Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

I love Zed but this has all the hallmarks of something being totally rushed out the door.

It works off the Claude Code SDK, which mean it doesn't support many of the built in slash commands - it doesn't support /compact, which is 100% necessary because when you use this implementation enough, you'll eventually get a "Prompt too long" error message with no ability to do anything about it. Since you can't see how far you are in the context window, it's a deal breaker, since you have to start a fresh chat and might run out of room before you can ask it to create a summary prompt for continuing.

There is no way to switch models that I can tell - I think it just picks up on your default model - and there is no way to switch to Plan mode, which has become absolutely crucial to my workflow.

I didn't see Zed picking up on problems reported in the IDE, it was defaulting to running 'tsc -b' in my directories.

At this point it's better to run a terminal inside Zed and work from there. The official response in the Zed Discord has been "talk to your local Anthropic rep" to get them to support Zed's Agent Client Protocol (ACP).

Tbf I never use /compact but clear instead, and load in the relevant context anew. I just haven’t seen compacted context to be very useful, so far.

The model is usually so confused after a /compact I also prefer a /clear.

I set up my directives to maintain a work log for all work that I do. I instruct Claude Code to maintain a full log of the conversation, all commands executed including results, all failures as well as successes, all learnings and discoveries, as well as a plan/task list including details of what's next. When context is getting full, I do a /clear and start the new session by re-reading the work log and it is able to jump right back into action without confusion.

Work logs are great because the context becomes portable - you can share it between different tools or engineers and can persist the context for reuse later if needed.

The trick is to parametrize the /compact. Something like "/compact focus on the XZY, the next steps will be FOOBAR, and keep a high level summary of BARFOO"

That makes the compaction summary a lot more focused and useful.

edit: But a work log/PRD is essential regardless!