Setup Zed Ai Assistant with Deepseek V3 on Lambda

Zed is a lovely text editor. I enjoy typing in it every time I try. Yet, the vibe coding capabilities are lacking 🙃 The foundations are flexible — they've figured out "extensions" and "workflows" back in August 2024, yet it's not as well developed as Cursor, Cline, or Copilot Agent Mode.

AI Assistant is a core part of Zed, and it's pretty great. They've partnered up with Anthropic and provide Sonnet 3.7 with very reasonable context windows and rate limits for free for now.

I like where Zed is right now. You can make a model edit your code in-place, but it doesn't get in the way as much. You just can't completely absolve yourself of thinking how the magic happens.

Let's setup the magic.

Why bother switching from Sonnet?

My reasons will differ from your reasons. Personally, I want to work on products that I would be proud and happy to use myself. Lambda models must become the best models for my IDE, Lambda assistance must replace my Claude and Perplexity.

Zed AI Assisant configuration

I'm assuming you are already using Zed. You'll need to grab a Lambda API key (get one here)

// settings.json
{
  // ... everything else ...
  // This block configures the default / current model to use
  {
  "assistant": {
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "openai",
      "model": "deepseek-v3-0324"
    },
    "version": "2"
  },

  // This configures using DeepSeek on Lambda inference
  // via an openai-compatible client.
  "language_models": {
    "openai": {
      "api_url": "https://api.lambda.ai/v1",
      "available_models": [
        {
          "name": "deepseek-v3-0324",
          "display_name": "Lambda DeepSeek V3",
          "max_tokens": 164000
        }
      ],
      "version": "1"
    }
  },
}

Honestly, that's it. As we ship new models, you can experiment with them by switching the model name, or on https://lambda.chat. Here's the same in a video:

Bonus

You can use Claude Code in a terminal pane in Zed and that's also pretty cool!