From MCP to ACP: A New Standard in AI Agent Interoperability
After a recent update to the Zed editor, I noticed it now includes native support for AI agents like Gemini CLI and Claude Code. What is surprising is not the integration itself, but the collaborative effort behind it. Zed Industries, together with Google, announced the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), an open standard designed to do for AI agents what the Model Context Protocol (MCP) did for tools: enable developers to focus on building the best possible agents without getting bogged down by integration complexities.
Inspired by the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and MCP (Model Context Protocol), the protocol was jointly designed, with Zed focusing on the editor (client) and Google on the agent. The initial announcement from Zed provides a deeper dive into their vision of unbundling AI agents from IDEs.