Fine. Cool step for Zed to push ACP, and I think this is the right direction for the IDE space.
But tbh if it’s not as frictionless as the Codex IDE extension in a Zed-skinned VSCode, it doesn’t matter.
Tried giving Claude and CC many chances, but the cognitive load of constantly managing a hard context window is DOA.
Codex w/gpt-5 is on par if not better than any of Anthropic’s solutions at this point, and the ubiquity (web, CLI, IDE) + UX consistency of Codex under one account/plan just dominates any marginal value of using a different model at a higher price.
Codex just works. Then it keeps working. Then it keeps working.
Any solution that wants to compete with OAI’s latest hostile takeover attempt has to match then beat on “unlimited/anywhere/frictionless” UX across platforms AND price ($200/mo all in).
I don’t see a good way out of this for most, except through major spend on playing catchup.
Guess that’s why Anthropic just raised again. Cursor is clearly trying to play, but they will always be a markup product until they launch their own SOTA model. Is Gemini still alive?
I’ll never understand why they didn’t even bother to experiment with monetization for Arc.
Normally, I’d scoff at the idea. But they genuinely made the browser useful again in ways for which I’d happily shill $30/mo. Superhuman proved you can do it for email, which was also previously laughable. I guess that ended in a buyout, too, but at least they tried.
Arc also had a solid wedge into team space, especially if going AI-native was their little dream.
You own the browser. Just build a capable browser-first agent that helps teams do work. Make it a shared space (separate from personal ofc) and start charging for teams.
As I write this, it’s pretty clear that’s what Atlassian wants to do with this. The only real loss is:
- They decided to roundtrip the entire product story of Arc with Dia, and drag users through 0->1 again
- It’s Atlassian, and you know they’re gonna suffocate anything that isn’t related to Atlassian
All in all, this looks like a fear-based sellout. They could have done it on their own but didn’t have the chops to scale into a company of that size. So instead they took the guaranteed payoff and tucked themselves inside this big ** kangaroo’s pouch for safety while they get to play with AI indefinitely.
“We coulda been something real.”
————
EDIT: unironically, they now offer the option to pay $20/mo for Dia Pro… it’s basically comedy at this point.
Yeah, this is the unfortunate part about products kept alive in maintenance mode in a rapidly evolving space.
I guess you could argue (as TBC did) it’s actually not rapidly evolving, and that gives it staying power. But eventually someone will reach parity and eventually eclipse the original product.
Hopefully Zen does that. I’m just tired of moving the same data to the effectively the same product run by a different team for no good reason.
But tbh if it’s not as frictionless as the Codex IDE extension in a Zed-skinned VSCode, it doesn’t matter.
Tried giving Claude and CC many chances, but the cognitive load of constantly managing a hard context window is DOA.
Codex w/gpt-5 is on par if not better than any of Anthropic’s solutions at this point, and the ubiquity (web, CLI, IDE) + UX consistency of Codex under one account/plan just dominates any marginal value of using a different model at a higher price.
Codex just works. Then it keeps working. Then it keeps working.
Any solution that wants to compete with OAI’s latest hostile takeover attempt has to match then beat on “unlimited/anywhere/frictionless” UX across platforms AND price ($200/mo all in).
I don’t see a good way out of this for most, except through major spend on playing catchup.
Guess that’s why Anthropic just raised again. Cursor is clearly trying to play, but they will always be a markup product until they launch their own SOTA model. Is Gemini still alive?