To create a fundamentally better editor, we had to invent a new approach to building desktop software. Our previous editor, Atom , was built as a fork of Chromium, spawning the Electron framework in the process. Electron eventually became the foundation of VS Code (which today seems to be forked into a new AI code editor every other week). Web technology offered an easy path to shipping flexible software, but it also imposed a ceiling. No matter how hard we worked, we couldn't make Atom better than the platform it was built on. So we started over. Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game , organizing the entire application around feeding data to shaders running on the GPU. That meant writing our own UI framework, GPUI , from scratch in Rust. Owning every layer of our stack lets us take Zed places that no one building on borrowed foundations can go, but we knew from the beginning that it wasn't going to be an easy path.…