I have been daily driving Zed since February and it’s been really great, surprisingly polished. I have barely touched SublimeText in this time. It has built in Helix mode for editing and configurable shortcut keymap for JetBrains, VSCode etc to minimise learning curve. Best performing editor/IDE I have ever used. I’m a little skeptical of business model but they’re promising basic editor to be free forever and sell AI subscription to be a viable business. It’s open source anyway and the code is worth a look.
So we started over. Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game, organizing the entire application around feeding data to shaders running on the GPU. That meant writing our own UI framework, GPUI, from scratch in Rust.
That was a bold bet early on, glad it paid off!
Building our own foundations is what got us to 1.0, and it’s also what makes the next chapter possible. We’re actively developing DeltaDB, a synchronization engine built on CRDTs that tracks every change with character-level granularity. DeltaDB lets multiple humans and agents share a single, consistent view of the codebase as it evolves. DeltaDB will allow you to invite teammates into conversations with agents to review and evolve agentic code directly in the context from which it’s generated.
Fascinating, cannot wait to see where this leads.
The native IDE I’ve been waiting for years finally landed, on the eve of IDEs being made obsolete by models and agents. Oh the irony.