Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

Posted by meetpateltech 9/3/2025

Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed(zed.dev)

681 points | 406 commentspage 2

fabbbbb 9/3/2025|

Their landing page via Safari manages to crash my iPhone 11 Pro repeatedly, namely crashing Safari but also another app and the Bluetooth connections - had not seen that before so they are clearly innovative.

tymscar 9/3/2025|

Honestly, I’d love to know why that happens. Can you take a look at the logs? On Mac, you can do it through the Console app, and on Linux, through idevicesyslog.

jryio 9/3/2025||

What most of these comments are missing is the attempt at standardization and unification.

There are a lot of comments that people need X feature in order to switch to Y editor. While that may be true and your particular workflow requires certain features, what is overlooked is the survival pressure for editors.

It appears that our industry is moving towards adoption, sometimes mandatory, of AI coding agents. Regardless of your feelings on the topic, having good tooling to support this effort comes down to: switching costs, compatibility with existing editors, and a strong ecosystem of third party extensions.

While Cursor/Windsurf jumped the gun on bespoke editor integrations with LLMs - the adoption of MCP and other SDKs for coding agents means it's plug and play. The full feature set will be in every editor connected to every agent.

I think Zed wins on having the lowest switching costs for most developers. Paying down generic solutions like Agent Client Protocol (AC) now is a good strategy. It took multiple parties coming together for us to get TLS, OAuth 2.0, and ECMAScript.

I don't see why most editors should behave like hand crafted musical instruments when in reality they are much more akin to high quality knives in a kitchen (sure you have your favorite knife set and bring it from job to job, but at the end of the day you can be just as productive with a different knife when necessary).

Shank 9/4/2025||

> I don't see why most editors should behave like hand crafted musical instruments when in reality they are much more akin to high quality knives in a kitchen (sure you have your favorite knife set and bring it from job to job, but at the end of the day you can be just as productive with a different knife when necessary).

This is such a poor analogy. Yes, a good chef can make do with a different knife, but there is a reason why chefs pay for significantly higher quality knives, keep them sharpened, and treat them with diligence and care, than other kitchen tools. A blunt knife can actually be dangerous. Consequently, a lot of chefs buy knives that are effectively hand crafted / forged knives out of this relentless pursuit of quality.

> What most of these comments are missing is the attempt at standardization and unification.

> While that may be true and your particular workflow requires certain features, what is overlooked is the survival pressure for editors.

I think your general perception is not something I agree with. I want to use software I enjoy using. Programming is a creative exercise for me, and I want to use the tools I enjoy. If a tool is not enjoyable to use, I do not want to use it. Sometimes, productivity does increase enjoyment, but sometimes it doesn't. For example, arguably I would have been more productive in my Java days if I used Eclipse, but because the editor was so bad, I preferred to learn the APIs myself and use Sublime Text instead.

I also don't think I'm sympathetic to the survival of any particular editor. Software comes and goes, and sustainably built business models will prevail. All of the AI-first editors hinge on this being the right iteration of this technology, and we simply do not have a long enough timeframe or context to know if this is truly the best way to write code using AI. MCP/ACP, whatever else might be the best strategy for now, but I think it's too early for anyone to suggest that we've come to the right conclusion forever.

conartist6 9/4/2025||

As someone who is in the position to see what the next really disruptive innovation is, you're quite right that there exist much, much better ways to write and collaborate on code. Flying leaps of innovation to Zed's tiny shuffle-steps.

conartist6 9/4/2025|||

Zed spent their innovation budget on Rust and GPUI, and as a result they have no energy to question the status quo of IDEs as a whole. Git and LSP are antiquated but form the bedrock of their plans for the future.

Essentially at this point they can only do spaghetti enigneering: adding more and more complexity on top of the complexity that already exists. IDEs have been through so many iterations of this process already that all the real wins are in refactoring: moving the whole system (and ecosystem) design sideways, which is he one thing they dare not try to do (though it happens to be my forte).

azemetre 9/4/2025|||

What tools or tech are you referring to?

conartist6 9/4/2025||

BABLR -- a parser framework, and agAST, the DOM structure at the heart of our state layer. Come to our Discord if you want to learn more. We're trying to launch in the next day or two here.

azemetre 9/4/2025||

Looks very interesting, thanks for sharing. Will be following for sure!

conartist6 9/4/2025||

I'm sorry if this is blunt but is Agent Client Protocol... ...good?

It just looks to me like a bolted-on dongle to the past 50 years of kludges in editor design. It hasn't got 1/20th of the value proposition that a proper shared state layer would offer.

atonse 9/3/2025||

My main issue with claude code is running multiple ones in parallel. I don't want to manually do all the git worktree stuff, I just want claude to handle it for me.

So if Zed automatically handles that (where there's a worktree per thread) I can see the appeal. Apart from that, I'm already using Tower to view the changes so I'm not really sure what the value here is.

I tried installing it, and got an error "can't load supported slash commands" – not sure what that means.

nicoslepicos 9/4/2025||

You should try Magnet for this! (www.magnet.run) https://www.loom.com/share/ceabf385871e45b88fcb512b6de6b684

nosefurhairdo 9/3/2025|||

I suspect Zed will aim to tackle this issue via DeltaDB:

https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed#introducing-deltadb-o...

camwest 9/3/2025|||

Same, logged an issue: https://github.com/zed-industries/claude-code-acp/issues/18

ZachSaucier 9/3/2025||

Ona makes this easy: https://ona.com/

neurostimulant 9/3/2025||

It's great that Zed adding this very useful feature, but isn't this effectively cannibalize their own AI subscription plans? Why pay zed $20 when you already pay for claude code and can use it in the assistant panel? You might still want the edit prediction feature, but then why pay zed $20 when you can pay $10 github copilot and can use it to power zed's edit prediction feature?

ricardobeat 9/3/2025||

It’s also great that they’re willing to risk that, in the name of a potentially better user experience. That’s what gets them to win in the long run, not building another walled garden.

chillfox 9/4/2025||

Could be cheaper, maybe?

I have been using zed a fair bit with clause api and the 50 free prompts a month that zed provide on the free plan works out to roughly $8 for an equivalent amount of code using the claude api.

But no idea how it compares to the subscription plan.

ZpJuUuNaQ5 9/3/2025||

I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and dozens of extensions based on either a technology stack or a project - it would be really difficult to find a good reason to throw it all away. The idea of switching between IDEs does not appeal to me either. I do use Neovim a little bit too, but most of that usage time was spent on configuration.

pimeys 9/3/2025||

It's really interesting point of view. I'm one of those people who avoid using VSCode at any cost. It's slow, it's bloated, the UI is not great, and it's slowly being locked down by Microsoft.

If Zed would not exist, I would be using helix, neovim, or emacs as I did before.

IshKebab 9/3/2025|||

VSCode is actually not slow. The problem is to make it useful you need to add quite a few extensions, and those can be slow. That itself wouldn't be too bad but VSCode doesn't expose any information about what is causing the slowness. You end up with "VSCode is slow and it could be due to any one of the dozen extensions I have installed", which effectively means that VSCode is slow.

It remains to be seen if Zed can avoid that though.

WD-42 9/3/2025|||

VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency. Zed is built by the same team that developed Atom and Electron and one of their stated goals is to make up for the shortcomings of these technologies.

If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.

matwood 9/4/2025|||

> VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency.

Start up time, sure. But VSCode was lauded as the first performant Electron based editor. I just tested VSCode, Zed, and vim and I can't see any difference from when I press a key to when a character shows up on the screen (appears instantly). I'd be curious to see the results of a blind test, and wonder if people's biases against Electron are showing up.

Barrin92 9/3/2025|||

>If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.

I don't think this is a fair claim. When you start doing an apples to apples comparison, that is to say make full use of IDE and auto-completion features it's difficult to see a difference given that the latency and speed of the plugins starts to dominate any millisecond difference in input latency or rendering speed.

WD-42 9/3/2025|||

No. When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately. All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously.

SAI_Peregrinus 9/3/2025|||

> When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately.

Seems to work the same for me in VSCode, CLion, and nvim. I don't doubt that you have issues with it (I've experienced slow editors & laggy input, it sucks) but I don't think it's inherent to VSCode. Doesn't mean it's not a bug, but if I had that issue I'd try with no extensions to verify, then binary search disabling the extensions I want until I find the one causing the lag.

Barrin92 9/3/2025||||

>All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously

in the technical sense, but you as a developer don't use auto-completion asynchronously. It's not like you autocomplete and continue typing and then come back to the completion. When you complete at point you have wait. Whether that keypress takes 2 or 3 milliseconds isn't going to make a difference when the inter-process communication of your editor and its services is magnitudes slower. It's not like programming is like playing an FPS game. You're not in any meaningful sense limited by your mechanical input speed.

typpilol 9/3/2025||||

Are you telling me that it was a delay when you type in vscode? If so, either your configuration or computer is doing something wrong

Shank 9/4/2025|||

> Are you telling me that it was a delay when you type in vscode? If so, either your configuration or computer is doing something wrong

This is simply not true. There is inherent latency in any rendering pipeline, and VSCode and Atom both have input latency that is significantly higher than other editors like Sublime Text owing to a bloated rendering pipeline. You can read more about this and how easy it is to introduce latency simply by changing basic things like keyboards here: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ or editors specifically: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

Fraterkes 9/3/2025||||

The thing their computer might be doing wrong is just being a slightly older budget laptop, which is not a particularly rare setup.

Just try to use vscode on a ~500 dollar laptop from 2019 or something

trenchpilgrim 9/3/2025|||

It's super noticeable on a high refresh display. VSC is like playing a video game at 20FPS.

Vanilla settings on a high end gaming PC.

Myrmornis 9/4/2025|||

If you press a key in VSCode, it does appear immediately.

eviks 9/4/2025|||

The difference in startup speed is measured in seconds, bit milliseconds. And difference in input speed can be dozens of ms, which is also noticeable

manuhabitela 9/3/2025||||

vscode is noticeably slow compared to sublime text or zed, even without any extension. You instantly notice it when switching files or typing things that trigger auto-completions.

In the end the feeling is drastically different. It weirdly makes for a more peaceful experience to have such a snappy editor.

vscode wins thanks to all its extensions, where basically every language is supported and most features you can think of are there. But it's kinda like modern react. You know better alternatives exist, like solid or svelte, but the community is so big, it stays the easier choice in the end.

typpilol 9/3/2025|||

I've never once experienced delayed input typing even with a lot of extensions

Myrmornis 9/4/2025|||

Latencies associated with typing and switching files are imperceptible on any laptop I've used with VSCode.

typpilol 9/3/2025||||

You can actually open the text tools on discord and see what's taking up memory and CPU.

They also have a new feature that's experimental that lets you offload extensions to a separate extension host so they don't block on the main thread for poorly designed or performing extensions.

It's definitely not slow in its default for .

fatata123 9/4/2025|||

[dead]

hu3 9/3/2025||||

Interestingly I disagree with all your points about VSCode.

It's fast, barebones by default, UI is minimal and it's Open Source enough that competitors forked from it.

I guess YMMV because there is a comment in this post from another user about Zed being sluggish.

pimeys 9/3/2025|||

I tried VSCode many times in my life and just hated the experience so much. It put me away from GUI editors for years, didn't want to try any of them. So ugly and so sluggish.

Zed was the first one that put me to rethink my position. It is so snappy on my Linux workstation and I don't have any issues with it's GUI. I finally switched from vim et.al.

But I know I have "weird" opinions, I also really dislike Apple products and their software.

typpilol 9/3/2025||

My experience is the exact opposite

Vscode has never had any input delay for me

timeon 9/3/2025|||

Even not counting the LSP, for a text editor, it eats quite large amount of RAM.

kace91 9/3/2025|||

It’s not at all slow when compared to IntelliJ products or similar. It doesn’t compete with editors, it competes with IDEs.

mikeocool 9/3/2025|||

Zed's main selling point over VSCode for me is the lack of a slight delay between when I press a key and when the character appears.

VSCode has always felt ever so slightly sluggish to me, and I find it maddening as I type.

pmg101 9/3/2025|||

So glad to hear I'm not alone! I continue to use SublimeText for this reason. Yet it doesn't seem to bother others.

WD-42 9/3/2025|||

I think a lot of people forget how long ago Electron/Atom were released, and the subsequent Cambrian explosion of Electron based apps and editors like VSCode. There's probably a huge amount of developers that haven't used anything else.

RussianCow 9/3/2025||

Ironically, I used JetBrains products for years before switching to VS Code because the latter felt so much faster. So it definitely depends on what you're used to.

Zed feels significantly faster than VS Code, but it also doesn't feel as polished and "complete" as an IDE, so I'm going to stick to VS Code for now for the same reason I stuck to JetBrains IDEs for so long.

pkorzeniewski 9/3/2025|||

Same here, still using Sublime Text due to its general snappiness, but can't wait for Zed to be released on Windows, it feels like a modern successor to ST that just keeps getting better.

IshKebab 9/3/2025||||

Weird, I tried it recently and found it actually a bit laggier than VSCode. The rendering is much worse quality too.

Are you using Vim mode or something like that?

mikeocool 9/3/2025||

I begrudgingly gave up vim mode in vscode a few years ago, because that seemed to make it so much more sluggish.

IshKebab 9/3/2025||

Yeah it hooks into some blocking event that gets called on every keypress. At least that's how it worked last time I tried it many years ago. Very sluggish.

Fortunately standard editing shortcuts like Ctrl-D, Ctrl-left/right, etc. replace 99% of Vim "magic" and are way easier to remember and use.

Fraterkes 9/3/2025||

No offense, but if you think ctrl-shortcuts are easier to use you don’t really get the appeal of vim

veber-alex 9/3/2025||||

Strange.

I just opened the same project in Cursor and Zed and started typing around, and I can't tell any difference. I am usually very sensitive to this stuff; for example, I can detect when my Mac drops below 20% battery because ProMotion is disabled and the screen refresh rate drops to 60Hz.

jkkola 9/3/2025||||

This is why I cannot switch to neovim despite my attempts. I love the workflow, but the delay is too noticeable for me, and nothing helps. It's not a long delay, but long enough for me to feel like I have to wait for hours compared to Zed.

throwaway314234 9/4/2025||

May be Helix editor will be fast enough? In my opinion it feels considerably faster then vim with addons

diabllicseagull 9/3/2025|||

vscode started to intermittently freeze my whole desktop on arch linux recently. I rage deleted it. imho, it’s a valid compromise to choose a snappy lightweight editor over vscode with all available extensions.

sadly it reminds me of how visual studio used to be and and how much of a sluggish mess it is today. I don’t think the community can fix it either. it’s an uphill battle when MS is known to lose care as soon as they reach a critical mass of users.

zorked 9/3/2025||

VS Code is sluggish for me as well and crashes. I have minimal expansions, this is just a poor excuse for a lousy editor. Zed is much better, neovim is much better. My only real concern with Zed is what bait-and-switch is awaiting for us when they decide to make money. But it's a fantastic editor, no question about that.

LocalPCGuy 9/3/2025|||

There is always a "better mousetrap", and there are those that continue to use the old one because they "know how it works and it's set up just the way I like it". And there are others that try every new mousetrap that hits the market. (and that's ok, not slighting either one)

I will say that I personally have never really gelled with VSCode no matter how much I try to customize it, it still is just a bit off. For me, it's like it's too much to be a simple editor like SublimeText or NeoVim, but not quite enough to be an IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio (full). It does just enough that I expect a bit more of it and it often fails to deliver. Right now I tend to just use 2 editors - one very simple one for viewing/editing text files and one IDE (currently IntelliJ) for coding in a project.

On topic - Zed is actually a really nice editor. It had some rough edges last time I tried it, but it's probably about time to give it another go.

Karrot_Kream 9/3/2025|||

I wanted to like VSCode but it has enough input latency on my machines that it's not that enjoyable when I'm "locked in". Also if I'm running a bunch of services in Docker on MacOS (which means they're running VMs sigh) the overhead of VSCode is just too much and the system starts swapping constantly grinding the whole thing to a halt. I also find configuring it a pain. Every configuration pane feels ad-hoc and not part of a holistic, configurable system. Emacs has lots of crusty bits and an annoying event loop that you have to really work around but is designed a lot more holistically than VSCode.

Zed to me feels like a great batteries-included editor and I still run it as my non-emacs alternate editor. I wish its configuration was a bit more discoverable (especially with configuring linters/formatters), but it's 95% of what I need 95% of the time.

kiney 9/3/2025|||

I had to use VSCode for some projects in the past because it was what was available on the clients workstations... I can't imagine having to use that laggy electron abomination all the time. For me Zed is sent from heaven, because my previously preferred editor (geany) hast basically zero developtment nowadays.

meowface 9/3/2025|||

I normally care a ton about latency and in the main project I work on I put extreme focus on reducing input latency in text input fields, but...

I've used VS Code for ages. I tried Zed. I don't really feel a difference. It's smoother but VS Code is more than smooth enough for me and has tons of features I rely on that don't exist in dev.

Meanwhile, when I tried Ghostty I noticed a significant improvement in "typefeel" compared to iTerm. So I'm not immune to detecting such a difference.

I will try Zed again though.

BoredPositron 9/3/2025||

>>I don't really feel a difference.

>>It's smoother but...

typpilol 9/3/2025|||

How big was his project bc I've never had any input away and I've worked on some pretty good size projects.

Are you using an old computer or something?

kiney 9/4/2025||

I mainly used VSCode on locked down corporate laptops. Usually good hardware but running windows and corporate security bloat. But where I was allowed to install alternative editors they were snappy.

jryio 9/3/2025|||

Zed succeeds at reducing the switching cost. I used NeoVim for ten years daily and configured it way back in college days.

I thought I would be unable to move to a GUI editor and it turns out that the speed and efficiency of Zed plus the almost one-to-one mapping of Vim features means that I am extremely productive in Zed.

monstrado 9/3/2025|||

I think the point of ACP being an open protocol is so that other editors (e.g. VSCode, Neovim) can implement it as a receiver and integration with ClaudeCode/GeminiCLI/... would just work.

norman784 9/3/2025|||

OTOH I'd ten to prefer as less plugins as possible in VSCode, just because they are inherently dangerous, I'd like Zed plugins that are WASM, so they don't have access to the world.

But I agree that VSCode Typescript support is better than Zed, it works with weird projects setup, while Zed has more troubles. I at work VSCode and Zed/Helix for my projects, generally I use Zed when want to do some AI stuff, otherwise I just use Helix.

the__alchemist 9/3/2025|||

It sounds like you haven't tried Jetbrains IDEs. I understand still preferring VsCode in that case, but I think you would be saying "I prefer VsCode" vs "I don't see a reason". A big con with JB is they are very slow. The upside is that they manage multi-file projects, refactoring, and introspection far better than VsCode.

kombine 9/3/2025|||

I switched to Neovim a year ago, and while I did spend a significant amount of time on configuring it, I haven't touched my config for months now - and I'm perfectly happy with it. There's things I can improve, but it does what I want.

californical 9/3/2025||

I’m in the same boat. I spent a lot of nights for a couple weeks getting everything tuned just right, in the beginning. But now, several years later, it really doesn’t take much. I spend maybe 2-3 hours once every few months, and that’s usually just adding a bunch of features that sound nice to make my life better. I’ve easily gone 6+ months without touching neovim config, if not longer, because it’s unnecessary. It only matters if you want to further improve your editor

SubiculumCode 9/3/2025|||

I am sure some would have said the same about why would anyone switch to using Linux when there was Microsoft Windows.

charcircuit 9/3/2025||

Especially now that Windows has WSL. You can even open GUI Linux apps just as if they were regular apps.

SubiculumCode 9/3/2025||

Yeah, but you still have to deal with all the other Windows shit.

stuaxo 9/3/2025||

I use zed when I need to quickly edit something, it pops up so fast- everything else feels sluggish.

dcre 9/3/2025||

Glad to see this out so quickly. Like I said[0] on the Gemini announcement post, it feels like Zed is trying to get out of the business of iterating on agent logic and just let other people handle it. Any prompting secret sauce a) is trivial to copy, and b) gets eaten by the next model generation anyway. The capabilities of Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, etc. seem to me to be converging.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045515

lemontheme 9/4/2025|

Plausible take. My first time using a coding agent was with Zed’s. As a sceptic, I was blown away. Two or weeks later Claude Code dropped and I haven’t used the Zed agent since. I canceled my subscription because 20 EUR/month for AI features I no longer use felt silly. And with the massive investment from Sequoia, and the real possibility of enshittification, I couldn’t mentally classify it as a monthly ‘donation’ to sponsor ongoing development either.

That last part is just me maybe. But I’m sure they poured a lot of time into their (granted, very nice) agent, only for many users to switch to Claude shortly after release. Letting others build the agent but being the place where the agent get used seems like a smart move

kiney 9/4/2025||

I use the zed agent regularly. What does claude code do better?

jimmyshoes 9/4/2025||

Fine. Cool step for Zed to push ACP, and I think this is the right direction for the IDE space.

But tbh if it’s not as frictionless as the Codex IDE extension in a Zed-skinned VSCode, it doesn’t matter.

Tried giving Claude and CC many chances, but the cognitive load of constantly managing a hard context window is DOA.

Codex w/gpt-5 is on par if not better than any of Anthropic’s solutions at this point, and the ubiquity (web, CLI, IDE) + UX consistency of Codex under one account/plan just dominates any marginal value of using a different model at a higher price.

Codex just works. Then it keeps working. Then it keeps working.

Any solution that wants to compete with OAI’s latest hostile takeover attempt has to match then beat on “unlimited/anywhere/frictionless” UX across platforms AND price ($200/mo all in).

I don’t see a good way out of this for most, except through major spend on playing catchup.

Guess that’s why Anthropic just raised again. Cursor is clearly trying to play, but they will always be a markup product until they launch their own SOTA model. Is Gemini still alive?

sgrytoyr 9/4/2025||

If they could add support for remote development (meaning the claude code instance runs on the remote server in the same folder that you have already opened as a remote/ssh project in Zed) and add a way to paste images in Zed and have them interpreted by CC on the server, this would really be a killer feature.

As someone who’s running a development agency I need to have tens of dev environments for different client projects running at the same time, and being able to switch between them multiple times every day (often from multiple client computers), so a remote server is the only way to go–I don’t want all of that stuff running on my Macs.

Nowadays I also have tens of CCs running on the dev server, switching between them using tmux, which works great, but the lack of support for pasting images through the terminal/ssh/tmux has been a real bummer. It would be great if Zed found a way to bridge that gap.

btown 9/3/2025||

As a VS Code + Claude Code user, I'm really excited to see progress here, because the official near-zero-config Claude Code IDE integration is... inflexible, at best.

What if I want to send a subset of my open editor panes to Claude Code? What if I want Claude Code to open diffs for its edited files in a specific area/window, and silently open that file so that I can multitask on other things without it taking focus when it's done thinking? What if I want keyboard shortcuts for specific slash commands, or to trigger a slash command from another task?

Having a robust open-source ecosystem that will let users fork and build customizable UI around coding agent experiences will make them even better, and the space will move even more quickly because the ecosystem won't split between different preferences for agent/model choice. It's an incredible time to be coding.

koakuma-chan 9/3/2025|

I just installed it and it seems changing mode is unsupported? I can't figure out how to switch to plan mode.

Aeolun 9/3/2025||

I think the article mentions this not yet being supported by the SDK, and therefore by the editor.

adastra22 9/3/2025||

Ah, if it is using the SDK, that is a big limitation. The SDK is nice, but it is meant to provide support for backend use of Claude Code, not integrating an interactive session.

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