Gradle vs Zed

Zed ships weekly, mixing editor craft with steady agent work. The current release sandboxes the Agent's terminal commands and web fetches, adds undo and redo for Project Panel file operations, a Skip Hooks commit option, and configurable Agent Panel fonts. Recent weeks brought llama.cpp as a language model provider, Claude Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 support across BYOK providers, staged and unstaged multibuffers for hunk-level review, Git Graph improvements, and the move of LLM providers, external agents, and MCP servers into the settings editor.

Two threads run in parallel and are starting to meet. The Git work has been building toward review-inside-the-editor — hunk staging, graph columns, branch picker filtering — while the agent work has been building toward an agent that operates on the repository rather than suggesting text. Sandboxing is the gate between those: an agent that runs terminal commands and fetches URLs needs containment before anyone lets it work unattended. Adding llama.cpp alongside hosted providers and moving provider configuration into settings both point at model choice being treated as user configuration rather than product identity.

Expect the sandbox to gain user-visible policy — which commands or hosts an agent may reach — since containment shipped before any controls over what it permits.