I think their recent push to delegate to CLI agents in the agent panel is the right direction. Claude Code has been running in Zed for the past month. Sure, there are SDK limitations and kinks to iron out, but it’s moving quickly. I’m into it.
My complaints:
No Claude code hooks support at the time of this writing. As someone who leverages this somewhat heavily this is why I don’t really use it all the time. I actually find it to be somewhat of a feature at times because I can simply run the thing through Zed if I want to temporarily run with no hooks.
Performance is noticeably degraded presumably because of the “ACP” protocol they invented. I usually work either directly in Claude terminal window using its edit tools or using repoprompt’s mcp editor tools and both are noticeably faster than running in zed.
What seems to be memory leaks in the agent window causes sluggish performance, especially when scrolling. It’s not bad enough to make it unusable, but for an editor whose main advertisement is speed it feels particularly painful.
I sometimes worry if we are moving too fast for no reason. Some things are becoming standards in an organic way but they feel suboptimal in my own little bias bubble corner.
Maybe I am getting old and struggling to adapt to the new generation way of getting work done, but I have a gut feeling that we need to revisit some of this stuff more deliberately.
I still see Agents as something that will be more like a background thread that yields rather than a first class citizen inside the Editor you observe as it goes.
I don't know about you, but I feel an existential dread whenever I prompt an Agent and turn into a vegetable watching it breathe. — am I using it wrong? Should I be leaving and coming back later? Should I pick a different file and task while it's doing its thing?