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Why IDEs Won't Die in the Age of AI Coding: Zed Founder Nathan Sobo

> I think those takes are not realistic.

Show: Training Data · Publisher: Sequoia Capital · Host: Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

Episode URL: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/CPUAI7976674176.mp3

Publish date: 2025-12-02
Duration: NAs
Default source credibility: HIGH — Sequoia partners interview frontier-lab founders + F500 AI buyers. VC-hosted — portfolio-company framing on recommendations; named guest metrics stay HIGH. Peer-tier to No Priors in quality.

  • Nathan Sobo argues that IDEs won’t die due to AI coding tools, emphasizing the importance of visual interfaces for understanding code.
  • Zed, an IDE built for performance and collaboration, integrates AI agents to enhance coding efficiency, with a user base of over 150,000 active developers.
  • Sobo discusses the limitations of LLMs in complex software development tasks, noting that while they excel in generating known code, they struggle with novel problem-solving.

Extracted quotes

# Credibility Speaker Org Timestamp Topic Quote
1 HIGH Nathan Sobo (Founder) Zed 02:14 02-corporate-tools I think those takes are not realistic. It is mind blowing that you can sit down at a terminal and speak English with a script talking to an LLM and make real progress on a code base, but if you believe that the IDE is going to die, then I think that requires you to believe that human beings are not going to need to interact with source code anymore.
2 HIGH Nathan Sobo (Founder) Zed 02:02 02-corporate-tools I’ve spent my entire life grinding toward building the ultimate tool for this. And is it not going to matter? Are these people right? But after mulling it over seriously, because I definitely don’t want to be gold plating a buggy whip, I think those takes are not realistic.
3 HIGH Nathan Sobo (Founder) Zed 23:09 02-corporate-tools About half of the people using Zed are using our edit prediction capability, which is, you know, I’m coding along and it suggests the next thing. And about a quarter of our active users are using agentic editing in some shape or form.

Per-quote detail

1. Nathan Sobo — Zed (02:14)

I think those takes are not realistic. It is mind blowing that you can sit down at a terminal and speak English with a script talking to an LLM and make real progress on a code base, but if you believe that the IDE is going to die, then I think that requires you to believe that human beings are not going to need to interact with source code anymore.

  • Credibility: HIGH — Named founder with specific claim about IDEs and source code interaction.
  • Topic tag: 02-corporate-tools

2. Nathan Sobo — Zed (02:02)

I’ve spent my entire life grinding toward building the ultimate tool for this. And is it not going to matter? Are these people right? But after mulling it over seriously, because I definitely don’t want to be gold plating a buggy whip, I think those takes are not realistic.

  • Credibility: HIGH — Named founder with specific claim about IDEs and source code interaction.
  • Topic tag: 02-corporate-tools

3. Nathan Sobo — Zed (23:09)

About half of the people using Zed are using our edit prediction capability, which is, you know, I’m coding along and it suggests the next thing. And about a quarter of our active users are using agentic editing in some shape or form.

  • Stat: Half of Zed users use edit prediction, and a quarter use agentic editing.
  • Credibility: HIGH — Named founder with specific metric about Zed’s user adoption of AI features.
  • Topic tag: 02-corporate-tools

Extracted 2026-04-14T17:50:18 via scripts/podcast_mine.py (MLX mlx-community/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-4bit).