Nathan Sobo is the co-founder and chief executive of Zed Industries, creator of the open-source Zed code editor and Delta, a collaborative environment for coding agents. His work combines high-performance editor design, real-time collaboration, and rigorous testing of AI-generated code.
Sobo joined GitHub in late 2011 to build Atom and led its team until 2018. He also co-led Teletype for Atom, which applied conflict-free replicated data types to collaborative editing. In 2018, he and Antonio Scandurra began developing Xray, an experimental editor; they continued the project independently after GitHub declined to pursue it. By late 2019, the foundations of Zed and its GPUI graphics framework were emerging. Sobo, Scandurra, and Atom veteran Max Brunsfeld founded Zed in 2021. Brunsfeld created Tree-sitter, the incremental parsing framework that gives Zed structural awareness of source code.
Zed entered public beta in March 2023 and became open source in January 2024. Written in Rust, its GPU-rendered interface departs from the Chromium-based architecture behind Atom. Zed 1.0, released in April 2026, added cross-platform support and parallel coding agents.
Contributions and technical convictions
- Real-time collaborative programming: Sobo designs editing systems around continuously changing shared code, using replicated data structures to synchronize concurrent edits and preserve references as documents evolve.
- Stochastic evaluations and deterministic regression tests: Sobo tests coding agents against real repositories using headless Zed instances, then isolates failures through repeated probabilistic checks and converts reproducible problems into conventional tests. His AI Engineer presentation details syntax-aware search, malformed streaming output, ambiguous deletions, indentation normalization, and model-specific escaping.
- Agent Client Protocol: In 2025, Sobo introduced an open interface connecting editors and coding agents, with Google’s Gemini CLI as its initial reference implementation. The protocol lets editors integrate multiple agents without building a separate bespoke connection for each.
- DeltaDB and Delta: Introduced in 2026, DeltaDB preserves individual code changes alongside the conversations and agent activity surrounding them. Delta, released in private beta that August, applies this model to shared workspaces where developers can follow agents, inspect their edits, and discuss evolving code.
