A Year Later: Zed is the AI Editor I Was Waiting For

A follow-up to my first post about Zed and my most recent post about programming with AI.

About a year ago, I first tried the Zed editor. At the time, I really loved it. It was simple, fast, and had great AI integration. The only things I wasn’t a huge fan of were a few UX issues, like the Vim keybindings being a little wonky. But the way it integrated with ChatGPT (which was the only model I had tried at that point) seemed really promising.

My main takeaway from that experience was a feeling of excitement and hype for what was to come with the editor.

Did it live up to the hype?

Holy shit, yes!

A year ago, when I was testing it, I could only really use it for small personal projects outside of work. The pricing model of Copilot, combined with shallow language server support, meant that it had very limited utility at my actual job. Not to mention the teeny-tiny context windows of the models at the time.

Over time, I went back to my toolbelt of PHPStorm and NeoVim.

More recently, I’ve been using Gemini 2.5 Pro, which has been a game changer. The fact that it asks questions, gives you commands to run, and easily iterates on itself has been amazing. I started using it for all of my research in lieu of ChatGPT. Then it dawned on me: Zed. After almost a year of downtime, I decided to give it another shot. Once I got my Gemini API key set up, it worked flawlessly. It quickly took over my personal projects, and then I realized it had Intelephense support. Finally, I could actually use it at work, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I’ve been using it both at work and at home.

• It reminds me of Sublime Text with its speed.
• It reminds me of VSCode and Cursor with its deep AI integration.
• It has the language server support needed to work with any framework.
• Plus, it has solid Vim keybindings.

For any professional developer looking to integrate AI into their workflow, I can’t recommend the Zed and Gemini 2.5 Pro combination enough. It’s a game changer.