Nathan Sobo

Nathan Sobo is CEO and co-founder of Zed, where his AI-relevant work includes explaining editable language-model contexts, opening the editor to third-party agents, and developing collaboration around conversations with agents. His public argument is that easier code production should raise expectations for software quality: engineers should judge their contributions by the reliability and maintainability of the resulting systems.[2][4][6][8][5]

In his June 2023 introduction of Zed’s assistant panel, Sobo explained why the team built a conversation editor rather than relying only on a sequential chat interface. The initial implementation sent conversation history with each inference; treating that history as editable text let developers understand and control what they sent to the model. Conversations were divided into message blocks, and users could revise them with ordinary editing tools, insert selected code, and send multiple requests in parallel.[4]

In June 2025, Sobo introduced Agentic Engineering as “combining human craftsmanship with AI tools to build better software.” His case for craftsmanship emphasized system design: a difficult codebase impedes both its human developers and the AI tools working within it. He argued that AI could help engineers overcome knowledge gaps and experiment faster, while remaining no substitute for expertise.[5]

Sobo’s August 2025 ACP announcement described the team’s Agent Client Protocol as a way to switch agents without switching editors. Working with Google, the team used Gemini CLI as the initial reference implementation. Instead of communicating through terminal escape codes, the editor and agent exchanged structured requests and responses through JSON-RPC endpoints, with Gemini CLI running as a subprocess. This brought its capabilities into an interface with edit visualization, multi-buffer review, and navigation between code and conversation.[6]

The protocol was released under the Apache license for other agents and clients to implement. Sobo also credited collaboration with Oli Morris of Code Companion to bring ACP-compatible agents to Neovim. Zed’s own agent was moved onto the same interface code paths as external agents, making the team’s UI improvements available to both.[6]

“I have never been a big fan of pull requests,” Sobo wrote in June 2026. He described the Zed team discussing code while working together in the same worktree, before commits and review threads. With agents, he argued, the conversation generating the code needed to remain connected to the code as it changed. His explanation of DeltaDB described fine-grained operations with stable identities, messages recorded alongside edits, and conflict-free replicated worktrees that allow people and agents on different machines to edit the same files.[7]

In August 2026, Sobo explained why DeltaDB’s first client became a separate application, Delta, rather than an addition to Zed. The team wanted the database and its application to shape each other without the constraints of an existing editor, and to avoid disrupting Zed users’ workflows by rebuilding its foundations underneath them. Delta put the conversation at the center; bringing DeltaDB into Zed remained part of the team’s plan.[8]

Sobo announced Delta’s first private-beta invitations on August 12, followed by its public beta on September 16, 2026. At the public launch, he reported that the team had disabled pull requests on Delta’s own repository the previous week and was building Delta within Delta. The public Zed repository would remain on GitHub for community issues and contributions, with contributors encouraged to share Delta threads alongside pull requests.[8][9]

Delta’s announced review workflow gave reviewers isolated copies of a thread’s worktrees and access to the original agent’s context, allowing them to explore or try fixes without disturbing the parent thread. DeltaDB retained edits and messages between commits while preserving Git compatibility. Sobo expressed the team’s belief that threads would become software development’s fundamental unit, bringing ideas, implementation, review, and landing changes into the same place.[9]

These agent-focused interfaces followed earlier work on editors and human collaboration. Sobo recalled that he and his collaborators founded Zed in 2021 to move beyond the constraints of commits; they had not yet anticipated how relevant those collaboration problems would become to agents.[7]

Sobo joined GitHub in late 2011 to build Atom and led its team until 2018. He co-led development of Teletype for Atom, which used conflict-free replicated data types for collaborative text editing. Antonio Scandurra joined him in architecting Teletype and researching the foundations of Zed. Zed’s co-founders also include Max Brunsfeld, whose work included creating Tree-sitter.[2]

Looking back in his June 2025 craftsmanship essay, Sobo described his initial goal for Zed as an editor rendering at 120 frames per second. His experience with Atom led him to look beyond web technology, taking on systems programming and shaders to pursue that experience. He wrote that he would have welcomed an LLM’s help with Rust borrow-checker errors when first learning the language—an example of the learning assistance he believed AI could offer, rather than an account of having used it then.[5]