Zed

Zed is a code editor developed by Zed Industries, Inc., a for-profit company founded by former members of GitHub's Atom editor team. The editor is written in Rust and positioned around performance, minimalist design and "multiplayer" editing, in which teammates can join a shared project and edit code as if it were on their local machine, follow each other around the codebase, call one another from a built-in contacts panel, and share screens. The project's tagline is "code at the speed of thought."

Beyond collaboration, Zed has added an AI layer: an Agent Panel for delegating coding tasks to agents that discover context, edit files and run tools, inline assistance, a unified-diff review flow for accepting or rejecting agent changes, and granular tool-permission settings. Zed supports third-party agents such as Claude Agent, Codex and OpenCode through the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), MCP servers for extending agent knowledge, models hosted by Zed, local models via Ollama, and user-supplied API keys from any provider. It also ships Zeta, an open-weight, open-data edit-prediction model. The same real-time multiplayer infrastructure used for human collaboration is reused for following agents.

The editor runs on macOS (10.15 or later), Linux and Windows, distributed via direct download, an install script and package managers; a web version is not yet available. It includes a command palette, project-wide search, integrated terminal, extension system for languages, theme selection, Vim and Helix keybinding modes, and migration guides for users coming from VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm and RustRover.

Founding story

Nathan Sobo joined GitHub in late 2011 to build the Atom text editor and led the Atom team until 2018, also co-leading Teletype for Atom, an early production use of conflict-free replicated data types for collaborative text editing. Antonio Scandurra joined the Atom team in 2014 after open source contributions drew attention, later co-architecting Teletype and working on a real-time distributed CRDT database in Rust at Ditto. Max Brunsfeld joined Atom in 2013 from Pivotal Labs and built Tree-sitter, the incremental parsing framework powering code analysis at GitHub. In 2019 Sobo and Scandurra concluded that realizing their vision of a code editor and collaboration platform required starting over on a new technical foundation; they worked nights and weekends until spring 2021, when they raised a seed round and founded Zed Industries.

Business model

Zed Industries, Inc. is a for-profit company. At the time of its Series A the company was pre-revenue and planned to monetize primarily through a service-based model. Current public materials reference hosted models with simple pricing and no API-key management, plus pricing and plans pages, alongside GitHub Sponsors donations that go to Zed Industries as general company revenue with no associated perks or entitlements.

Service-based monetization, including Zed-hosted AI models offered under stated pricing plans; the editor itself is open source, and GitHub Sponsors contributions are treated as general company revenue.

Traction

During the private alpha the waiting list reached roughly 12,000 people with about 800 weekly active users. As of the fetched GitHub page the repository had about 89,000 stars, 10,200 forks, 315 watchers and 39,643 commits, with a public feed of recently merged pull requests from external contributors. Public testimonials come from developers including Amos Wenger, José Valim (creator of Elixir), Fatih Arslan and Samuel Colvin (creator of Pydantic). The company publishes an agent-usage metrics dashboard covering Zed Agent, Claude Agent and Codex CLI.

Latest developments

Recent public activity includes stable release 1.16.1 (August 19, 2026), continued merged pull requests covering agent UI fixes, OpenCode model updates, addition of Google Gemini 3.7 Flash, an ask_user elicitation tool, support for self-hosted Sweep next-edit models and a Max reasoning-effort setting. Product pages highlight Zed-hosted access to models such as Claude Opus and GPT 5.4, an agentic panel layout, and expansion of the Agent Client Protocol ecosystem.