To me this (coupled with their DeltaDB announcement[0]) feels like Zed trying to get out of the business that Cursor is in, and maybe even kicking them on the way out, if the protocol helps bring-your-own-agent take off. These agent tools are already not particularly sticky, especially when they are outside the editor. I don't use Cursor or Zed full time, but I have heard that the most compelling bit is the tab completion, which isn't even part of the agent stuff. I'm sure it's nice, but it's very hard to imagine that being a moat for an editor.

I think I agree with the implicit judgment from the Zed team that it's too early to try to lock people in and capture value, and the best way to build long-term user loyalty is to just be the best editor and let people work however they want to work. On top of that, it is not a great use of their dev time to iterate on the details of an agentic coding tool when there are 10 other ones doing the same thing, and any prompting secret sauce a) is trivial to copy, and b) gets eaten by the next model generation anyway.

I don't really understand what Cursor's business model is supposed to be long term -- at least Zed is trying to come up with new things that an editor can be (see their chat ideas and now source control). On the other hand, I also don't buy the argument some have made that Cursor and friends were banking on the marginal cost of inference going to zero, keeping prices at $20 a month, and pocketing the difference. It seems obvious (even a year ago, but moreso now) that in that situation, the IDEs also compete down to zero. If anything, higher total inference spend has to be better for them: more to skim off of. If you're already spending $50 a month on LLM tooling, Cursor doesn't have to be that big of a value-add to get you to pay them $52 instead.

[0]: https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed#introducing-deltadb-o...