Zed

You will love Zed for speed: a Rust editor that opens and searches large repositories without a stutter, with an agent panel that feels native rather than bolted on, and speed is the daily trait that decides it, because an agent you wait on is an agent you stop using. What you give up is reach: no browser tool, and no way to run it unattended, so it is a pair rather than a delegate.

Pick it for daily editing with an agent close at hand. Pick Cursor when you want the agent to carry more of the task, and Claude Code to hand it a ticket and walk away.

The risk is isolation. The tools doc lists write_file, delete_path and a terminal tool, and sandboxing is opt-in, applied only "when Zed Agent sandboxing is enabled"; even then the fetch tool sits outside it, so a prompt injection that arrives through a fetched page runs with the agent's full reach. A bad rm runs where you are standing, and the default is standing in your checkout.

Turn sandboxing on before the first session and treat fetched content as hostile. What it does right: every tool call asks for permission before it runs, and the permission model is explicit in the docs rather than implied by a demo.

Zed publishes no benchmark, which spares the reader a methodology audit. The principled property is separation. 1. The Agent Client Protocol hosts Claude, Codex and Gemini as external agents in the same panel, so the editor's value does not depend on its own loop being best. 2. Subagents get their own context window, which bounds what one task can read. 3. Edits are text replacements the user sees before they land, so verification is visual and immediate rather than deferred to a test run.

The observation: an editor that can host its competitors has hedged its own agent, which is either humility or strategy, and works either way.

The moat is the editor itself: distribution a model lab cannot build quickly, and a Rust codebase with real users is a rarer asset than a model wrapper. Monetization is the weak part. Pro is $10 with $5 of tokens included and Business is $30 a seat, both thin wrappers on someone else's inference, so pricing power is bounded by what the labs charge and what the user could pay them directly.

Likely acquirer: a lab that wants an editor it does not have, and there are several. Position: adopt the editor, treat the hosted plan as a convenience, and expect the cap table to change before the product does.

The demo is fast and the agent panel is capable. Procurement is a different meeting: sixty Business seats is $1,800 a month before tokens, and the pricing page says SSO, SAML and SCIM are planned but not currently available, which is a sentence that ends the conversation with security before it starts. There is no headless mode, so nothing runs in CI and nothing is auditable centrally.

Onboarding is a day, mostly keybindings. Not yet. Revisit when SAML ships, and ask for audit logs in the same release.

I can read the whole thing. GPL-3.0-or-later, so a fork survives the vendor and has to stay open. MCP servers go in a context_servers block in settings.json, with command for local ones and url plus headers for remote, and providers include Ollama and LM Studio for fully local use, so the agent runs on my hardware with the editor talking to localhost.

The settings file is the whole configuration surface, which means it lives in dotfiles and travels with me. That is ownership, not a rental, and the only tool on this board I would call both fast and mine.