I kept losing my place
Handing work to AI agents changed how I use an editor. Instead of one terminal talking to one agent, I run three or four at a time. Which reply belongs to which project, and which branch will the instruction I am typing right now actually touch? I lost that thread constantly, and more than once I sent instructions to the wrong worktree.
necoder kills that confusion with color. Projects and branches get a color, and the same color runs through the rail, the tab underline, the caret and the AI thread tabs. Color is used for identity only, never for decoration. Above the input sits a destination chip: this thread → this project ⎇ this branch.
A multiplexer for agents
Fleet mode runs several agents side by side. Each one is isolated in its own git worktree, so they can work on the same repository without stepping on each other, and you can put a Captain thread in charge of the overall picture. Tasks live in a Markdown file, and finished items get ticked off by the agent itself.
Agents connect over ACP, an open protocol. necoder talks to the claude CLI and friends directly, so the subscription you already pay for works as-is and no separate API key is needed. necoder ships no LLM of its own and never holds your keys.
No Electron
The whole UI is drawn natively in Rust with GPUI. A WebView only appears for HTML preview, and no browser engine is bundled. Cold start is around 215ms, idle memory around 120MB, and ⌘P stays around 10ms even across 50,000 files. Editing-core operations run in microseconds, watched by a benchmark in CI. All of these are best-effort measurements on my own machine, not official benchmark figures.
Remote SSH works too. The server side is a single ~2.4MB static musl binary, with no Node.js required on either end, and it uses your existing OpenSSH config, keys and ProxyJump.
Where it stands
necoder is not a Zed fork. It depends on GPUI, the UI framework Zed develops under Apache-2.0, and copies or ports none of Zed's application code. ACP is likewise an open protocol authored by Zed; necoder is an implementer of it.
It is also a personal project, not a GENSHI AI product. AGPL-3.0, free, zero telemetry. necoder is developed inside necoder: I use it every day and fix whatever trips me up, on the spot. That is the only way features get chosen.