No more general edit mode

[Zal1kola]

Why was the edit mode removed from the selection window? I have been using it a lot, especially in an interactive (co-working) editing session to constantly improve the source code. Now I have to select lines of code to change this. In the past, the whole file could be used for this purpose. What does such an editing process look like from your point of view?

[Zal1kola]

why is no one from continue getting back to me on this? @bdougie

[RomneyDa]

@Zal1kola apologies for the delayed response. It seems like you're aware that it can still be accessed with keyboard shortcuts (cmd I on VS Code for example). We soft-hid it for a few reasons:

• The UI of switching between modes Edit and Chat was a bit rough because your session would disappear when you clicked Edit in the dropdown, which felt off (Edit is always a new session 1-off interaction)
• When plan mode was added it became confusing that Plan/Agent/Chat were modes related to tool policies, while edit was a completely different underlying architecture
• A main value of edit is targeted edits, and if you entered from the dropdown it would default to the entire file, defeating much of the purpose on the happy path. Cmd I on the other hand uses currently selected code
• On top of these, Edit mode uses a somewhat legacy process of constructing a prompt using a template, usually with the selected region differentiated from the rest of the file and some additional instructions, and then running it through stream complete (as opposed to stream chat completion ), and rather than rebuild the mode we were looking for reasons to slowly hide it in favor of Agent, especially since more models are becoming capable of search and replace. We could potentially re-architect edit to use tool calls, but since that's already agent, we want to encourage Agent mode especially as even open source models become fully capable of search and replace.

Let me know if any thoughts on why you prefer Edit over agent, or how we could maintain the benefits of Edit given some of these issues! I appreciate the feedback.