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Parallel agents in Zed

zed.dev

51–60 of 178 posts

Re: Parallel agents in Zed

#51

It's pretty clear by this point that everyone is going towards parallel agents and worktrees, but TBH I am surprised to see an offering from Zed, seeing how heavy they lean into being editor-heavy and having AI features be strictly optional. The key advantages Zed has are being agent-agnostic (so not a first party UI like Claude/Codex/Cursor Desktop), supporting multiple repositories on the same agent via creating a…

yeah, but they don't support a lot of the features Claude does like MCP integration. we've booked this up to logfire (telemetry provider) and it's a game changer when doing optimisation or diagnosis of bugs. plugins and skills also missing. but it is nice to switch between provider easily

Re: Parallel agents in Zed

#53

Warp launched something similar a week or so ago, but the Zed implementation I find a lot more logical. Will give Zed another try, as I’m overdue for my monthly “maybe I should try this terminal/IDE” itch.

I like Warp but something about it is very opaque and confusing. Maybe it has a learning curve I haven't committed to, or it's just very alpha and evolving often.

Re: Parallel agents in Zed

#56
post #7

I'm buying into this workflow more the more I use it, but the real gamechanger is (a) parallel threads in worktrees, with (b) enough lifecycle hooks to treat them similarly to spinning up a VM. Specifically for me that means that after I create a worktree I get some local config files copied over and Postgres duplicating my local dev and test databases so I can test in isolation, and then when I close out a worktree…

We support create git worktree hooks too

Is there an example of this?

Re: Parallel agents in Zed

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We support create git worktree hooks too

Is there an example of this?

The worktree create hook is documented https://zed.dev/docs/tasks?highlight=hook#hooks

And then I guess setting up tasks for the cleanup part, but it'd be great to see that get automated too so I don't need to remember it.

Re: Parallel agents in Zed

#58

I really want to like Zed, but for some reason the way it interfaces with the TypeScript language server is dog slow compared to VS Code and its derivatives.

I'll bet if you point out the issues where this is described and measured, you'll get some eyeballs.

Re: Parallel agents in Zed

#59
post #8

I personally don't love the idea of the default layout pushing aside my code and filetree to make space for AI tools I really like Zed, I use it every day. But, if I'd seen this layout when I first installed, I never would have taken it seriously I imagine this will push some new users away

This was also my first impression. But it seems to me the changes are mostly about swapping what panels dock where (left or right) and maybe some additions/tweaks around the AI panels. On macOS these are still the same:

    ⌘B : toggle the left dock
    ⌘R : toggle the right dock
If you opt-in to the new layout, the panels that used to sit in the left dock are now in the right dock. I will give it a try even for classic coding. One can change what panels get docked where from the settings window.

Re: Parallel agents in Zed

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proper git implementation. I end up doing things in the terminal tab because its faster than the ui or is more clear. The basics are good but thats about it.

What git features are you missing? We've been adding a ton recently

If you're taking suggestions I'd like to be able to see when I'm over the 72 character limit, last time I checked there was no way to know inside Zed when writing the commit message though I might be wrong. Other than that I think Zed's great and multi-buffer editing is really swell.
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