Zed Is Our Office — Zed’s Blog

It’s Monday, 12 noon ET, and the entire Jade Industries team has joined our weekly all-hands meeting. Some teammates write down their schedule deviations, while others explain in detail what they want to focus on for the week. Nathan has just completed top-level announcements and Morgan is sharing trends from our metrics and covering operational updates. In the meantime I’m preparing user quotes from the past week to share, and other people add to the topic Discussions Section.

Throughout the meeting, screens are being shared, different voices are coming in and out of the conversation, and our notes are moving rapidly as dozens of cursors are simultaneously editing the same file in real time.

This entire meeting is taking place inside Z.

Our mission from the beginning has been to create an editor that will:

1. responsible: Latency between keystroke and re-render should be invisible.
2. Concentrate: The interface should provide minimal distractions and stay out of the way of the code.
3. collaborative: Working with teammates should be no different than sitting next to them in the office.

Leaving aside the first two qualities, let’s focus on collaboration.

We’ve been dreaming of building the best collaborating editor for years. The roots of this approach go back to Nathan’s early days at Pivotal Labs, where pair programming with two keyboards plugged into the same computer was standard practice. We set out to recreate that seamless collaboration experience – but for distributed teams.

But wait… doesn’t this technology already exist in other editors?

Yes! If you’ve been a longtime developer, you may remember the Teletype package for Atom – both were created by the founders of Z. Teletype enabled developers to share “portals” across their workspaces, an early step toward Zed’s collaborative vision. Despite efforts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team desired. Nathan left the Atom team and eventually began working on GPU, Z’s GPU-accelerated UI rendering framework written in Rust, and Atom, later discontinued by GitHub. No atom, no teletype.

Other editors have added their own versions of collaboration, but the landscape is still small. Setup is so difficult that it can be a hassle; You often have to install the extension, and paste the link into a terminal or editor whenever you want to share. Concurrent edits obviously don’t merge, performance rapidly degrades as more collaborators join, and worst of all, you often resort to sharing your screen on Slack or Zoom anyway.

We built Z from the ground up to be collaborative—it’s No A bolt-on service Or An afterthought.

Using CRDTs as our core data structure, we ensure conflict-free and ultimately consistent properties where everyone’s changes are seamlessly merged and converted into a single state. You don’t have to worry about doing cursor gymnastics to avoid fatal flaws in the collaboration service. Our architecture delivers low latency, whether colleagues are in the same office or across an ocean, and whether you’re working in pairs or crowd programming, performance remains fast.

Setup is simple: no extensions to install, no per-session links to copy and paste; Only your GitHub handle is required. And with built-in audio and automatic switching on screensharing, there’s no need to fall back to external tools when you need to communicate work happening outside the editor.

We built Zed’s collaboration service mainly for ourselves, so we can effectively build Zed in Zed together. It’s not just a convenience for us – it’s urgent how we work. We have both benefited and enjoyed using Zed’s collaboration service, and we think you will too!

• 1: The Collaboration panel is opened by clicking the People icon in the status bar, and becomes accessible after you sign in through the GitHub authentication flow.
• 2: This area contains virtual rooms called “channels” that are organized in a hierarchical structure.
• 3: Click to create a top-level channel + button. Create nested children channels by right clicking an existing channel and selecting New Subchannel Option.
• 4: GitHub avatars show who is in which channel. To join a channel, click on its name.
• 5: Click the document icon to access its “Channel Notes”, which serves as metadata associated with the channel.
• 6: Once in a channel, mute/unmute your voice via the microphone icon.
• 7: Give others the option to see your screen.
• 8:channels are project agnosticProjects are shared voluntarily Through through them Share Button in the title bar. Channels can be public (🛜) or limited to specific members (#️⃣), and may include a permissions system Guest, MemberAnd Admin Roles.
• 9: Click on an avatar in the title bar to follow a teammate. If you’re following someone who’s sharing their screen, Zed will automatically switch between following their cursor in your Zed instance and sharing their screen, depending on whether they’re focused on Zed or another application.

See our FAQ on data and privacy regarding collaboration.

Our office is Z’s collaboration panel.

Our channel tree has gone through several iterations as our company has grown, but the structure we have today is flexible enough to accommodate many types of collaboration. Our channel tree is used for:

• Company-wide discussions
• working on projects
• personal focus time

Company-wide discussion space

While any channel can technically be classified and used as a “meeting” space, we have some designated for “all-hands” meetings. These channels are used for check-ins, knowledge dissemination, and reflection. Projects are not generally shared through these meetings; The action happens directly in channel notes. some examples:

• Every Monday, we jump into this week Join the Discuss channel to discuss our plans for the week, review metrics, and discuss any important matters we need to take action on.

  # Monday, November 10, 2025
   
  ## Schedule Deviations
   
  ...
   
  ## Focus Areas
   
  - Max: edit predictions
  - Katie: Git, student plan, RBAC, blogggsssss
  - David: Git (Multibuffer perf)
  - Lukas: Windows / Multibuffer
  - Ben: ACP + Meetup
  - Cole: side-by-side diff, git PRs
  - Ben K: zeta2
  - Julia: windows bugs
  - Anthony: git work 😀
  - Smit: community board, issues replies, pr triage
  - Finn: Community board, extension org CI
  - Bennet: AI Quality, setting up evals
  - Conrad : Extension store test; move auto-updated to cloud
  - Antonio: Meetup + DeltaDB
  - Mikayla: Multi Agent
  - Kirill: rainbow brackets; PRs
  - Lena: github issues visibility, community board
  - Oleksiy: zeta2
  - Dino: community board, issues replies, pairing on runnables and performance
  - Joseph: Community, building zed in zed blog
  - Mary: PM hiring, BE
   
  ## Biz Corner
   
  ...

• retrospectives The channel is captured every 6 weeks. At this meeting, each staff member is encouraged to add bullet points under categories what went well? And what could have gone better?And upvote what topics we will discuss to learn during this time slot.

  # Friday, September 19, 2025
   
  ### What went well
   
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ We keep launching
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ACP Launch amazingly positively received
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Serious traction on DeltaDB
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Loving the progress on Windows and excited about the launch
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Investment in Cloud really feels like it's paying off with this billing work
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Edit prediction progress
  - ⭐⭐⭐ Better stability in our dependencies (esp tree-sitter, no more segfaults hooray)
  - ⭐⭐ New team members are doing great
  - ⭐⭐ Strong strong engagement via PRs (and many merged)
  - ⭐ Getting Codex ACP integration off the ground has been smoother sailing than Claude Code, thanks to codex-rs being open-source (1000%)
   
  ...
   
  ### What could have gone better
   
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ We had multiple regressions that @Kirill spotted in nightly but made it to stable
    - Auto-update
    - Throwing away unnamed buffers
      => action item: ping @first-responders
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Auto-update breakage (I know a subset already retro'd on this)
    - We have a test for this now
      - I think we needed to experience this once in order to realize we needed to add testing here
  - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ PR backlog is growing again :/
  - ⭐⭐ Wish there was a windows laptop I could buy that is good

• There should be no delay in meetings. demos The channel is used every Friday and the team considers it “banging”. Staff members come in, volunteer to show off that cool feature or bug fix they worked on, and get real-time feedback from the rest of the team.

  

In addition to channels for specific company-wide meetings, we have some generalized meeting rooms for one-offs that are not suitable elsewhere and do not demand dedicated space.

For a company that makes text editors, it seemed right to name these meeting spaces after famous typing machines of the past.

project-specific location

We structure channels and teams based on specific projects, and that’s where most of our collaboration happens. Projects typically group together a number of characteristics required for larger initiatives, such as git 1.0, edit predictions v2, delta dbAnd cloudIn these channels, a project member acts as a host by sharing his or her Zcodebase instance for team collaboration, Channel notes will typically include a list of project members, goals, links to GitHub issues/discussions/project boards we aim to tackle in this effort, and the overall progress of the project,

## Git 1.0
 
Team: Cole, Anthony, Cameron, Jakub, David
Related:
 
- Git 1.0 Board: https://github.com/orgs/zed-industries/projects/48/views/1
 
## Done 🎉 (celebrate then move to bottom)
 
...
 
# Key:
 
- [D] - Needs design
- [*] - In progress
- [x] - Done
- [-] - Paused
 
## Phase 1 (diffs):
 
- [*] [@jakub @david] Make the project diff consistently snappy, eliminate beachballs
  - [*] [@david] Make multibuffer 'loading' incremental
  - [*] [@david] Add benchmark for `DisplayMap` snapshot on many file multi buffers
 
...
 
## Phase 2 (merge conflicts):
 
- [D] Make our merge conflicts not feel like engineer UI
  - 🎨 conflict region highlighting
  - Highlight diff3 markers: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/34813.
  - More helpful labels for the two sides of each conflict region
- Add a three-way conflict resolution UI
 
...
 
## Phase 3 (panel / location / traversal):
 
- [D] Commit Log
  - https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26511
- [D] File history UI
  - https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/16827
  - Joseph: Local file history could be supported by DeltaDB
  - Make past commit diff more interactive (editor::OpenExcerpts, file history integration)
- [D] Separate staged/unstaged diffs (feature): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/26560.
 
...

Subchannels are often used to organize meeting places for individual components of a project.

Not all project-based channels focus on the features we’re adding in Z; Many exist to support non-development tasks such as marketing, community, and metrics.

Many of our project channels are public, you can join our channel tree, read notes, and learn how we build Jade, like @FalbertengoDev,

personal focus space

In our tree, we have a people Channel. Staff members are encouraged to add a subchannel in their name here. These are our individual workspaces—our “virtual cubicles.” When a teammate is in a private channel, he or she sends the signal: “I need some focused time to complete this task, but you’re welcome to leave if you need some.” Everyone on the team uses them a little differently. I often use my channel to organize content for blog posts I want to work on.

fun facts, My outline was given at the beginning of this blog post blog Subchannel.

Astute observers may have noticed that there are no avatars next to these channels in the above screenshot. It’s not unusual for these to be free as teams generally love to collaborate whenever possible!

Our virtual office isn’t much different from any other in-person office – we have designated spaces for meetings, working on projects, and personal focus time. We’ve structured our channel tree to support the workflow that empowers us to operate our company, but you can create your own structure to suit your team’s needs.

While collaboration in Z has given us the ability to run Z Industries from within Z, it is only scratch The surface of how we envision working as a team. We’re building toward a future where collaboration is an ongoing conversation, not isolated commitments – where every discussion, edit, and insight remains connected to the development of code, accessible to both teammates and AI agents.

Getting here isn’t a straight line. Over the past few years, we’ve paused work on collaboration to focus on the features users most frequently request – agent-driven tooling, debugging, Windows support, and Git support – but our primary goals for Z hasn’t changedAs we reach parity with other editors on table-stakes features, these detours are becoming less frequent, giving us the opportunity to refocus on the thing we’re most excited about: building the greatest multiplayer software development tool ever,

The cooperation that exists today is considered alphaAnd for now, it’s free for everyone to use! View the source code.