Why IDEs Won't Die in the Age of AI Coding: Zed Founder Nathan Sobo
Nathan Sobo has spent nearly two decades pursuing one goal: building an IDE that combines the power of full-featured tools like JetBrains with the responsiveness of lightweight editors like Vim. After hitting the performance ceiling with web-based Atom, he founded Zed and rebuilt from scratch in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering. Now with 170,000 active developers, Zed is positioned at the intersection of human and AI collaboration. Nathan discusses the Agent Client Protocol that makes Zed "Switzerland" for different AI coding agents, and his vision for fine-grained edit tracking that enables permanent, contextual conversations anchored directly to code—a collaborative layer that asynchronous git-based workflows can't provide. Nathan argues that despite terminal-based AI coding tools visual interfaces for code aren't going anywhere, and that source code is a language designed for humans to read, not just machines to execute.
Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
Building Zed's agentic editing (Interview)
Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE.
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Featuring:
Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Agentic editing
Zed’s leaked-prompts
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Zed's secret sauce (Friends)
The Zed text editor has come a long way since Nathan Sobo came on the show last year to tell us about this follow-up to Atom. Zed is open source now, has the underpinnings of collaboration built in, is beginning its journey toward full extensibility, is coming to Linux soon & shows serious promise if Nathan’s team can mix their secret sauce just right.
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Featuring:
Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Zed.dev
Goodbye Atom. Hello Zed. (The Changelog #531)
Introducing Channels for Collaboration
Zed is now open source
User themes now in Preview
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Goodbye Atom. Hello Zed. (Interview)
This week we’re talking with Nathan Sobo about his next big thing. Nathan is known for his work on the Atom editor while at GitHub. But his work wasn’t finished when he left, so…he started Zed, a high-performance multiplayer editor that’s engineered for performance. And today, Nathan talks us through all the details.
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Featuring:
Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
zed.dev
Zed raises $10M for a code editor built for collaboration
The Changelog #241: The Story of Atom with Nathan Sobo
GitHub officially says farewell to Atom
Founders Talk #7: Henk Rogers / The Tetris Company
Prioritize enablers and blockers - linear.app
Zed’s language support
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The Story of Atom (Interview)
Nathan Sobo, founding member of the Atom editor team at GitHub, joined the show take us all the way back to the beginning of Atom to learn where it came from, the founding team, the problem it solves, on through to shipping 1.0 and beyond.
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Featuring:
Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Lambda the Ultimate
Chris Wanstrath
Corey Johnson
Github Atom’s Code-Editor Nerds Take Over Their Universe
Atom on Libraries.io
Treetop on Libraries.io
The super early version of Atom was built on Ace Editor
Atom: free and open source for everyone
Atom homepage
@atomeditor on Twitter
Atom on GitHub
Atom Flight Manual – Documentation for Atom, generated by nanoc, hosted by GitHub Pages
Atom Blog
Atom Forum
The Changelog #216: Electron and Cross Platform Desktop Apps with Zeke Sikelianos
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!