz 2026-04-07 05:07

@krig My thoughts? This is the result of ✨vibes✨. Zed is notoriously AI-friendly so I suspect it attracts the kinds of developers who rely heavily on AI tools, whether or not they explicitly declare it. From both my own experience and from what I have seen of other people's AI code is notoriously bad (e.g. the Claude source code leak, Jonny's takedown is beautiful if you haven't read it already), the companies managed to get the LLM to emit the correct functionality but they haven't made the code maintainable (and I'm not convinced this is a problem that can be solved without significant human hand-holding). The result in code is what I can best describe as "chaotic" or "lacking in intentionality", it does the job sure but nobody quite knows how, not even those who (claim they) wrote it. Think of it like those 30 year old spaghetti balls that sit at the heart of Windows that nobody dares touch, except now it's affecting much newer applications which shouldn't have this issue. If you can successfully untangle the legacy Zed code in Gram, there is a chance you could have a very futureproof career in dealing with this problem in companies that went in a bit too deep on the vibes 😉

Open ##1970395