Zed: loved for UX, held back by reliability.
457 Hacker News opinions from 378 developers, Nov 2025 – Nov 2026. 376 come from people who say they use it. Here is what they praise, what they complain about, and who switched.
Where Zed is strong — and where it is not.
Zed earns 59% approval across 457 opinions. Developers praise its UX, while reliability is the recurring complaint. In the last 90 days it sits at 57%.
Pick it if you
- Want fast performance and a well-reviewed interface
- Orchestrate several coding agents from the editor
- Value UX and speed over deep customization
Look elsewhere if you
- Depend on accurate file sync and git panel updates
- Need VS Code-level customization
- Need strict control over what the AI agent reads or edits
Where it wins and loses.
Mentions across 457 opinions. Bars are counts, not votes; a tool can be both praised and criticized on the same topic.
View data table
| Topic | Praise | Complaints | Mentions |
|---|---|---|---|
| UX | 119 | 56 | 175 |
| Speed | 62 | 16 | 78 |
| Customization | 14 | 13 | 27 |
| Privacy & local use | 6 | 10 | 16 |
| Reliability | 16 | 32 | 48 |
How opinion has moved.
Monthly approval, Nov 2025 – Oct 2026. Bars show opinion volume; low-volume months are still included but faded.
View data table
| Month | Approval | Opinions |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 2025 | 59% | 50 |
| Dec 2025 | 75% | 16 |
| Jan 2026 | 57% | 56 |
| Feb 2026 | 62% | 28 |
| Mar 2026 | 63% | 19 |
| Apr 2026 | 51% | 128 |
| May 2026 | 69% | 44 |
| Jun 2026 | 66% | 34 |
| Jul 2026 | 75% | 14 |
| Aug 2026 | 56% | 44 |
| Sep 2026 | 35% | 13 |
| Oct 2026 | 90% | 10 |
What developers say.
Summaries are paraphrased. Each links to the original Hacker News comment.
Praise
4 selectedHas settled on Zed, Pi, and Paseo as their setup and is adding another tool to it.
Uses Zed as their main agent orchestrator and IDE; likes how it runs several agents, diffs, and worktrees.
Has started using Zed more instead of PhpStorm and finds it mostly stable, though more RAM would help.
They switched to Zed after another tool wasn't good enough for them.
Complaints
4 selectedZed copies Sublime but misses details, like file previews during search.
Zed's file system handling is broken, so project and git panels miss changes; 1.0 is premature.
Lost faith in Zed after its stale file-sync behavior after external edits made the editor unusable for them.
Zed's default system prompt costs about 7k tokens every session, doubting it's worth it.
Questions developers ask.
Is Zed worth it?
Is Zed better than Cursor?
Is Zed reliable?
The data behind this page.
Approval is 59% across 457 opinions from 378 authors. The 90-day figure is 57%, 2 points lower. UX has 119 positive and 56 negative opinions, and speed has 62 positive and 16 negative. Reliability has 16 positive and 32 negative, with complaints about stale file sync and missed changes in project and git panels. Recent monthly results are volatile: 35% in September 2026 (13 opinions), 90% in October (10), and 100% in November (1).
Every number comes from public Hacker News comments collected through the HN Search API. A language model tagged each comment for sentiment, first-hand use, topic and switches; a human spot-checks samples. No vendor can pay for placement.
Get the monthly report
Which AI coding tools gained or lost developer approval on Hacker News, and why people switched. One email a month.