Bring Your Own Agent to Zed – Featuring Gemini CLI

Summary

You can now interact with third-party agents directly within Zed. To make this possible, we created the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), and we've partnered with Google to integrate Gemini CLI as the initial reference implementation. Because software developers rely on diverse tools in a variety of different tech stacks, we see room for multiple agents competing to solve problems in different domains. Just as the Language Server Protocol unbundled language intelligence from monolithic IDEs, our goal with the Agent Client Protocol is to enable you to switch between multiple agents without switching your editor. If you're an agent developer, we're also giving you a fast and convenient user interface inside an IDE, so you can focus on building the best possible agent rather than forking VS Code. A walkthrough of Gemini CLI in Zed. After shipping agentic editing earlier this year, the next big task on our roadmap was making that experience extensible. As luck would have it, that's around the time when Google decided to reach out. The Gemini CLI team was having a great experience using their agent in Zed's integrated terminal, and they wanted to explore what deeper integration could look like. As an open-source project with a ton of early traction, Gemini CLI seemed like a perfect way to drive the design of extensible agents in Zed with a concrete use case. Command-line agents are cool because their simplicity makes them easy to run anywhere—including as a subprocess of another application. Zed was already running Gemini CLI inside our embedded terminal emulator, but we needed a more structured way of communicating than ANSI escape codes. So we defined a minimal set of JSON-RPC endpoints to relay user requests to the agent and render its responses. The result is the Agent Client Protocol, a lean framework that lets any client talk to any agent, as long as they follow the schema. By running the same Gemini CLI as a subprocess speaking ACP, we surface the same underlying capab...