# Zed users praise its speed more often than users of any other coding agent

*In seven weeks of posts, 81 people praised how fast Zed opens, types and responds, against 16 who complained. Per judging post, that is the highest rate of speed praise among 17 coding agents, and 20 of those users praise it while agents write the code they then read in Zed.*

What users credit, Zed. By Feedback Bench, 15 October 2026. Feedback Bench 1.1. Posts 2026-08-31 to 2026-10-18; bench built 2026-10-19. Web: https://feedbackbench.com/coding-agents/#/articles/zed-users-praise-its-speed-more-often-than-users-of-any-other-coding-agent

On 5 September someone in r/cursor answered a thread asking for an alternative to Cursor. They had just made the move themselves, and what struck them first was what they had been putting up with. "[just switched to zed and it made me realise how sluggish vscode and forks actually are. that feeling of instantness is amazing.](https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1w84npz/alternative_to_cursor/p811lnh/)" The next sentence described a working day that would have sounded odd a year ago. They used Conductor "[for more agent-based tasks and first drafts, then opening in zed and refactoring and further work from there.](https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1w84npz/alternative_to_cursor/p811lnh/)"

Both halves of that post turn up again and again in what Zed's users wrote over seven weeks. Zed is fast, and its users say so more often than the users of any other coding agent we track talk about speed. A sizeable share of them now feel that speed in a new place: the editor where they read and rework code an agent wrote.

## The size of it

Feedback Bench read posts about 17 coding agents from 31 August to 18 October 2026. After we removed bots, staff, vendors, giveaway and promotion accounts and a referral poster, 81 people praised how fast Zed opens, types or responds. Sixteen complained about its speed in the same weeks, a ratio of about five to one.

To compare agents we used one rule for all of them, user-weeks labelled as praising speed divided by the posts that judge each agent. Zed draws 44.1 per 1,000 judging posts. Warp is next at 24.1 and Cline at 23.1, and no agent with a large following comes close. On the bench's customer-love measure for the same criterion, "[Latency, throughput and fast mode](https://feedbackbench.com/criteria/rel.response_speed.md)", Zed is 2nd of 10, behind Claude Code, and on the bench's count its speed praise outnumbers complaints 73 to 16. Across the bench's whole "[Reliability and speed](https://feedbackbench.com/criteria/reliability.md)" area, Zed ranks first of 13.

**Exhibit 1: Zed's users praise its speed at the highest rate of the 17 agents, by a wide margin.** User-weeks praising latency, responsiveness or speed, per 1,000 posts that judge each agent. The same rule for every agent. Warp, Augment Code, Grok Build, Conductor and Kiro rest on fewer than 10 speed posts each.

|  | Praise of speed per 1,000 posts that judge the agent |
|---|---|
| Zed | 44.1 (83 of 1,881) |
| Warp | 24.1 (7 of 291) |
| Cline | 23.1 (35 of 1,518) |
| Augment Code | 20.0 (1 of 50) |
| OpenCode | 18.8 (308 of 16,371) |
| Pi | 16.7 (64 of 3,839) |
| Google Antigravity | 15.8 (241 of 15,222) |
| Grok Build | 14.3 (1 of 70) |
| Factory | 9.0 (16 of 1,783) |
| Kiro | 7.9 (7 of 888) |
| GitHub Copilot | 7.8 (19 of 2,438) |
| Claude Code | 7.4 (392 of 53,078) |
| Devin | 7.2 (34 of 4,747) |
| Cursor | 6.6 (102 of 15,454) |
| OpenAI Codex | 6.5 (521 of 79,900) |
| Amp | 4.7 (11 of 2,325) |
| Conductor | 2.3 (1 of 435) |

*Posts 31 Aug to 18 Oct 2026. Criterion: Latency, throughput and fast mode. Labels by large language models, counted by code.*

It was not one good week. Speed praise appears in every week of the window, from four posts in the slowest week to 22 in the week of 21 September, when a thread started by @theo and a post from Zed's own account drew a run of replies.

## The decision users credit

Zed's team has never been shy about this. The homepage calls Zed "The world's fastest IDE." In the 1.0 post in April, Nathan Sobo explained that building it "meant writing our own UI framework, GPUI, from scratch in Rust," and "organizing the entire application around feeding data to shaders running on the GPU." The same post traces the line back to Atom, the editor that spawned Electron, which "eventually became the foundation of VS Code."

Users repeat that reasoning without being asked. Nine of the 81 name the design choice itself. They cite Rust, a native app, GPU rendering and "[no electron bloat.](https://twitter.com/2040670492315508736/status/2107687816771866841)" One user on X drew the distinction carefully:

> [zed is my daily driver, not because its written in rust, but because the consequences of it being written in rust. its a fast, lean, editing machine.](https://twitter.com/123797739/status/2108667677921120416)

A Reddit user in a heated thread on Zed's memory put it more bluntly. Zed "[is freaking fast thanks to it's architecture](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1x354w5/i_profiled_zed_memory_usage_and_heres_what_it/pfa9o2y/). and that's where it's different from web based editors." When users explain the speed, they reach for the architecture, which is the decision the company made years ago and still describes in the same words.

When users name a yardstick, it is usually VS Code. Twenty of the 81 say outright that a VS Code-based editor is slower, whether VS Code itself, Cursor or Google's Antigravity IDE. Someone in r/google_antigravity wrote that "the ide is slow and crashes. [i switched to zed so i can use the models is a stable and snappy ide](https://www.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1waolu4/why_does_antigravity_have_so_few_users/p8r9iig/)."

## Where people feel it

Users rarely talk about benchmarks. They describe moments. A long-time r/ZedEditor user explained that what first drew them to Zed was that "[the typing latency was nonexistent](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1whv207/i_love_zed_but/pajaf1c/)," and that on "[gigantic .net solutions](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1whv207/i_love_zed_but/pajaf1c/)" it "[just keeps up.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1whv207/i_love_zed_but/pajaf1c/)" Another wrote, under a post profiling Zed's memory, "[when i click there is no waiting](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1x354w5/i_profiled_zed_memory_usage_and_heres_what_it/pf7xemw/)." One X user found a complaint to make anyway: "[the only thing to hate about zed is that it is isn’t slow enough. i miss the waiting time to get distracted](https://twitter.com/377812931/status/2103316200688345574)."

Startup is the moment that cuts both ways. Six of the 81 single out how fast Zed opens ("[particularly snappiness and start-up time](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1wohfe8/zed_the_new_ide_to_rule_them_all/pbpzdsb/)", one wrote). Five of the 16 complaints are also about startup, and three of those come from Linux or WSL. The 14 October release lists "Improved Zed startup time," so the team appears to be watching the same spot.

## Speed in the agent era

Some users argue that agents make an editor's speed beside the point. If an agent writes the code, why care how fast the editor types? In the same memory thread one wrote:

> [editor being fast is irrelevant if i don't edit the code.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1x354w5/i_profiled_zed_memory_usage_and_heres_what_it/pf8lr56/)

Another said that because "[nobody writes code anymore](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1x354w5/i_profiled_zed_memory_usage_and_heres_what_it/pf8bbwo/)," Zed's performance edge no longer counts. Even the long-time user who praised the typing latency added that "[when you're just vibe coding, the ide doesn't really matter.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZedEditor/comments/1whv207/i_love_zed_but/pajaf1c/)" We found three people making some version of this case.

The posts we read point the other way, at least for now. Twenty of the 81 people who praise Zed's speed do so while agents do much of the writing. Most run Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Grok Build in a terminal or a separate app and open Zed alongside; a few use Zed's own agent or Delta. One X user described the routine:

> [whenever working with the agent apps/clis now when i want to look at the code files it’s a simple super + s and fast zed lookup search for the files or folders or whatever component i want to read.](https://twitter.com/1729375010/status/2096603934555074581)

A user in r/opencodeCLI gave newcomers a two-step recipe, "[install zed editor ( which is extremely fast ) and then install agent ( install opencode )](https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1wrgmfe/whats_the_deal_with_openchamber/pdjv60z/)." A user who had moved to another app because it resumed Claude Code sessions, which Zed did not, still wrote that "[i much prefer the speed of the terminal in zed over orca](https://twitter.com/1559581716489969664/status/2103324253546529111)."

The clearest statement came from a developer who cancelled a WebStorm licence in October. They write less code by hand each week, they said, and "[when i need to, i use @zeddotdev; it's faster, lighter, and easier for me](https://twitter.com/1164255744/status/2107717062785122341)." The same day they added:

> [the editor went from where i write code to where i review and tweak it. speed matters more than features now.](https://twitter.com/1164255744/status/2107743558119612813)

Only three of them spell out the review role this directly, so we would not call it a trend yet.

**Exhibit 2: About a quarter compare Zed with VS Code, and as many praise it while agents write the code.** What the 81 people who praise Zed's speed say alongside the praise, read post by post. 16 people complain about Zed's speed in the same weeks.

|  | Of the 81 people who praise Zed's speed; one person can appear in several rows |
|---|---|
| Say a VS Code-based editor is slower | 20 people |
| Praise it while agents do the writing | 20 people |
| Credit Rust, GPU rendering or native code | 9 people |
| Single out how fast it opens | 6 people |

*Posts about Zed, 31 Aug to 18 Oct 2026. Firm counts of people. Staff, vendors and reply bots excluded.*

## Who loves it most

The clearest group is people who measure Zed against a VS Code-based editor they left (twenty of the 81). Six made the case in other agents' communities, in r/cursor, r/google_antigravity and r/opencodeCLI, usually to people asking what to use next. Fifty-nine of the 81 wrote on X, most of them in other people's threads, and 22 on Reddit.

## What to protect, and where it could reach

The praise attaches to things a user feels in the first second, such as opening a window, a keystroke or a file search. Those are worth treating as a promise, on every platform, because the few complaints cluster on Linux and WSL startup, where the promise is weakest. The second thing worth protecting is newer. A growing share of Zed's fans use it to read what an agent wrote, so the speed of jumping to a file, opening a diff or searching a freshly changed tree is now part of the same promise.

## Limits

Memory is the caveat users raise most. In long agent threads Zed can hold a great deal of history in memory, and one user profiled it in detail on 11 October; the 14 October release notes list "Improved memory and CPU usage while the agent responds in long threads." Slow startup on Linux and WSL is the other recurring complaint. Most of the praise is short replies on X, and short replies say less than a Reddit essay.

## How we read this

We read every Zed post that praised the product between 31 August and 18 October, plus keyword sweeps of the rest, and counted people, not posts. We removed staff, vendors, reply bots, giveaway and promotion accounts, a referral poster, and a Delta user whose praise came with thanks for free credits. We left borderline speed posts out of the 81. The agent-workflow group of twenty comes from reading each post; seven more were too vague to count. One of the complaints, a two-word "[too slow](https://twitter.com/140255012/status/2102027043412340744)" reply, has an unclear object; without it the ratio is still about five to one. The cross-agent rate uses the bench's labels, made by large language models, and the same rule for all 17 agents.

## Sources

- [Zed, homepage, read 2026-10-15](https://zed.dev/)
- [Nathan Sobo, "Zed 1.0", 2026-04-29](https://zed.dev/blog/zed-1-0)
- [Zed, stable release notes (1.24.2, 2026-10-14), read 2026-10-15](https://zed.dev/releases/stable)
- [Feedback Bench, Zed](https://feedbackbench.com/agents/zed.md)
- [Feedback Bench, Latency, throughput and fast mode](https://feedbackbench.com/criteria/rel.response_speed.md)
- [Feedback Bench, method](https://feedbackbench.com/#/method)