Zed, the code editor built in Rust by the team behind Atom and Electron, has hit version 1.0. What matters for the agent ecosystem is the Agent Client Protocol. Zed designed its editor to run multiple AI agents in parallel, integrating with Claude Agent, Codex, OpenCode, and even Cursor. Nathan Sobo and his team are betting that developers want to use AI agents to unblock complex projects. The approach is a direct counter to the walled garden trend in AI development tools. Most AI editors tie you to a single provider or their proprietary agent tech. Zed's Agent Client Protocol treats agents as pluggable components. You can run several at once, side by side, and the editor handles the coordination. The whole thing is built on a custom GPU-based UI framework called GPUI, which the team wrote from scratch because, as Sobo explains, web-based foundations couldn't deliver the performance they wanted after years of working on Atom and Electron. What's coming next matters more than 1.0. Zed is building DeltaDB, a synchronization engine using CRDTs that tracks changes at the character level. The goal is shared collaborative spaces where humans and AI agents work on the same code simultaneously, with a consistent view of the evolving codebase. You could invite a teammate into a conversation with an agent to review agentic code in the context where it was generated. Sobo's team explicitly says this kind of experience wouldn't be possible inside someone else's browser engine, a pointed comment about the Electron-based editors that dominate the market. The editor now runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, with a business tier adding centralized billing and team management. Five years and a million lines of code in, the real question is whether developers actually want this kind of agent flexibility or if convenience wins over choice.