Future of ACP

[somtooo]

Following the ACP Progress Report, could someone from the Zed team share the big-picture vision for ACP?

While the progress is promising, I'm concerned about maintaining a high-quality developer and UI experience when using external agents in Zed. Other agent tools like Claude Code and Open Code are continuously innovating their UI/UX to provide first-class support for their agents' features. In comparison, Zed's ACP integration seems constrained to a standard chat interface, offering what feels like second-class feature support for external agents (for instance, the inability to view history when using the Claude Code agent).

I understand the rationale for not competing directly in the agent market. However, since the Zed team owns the IDE, you have a unique opportunity to pioneer the user experience for agentic engineering. While allowing external agents aligns with the collaboration vision @nathansobo posted about, I'm worried that the current ACP approach means Zed will always be playing catch-up on UX and external agent feature support thereby pushing users to just use the ux tool the agent creators have first class support for e.g open Claude code in a terminal inside zed.

Note: For now all is good, chat is still the main way we interact with agents I'm talking about 5 years from now