Zed AI

Zed is a code editor built from scratch in Rust by the founders of Atom (GitHub's editor) with a focus on performance as a first principle. It is one of the fastest text editors available on Mac and Linux, with sub-millisecond keystroke response times and smooth scrolling even in very large files — capabilities that are noticeably different from Electron-based editors like VS Code.

Zed AI integrates language model capabilities throughout this high-performance editing experience. The inline assistant allows generating or transforming code directly in the editor without switching to a chat panel, and the code actions and diagnostics features provide AI-assisted understanding of errors and suggestions for fixes.

The collaboration features, where multiple developers can work in the same file simultaneously with real-time editing, are distinctive. Zed supports multiplayer editing natively rather than through an extension, which provides a lower-latency collaborative coding experience than Live Share in VS Code.

The AI features primarily use Claude (Anthropic) models for code generation and chat, with bring-your-own-API-key support for users who prefer to use their own Anthropic or OpenAI accounts. Zed AI provides a limited free tier of AI completions for personal users.

The main limitation for teams considering Zed is the extension ecosystem. VS Code has decades of extension development behind it, with tens of thousands of extensions covering virtually every programming language, framework, and tool. Zed's extension ecosystem is much smaller. Teams that rely on specific VS Code extensions for their workflow may find Zed missing capabilities they depend on.

Zed is most compelling for developers who value editor performance above all and are comfortable with a smaller extension ecosystem.