history
the company, sourced and dated — atom's rise and sunset, the xray rehearsal, the empty-repo restart, and the agent-era turn toward delta.
the atom years2013–2022
inside github, the future zed founders build atom, tree-sitter, and teletype — then xray, the rust-core rehearsal with an operation-based vcs called memo. github kills xray after the microsoft acquisition, and atom is sunset the day zed goes public.
- 2013-11-06tree-sitter starts on nights and weekendsmax brunsfeld makes the first tree-sitter commit — built nights and weekends while driving atom toward 1.0. the incremental glr parser later powers github.com code navigation, neovim, helix, emacs, and zed itself.
- 2014-02-26atom public betaatom public beta, announced by sobo — 'a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability.' sobo had joined github in december 2011 to work on chris wanstrath's webview-wrapped ace experiment full time; brunsfeld joined from pivotal in 2013, scandurra in 2014 as a university student whose contributions caught the team's attention.
- 2014-05-06atom open-sources — and spawns electronatom is open-sourced under mit — including atom shell, the chromium desktop framework renamed electron, which goes on to power vs code, slack, discord, and notion. 'the ironic thing is that we created electron to create atom, but i can't imagine a worse application for electron than a code editor' — sobo, a decade later.
- 2015-06-25atom 1.0atom 1.0 ships with 1.3m downloads and 350,000 monthly active users (company-reported at the time), 660 themes, 2,090 packages. redpoint later characterizes the run as '5+ years, 59k github stars, and 9.3% of engineers' — investor-reported.
- 2017-11-15teletype: crdt collaboration inside atomteletype for atom launches in beta, unveiled by sobo at qcon san francisco — encrypted peer-to-peer (webrtc) real-time collaboration on a custom string-wise crdt, one of the first production crdt uses for collaborative text. scandurra authors the announcement.
- 2017-12-07xray: the rust-core rehearsalthe atom-archive/xray repo is created — 'an experimental next-generation electron-based text editor' with its core logic in rust. by march 2018 it switches to a client/server architecture on an rgasplit-variant copy-on-write crdt; sobo keeps a public weekly journal in the repo.
- 2017-12-11tree-sitter goes to github.combrunsfeld gives a galois tech talk on tree-sitter while github is integrating it into github.com and atom. before leaving github he helps the semantic analysis team wire tree-sitter into syntax highlighting and code navigation on the site.
- 2018memo: deltadb's embryoxray's q3 focus is memo — 'an operation-based version control system that tracks changes at the level of individual keystrokes and synchronizes branches in real time.' eight years later the same idea ships as deltadb.
- 2018github kills xraygithub management makes clear there is no path forward for xray; sobo takes time off after the birth of his second daughter. the repo readme now reads 'github has decided not to move forward with any aspect of this project'; last push july 2019. microsoft's acquisition of github had closed that october.
the restart2019–2023
sobo and scandurra restart from an empty repo in their free time; a warp detour, a ~$2.5m seed, and a year of dogfooding later, zed ships a macos-only public beta with a $10m series a led by redpoint.
- 2019the restart in an empty reposobo reemerges: 'antonio and i decided we would continue the xray work in our free time. we started over with an empty repo, and by fall of 2019 the foundations of zed and gpui were beginning to take shape.' scandurra meanwhile spends about two years at ditto building a crdt database in rust.
- 2020-12the three-month warp detourat the end of 2020 sobo takes a job at warp, bringing the code with him — 'three months in, i realized that i couldn't let go of my dream of building the ultimate editor.' how zed's ip was separated from warp is undocumented; the ledger marks it open.
- 2021-02-20zed-industries/zed createdthe zed-industries/zed github repo is created — private until the january 2024 open-sourcing.
- 2021-04~$2.5m seed; zed industries foundeda ~$2.5m seed closes — root ventures, matchstick ventures, and v1.vc; trackers split on the exact date (6 april per cb insights, 20 april per caplight/linkedin) and no lead is publicly stated. 'max and antonio soon joined me' — zed industries starts.
- 2021-12-15introducing zed — vaporware, but in rustthe first public 'introducing zed' announcement — 'a lightning-fast, collaborative code editor written in rust.' the hacker news thread runs 151 points and sets the early tone: 'this has all the characteristics of announcing vaporware. but "in rust"!'
- 2022-03zed dogfoods zedthe team makes the switch to coding in zed full time after a year of building the minimal feature set to dogfood.
- 2022-05-05the first public demofirst public demo video — 'zed: collaborative coding at the speed of light' — with a private alpha promised 'in the coming weeks.'
- 2022-06-08atom's sunset, zed's sunrisegithub announces atom's sunset (all atom-org repos to be archived december 15, citing the refocus on vs code and codespaces) — and the same day sobo publicly announces zed: 'as atom's sun sets, zed's sun is rising. we are not done here.' the private alpha begins that week; the waitlist reportedly reaches ~12,000.
- 2022-12-01the crdt dna postthe first zed.dev blog post — 'how crdts make multiplayer text editing part of zed's dna': 'so 16 years ago, i decided to build one. it took a failed attempt, many hard lessons, and the help of some talented friends, but the tool i've been striving to create is finally emerging in the 135k lines of rust that constitute zed.'
- 2023-01-23the weekly journal returns'this week at zed industries' begins — a public weekly journal in the xray tradition, and the post carrying sobo's full founding narrative.
- 2023-03-07gpui: the gpu-rendered ui stackgpui is revealed — scandurra's 'leveraging rust and the gpu to render user interfaces at 120 fps': game-engine-style immediate-mode rendering, per-primitive shaders, the whole ui stack owned.
- 2023-03-15public beta and $10m series apublic beta — macos-only — plus a $10m series a led by redpoint (patrick chase, erica brescia) at a reported $40m valuation, ~$12.5m total; angels include dylan field, tom preston-werner, spencer kimball, rahul vohra, and todd goldberg. the hn thread (223 points) is sharply mixed: atom-alumni excitement against 'closed-source editor built on a closed-source framework, telemetry built-in, macos only.'
- 2023-04-20copilot integrationgithub copilot integration lands — the first ai feature, two years before the agent era.
- 2023-06-14the open-source decision'we've decided to open source zed… on zed' — the pre-announcement that sets up the january 2024 relicensing.
- 2023-06-28the assistant panelthe assistant panel is introduced — an llm chat expressed as a plain text buffer, 'text is the ultimate user interface.'
the open-source year2024
zed goes gpl/agpl/apache-2 and becomes a community cause overnight — 1,576 hacker news points — then ships linux, the wasm extension registry, ssh remoting, and the first ai wave with anthropic.
- 2024-01-03gpui 2 in productiongpui 2 reaches production — the framework's first major internal rewrite.
- 2024-01-17channelschannels ship — link-shareable real-time collaboration rooms that become the company's virtual office.
- 2024-01-24zed goes open sourcezed is open-sourced — gpl editor, agpl server-side, apache-2 gpui — with the pledge 'we're never going to show you a banner ad in your code editor, and if we do, you can always build zed from source.' fireside hacks launches the next day. the hacker news thread runs 1,576 points — the largest coverage event to that point — mixing celebration with license-mix, cla, and telemetry scrutiny.
- 2024-02-07the wasm extension registrythe central extensions registry repo is created; in april, 'extensible language support in zed' details the wasm/wit-sandboxed extension architecture — a deliberately narrower api surface than atom's anything-goes packages.
- 2024-07-10linux now'linux when? linux now.' — stable linux builds ship on vulkan (wayland and x11). 923 points on hacker news; phoronix, omg ubuntu, and gamingonlinux all carry it.
- 2024-08-20zed ai with anthropiczed ai launches — a hosted service built with anthropic on claude 3.5 sonnet, piloting anthropic's then-unannounced fast edit mode and prompt caching; free during launch. simon willison flags the buried anthropic feature reveal the same day; the first 'why is my editor doing ai' grumbling begins.
- 2024-10-17at-cost ai billingusage-based billing arrives for high-volume zed ai users — 'bill at cost,' the first step away from free ai.
- 2024-10-30ssh remotingssh remoting ships — 'a key feature for potential vs code switchers' per devclass — though installing a binary on the remote host sparks a security debate.
the agent era2025
zeta, the agent panel, and acp make zed the neutral surface for coding agents while the base bifurcates — a disable_ai flag, a privacy fork, token pricing — and sequoia leads a $32m series b as windows finally lands.
- 2025-02-13zeta, the open edit-prediction modeledit prediction launches on zeta — a qwen2.5-coder-7b fine-tune released as open weights with an open dataset on hugging face, hosted by baseten, with opt-in training-data telemetry. 516 points on hn; praised for the open-model approach.
- 2025-03-12native gitnative git integration ships — the last obvious 'not a real editor' checkbox for many holdouts.
- 2025-05-07the agent panel'zed: the fastest ai code editor' — the agent panel and agentic editing launch, with byok and local models via ollama. 747 points on hn, split between admiration for an open-source implementation and ai-fatigue complaints; sobo tells the changelog the story is 'open source, the hard way.'
- 2025-06-18the debuggerthe debugger ships — dap support closing the 'not a real ide' gap — built as a community-led effort: 8 months, 977 commits, 25k+ lines (self-reported). community lead anthony eid is later hired.
- 2025-07-23the disable_ai flag'you can now disable all ai features in zed' — `disable_ai: true` ships after roughly a year of requests for a global kill switch. the register covers it wryly ('hears your prayers, rolls out ai-free mode'); 577 points on hn — a concession-coverage moment.
- 2025-08-19what's taking windows so longthe windows progress report explains the delay — a vulkan attempt abandoned for a hand-built directx 11 backend, four engineers full-time. the register turns it into a story about the cost of native cross-platform.
- 2025-08-20$32m led by sequoia — and a deltadb teasethe $32m series b is led by sequoia (sonya huang, james flynn) — total raised above $42m. the same post publicly teases deltadb for the first time: 'a new kind of operation-based version control that incrementally tracks the evolution of your code with edit-level granularity.' sequoia cites 150k monthly active developers (self-reported).
- 2025-08-20the zedless forkzedless appears — a privacy/local-first fork that strips telemetry, crash reporting, non-selfhostable cloud dependencies, and the cla: 'no rugpulls.' 556 points on hn; the fork's existence is itself a verdict on the trust ledger.
- 2025-08-27acp: lsp for agentsthe agent client protocol launches with google — gemini cli as reference agent, google having initiated contact — pitched as what lsp did for language intelligence, now for agents. json-rpc over stdio, apache-2.
- 2025-09-03claude code in zedclaude code lands in beta via acp — 683 points, the biggest ai-era thread — framing zed as the neutral surface where the agents come to you.
- 2025-09-24token-based pricingthe pricing overhaul moves off prompt bundles to token pass-through: pro drops $20→$10/month including a $5 token credit, overage at api list plus 10%; gpt-5 and gemini 2.5 added. the hn split: 'inevitable and more honest' versus 'bait-and-switch.'
- 2025-10-06jetbrains adopts acpjetbrains adopts acp for its ides — the protocol gets a second editor vendor.
- 2025-10-15windows now'windows when? windows now' — stable windows ships on directx 11 and directwrite, led by platform engineer @localcc, ending two-plus years of 'windows when?' replies. 548 points on hn; the register had run 'zed's dead, baby… it's on windows' for the beta a fortnight earlier.
- 2025-10-16codex via acpopenai's codex goes live via acp — the third major agent on the protocol.
- 2025-11-13zed is our office'zed is our office' — the dogfooding post: the entire remote company runs all-hands inside zed channels. 627 points on hn — months before the collaboration stack starts moving to delta.
- 2025-12-17secure by defaultworktree trust and secure-by-default posture ship — agent-era hardening for running untrusted repos.
the platform year2026–
zed 1.0 draws the biggest thread in the project's history, zed for business launches, and the company turns toward deltadb and delta — the operation-based vcs memo sketched in 2018, now a separate app betting that threads replace pull requests.
- 2026-01-28the acp registrythe acp registry goes live — a catalog for agents speaking the protocol, months after agent extensions shipped in november 2025.
- 2026-02-04edit prediction, pluraledit prediction goes multi-provider — zeta, mercury coder, sweep, ollama, codestral, and copilot nes all pluggable.
- 2026-03-09zed for educationzed for education launches — a free pro year for verified students — alongside the 'hired through github' pipeline that turned contributors into employees.
- 2026-03-25zeta2zeta2 — 'we rebuilt zeta from the training data up'; zeta2.1 follows in may with 3x fewer tokens and 50ms faster predictions (self-reported).
- 2026-04-22parallel agentsparallel agents ship — multiple concurrent agent threads — after the april 9 agent-metrics dashboard.
- 2026-04-29zed 1.0zed 1.0 — '1.0 doesn't mean "done". it also doesn't mean "perfect". it means we've reached a tipping point where most developers can quickly feel at home in zed.' over a million lines of code; 'hundreds of thousands of developers' daily (self-reported); acp agents now include claude agent, codex, opencode, and 'more recently cursor.' the hn thread runs 2,153 points — the largest in the project's history.
- 2026-05-05not building ai for the moneyconrad irwin answers the ai-direction critique head-on: 'we were selling tokens at a loss to most paying ai users until we switched to token-based billing' — the long-term monetization is 'a collaborative workspace where humans and ai agents work together,' i.e. deltadb. hn is unconvinced: 'didn't feel like much of an actual refutation.'
- 2026-05-06zed for businesszed for business launches — $30/seat/month, org admin controls, order forms at 25+ seats. the revenue model is now pro ai subscriptions plus business seats plus planned delta plans; channels and collab remain free.
- 2026-06-11deltadb detailed'software is made between commits' details deltadb — crdt operation-based version control compatible with git, versioning worktree and conversation together. techtimes frames it as 'a direct challenge to the commit-centered model that has defined software collaboration since git's creation in 2005.'
- 2026-08-12delta private betadelta enters private beta — a separate app, 'a multiplayer environment for coding with agents and reviewing what they build,' deliberately not inside zed: 'rebuilding zed's foundations underneath hundreds of thousands of daily users would have meant disrupting the workflows.'
- 2026-09-16delta public betadelta goes public beta — 'replace prs with delta.' the team disabled pull requests on delta's own repo; '33 of us have landed 570 changes to main since we turned off pull requests' (self-reported). free during beta, paid plans coming; 'it seems like everyone is in a race to replace github right now.'
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.