Zed: The Fastest AI Code Editor

Summary

For millions of years, humans have used tools to create things. We programmers have recently created some very useful tools for ourselves: large language models. So far, these futuristic tools have been accessible to programmers in one of three ways: Copy/pasting from a website Running in a terminal emulator Baked into a closed-source fork of an open-source fork of a web browser As of today, there is now a fourth option: Zed, the world’s fastest AI code editor. The entire Zed code editor is open source under GPL version 3, and scratch-built in Rust all the way down to handcrafted GPU shaders and OS graphics API calls. Zed's new AI capabilities are also open-source, just like the rest of the editor, so you can see exactly what the new Agent Panel is doing under the hood. Here it is in action: A walkthrough of Agentic Editing in Zed. The Agent Panel lets you tell an AI agent what to do, and it'll do as you asked to the best of its ability. This can be anything from asking questions about your code base to having it directly make changes and write new code. For example, here I opened the Agent Panel and asked the agent to make a change about a blog post format: Asking the agent to help with blog post author's name display. I just typed in the words and pressed Enter; I didn’t have to teach the agent anything about my code base first, or wait for an indexing process to finish. The agent quickly figured out what it needed by searching the code base—the same thing I’d do if I found myself in a new code base and wanted to orient myself. This example had the agent making a trivial edit, but agents can be helpful even when I want to handcraft code myself. For example, in an unfamiliar part of a large code base, an agent can save me time by tracking down the spot where I need to make the change. Your conversation with the agent is private by default; Zed doesn't harvest your data for training purposes (or any other purpose). If you want to share feedback to help improve Zed's...