I'm a big fan of Zed but tbf I'm just using Claude Code + Nvim nowadays. Zed's problem with their Claude integration is that it will never be as good as just using the latest from Claude Code.

Text on frosted glass over other text is really hard to read

We need an option to turn these “improvements” off

FWIW my system does feel more snappy and the improvements to Spotlight are nice

It works off the Claude Code SDK, which mean it doesn't support many of the built in slash commands - it doesn't support /compact, which is 100% necessary because when you use this implementation enough, you'll eventually get a "Prompt too long" error message with no ability to do anything about it. Since you can't see how far you are in the context window, it's a deal breaker, since you have to start a fresh chat and might run out of room before you can ask it to create a summary prompt for continuing.

There is no way to switch models that I can tell - I think it just picks up on your default model - and there is no way to switch to Plan mode, which has become absolutely crucial to my workflow.

I didn't see Zed picking up on problems reported in the IDE, it was defaulting to running 'tsc -b' in my directories.

At this point it's better to run a terminal inside Zed and work from there. The official response in the Zed Discord has been "talk to your local Anthropic rep" to get them to support Zed's Agent Client Protocol (ACP).

> What I found interesting is how it forced me to think differently about the development process itself. Instead of jumping straight into code, I found myself spending more time articulating what I actually wanted to build and high level software architectural choices.

This is what I already do with Claude Code. Case in point, I spent 2.5 hours yesterday planning a new feature - first working with an agent to build out the plan, then 4 cycles of having that agent spit out a prompt for another agent to critique the plan and integrate the feedback.

In the end, once I got a clean bill of health on the plan from the “crusty-senior-architect” agent, I had Claude build it - took 12 minutes.

Two passes of the senior-architect and crusty-senior-architect debating how good the code quality was / fixing a few minor issues and the exercise was complete. The new feature worked flawlessly. It took a shade over 3 hours to implement what would have taken me 2 days by myself.

I have been doing this workflow a while, but Claude Code released Agents yesterday (/agents) and I highly recommend them. You can define an agent on the basis of another agent, so crusty-architect is a clone of my senior-architect but it’s never happy unless code was super simple, maintainable, and uses well established patterns. The debates between the two remind me of sitting in conf rooms hashing an issue out with a good team.

What we do is he first completes an essay by himself, then we put it into a Claude chat window, along with the grading rubric and supporting documents. We instruct Claude to not change his structure or tone but edit for repetitive sentences, word count, correct grammar, spelling, and make sure his thesis is sound and pulled throughout the piece. He then takes that output and compares it against his original essay paragraph-by-paragraph, and he looks to see what changes were made and why, and crucially, if he thinks its better than what he originally had.

This process is repeated until he arrives at an essay that he's happy with. He spends more time doing things this way than he did when he just rattled off essays and tried to edit on his own. As a result, he's become a much better writer, and it's helped him in his other classes as well. He took the AP test a few weeks ago and I think he's going to pass.

So I ended up posing the question to Claude and the response was “figure out how to work with me or pick a field I can’t do” which was pretty much a flex.

I killed all internet access for my TVs, bought Apple TVs to attach to them and never looked back.