Zed Agent
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 28 of 41 coding agents by recommenders
Recommended for live pair programming and self-hosted models; critics say it breaks on Windows with WSL or SSH remotes.
Recommended for live pair programming and self-hosted models; critics say it breaks on Windows with WSL or SSH remotes.
14 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 71%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Dependable for serious coding work
“For serious coding work I use the Zed Agent”
Comment from 21 Mar 2026 in “OpenCode – The open source AI coding agent” “This is why I use Zed and the Zed Agent.”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed” Praised as exceptional and enjoyable
“I am really enjoying how zeds agents have worked out in the past few weeks”
Comment from 15 Jun 2026 in “My Homelab AI Dev Platform” “The Zed Agent is exceptional!”
Comment from 5 Jan 2026 in “I switched from VSCode to Zed”
Other coding agents people recommend
The four most recommended other coding agents, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | 571 | 993 | 37% | 12 | 1 yr46 owners | — |
| oh-my-pi | 104 | 28 | 79% | 9 | 2 mo5 owners | Approved |
| Grok Build CLI | 66 | 114 | 37% | 6 | — | — |
| DeepSeek Harness | 63 | 28 | 69% | 4 | 1 mo5 owners | Approved |
| Zed AgentThis page | 10 | 4 | 71% | 7 | — | Approved |
What people said
13 of the 15 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“it gets better results from the same model on the same task”
“then it casually burned through a surprising amount of money for very little progress”
“their Zed agent is completely broken when running on Windows connected to WSL/SSH remote”
“I am really enjoying how zeds agents have worked out in the past few weeks”
“The majority of the tool calls worked.”
“way longer than with zed agents”
“I usually use the Zed Agent built into Zed editor for self-hosted models”
“it couldn't run bash commands”
“I was SHOCKED at how bad its edit tool is compared to the search-and-replace tool in pi.”
“For serious coding work I use the Zed Agent”
“This is why I use Zed and the Zed Agent.”
“It's near-unparalleled for live, mind-meld pair programming with an agent, thanks to CRDTs, DeltaDB, etc.”
“The Zed Agent is exceptional!”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.