Zed Agent as standalone, headless CLI application

[bachp]

Body

What are you proposing?

Make the Zed Agent available as a standalone CLI tools. This way it could be used on headles remote machines similar to claude code, opencode or copilote cli.

Why does this matter?

Zed Agent is a poverful harness but it is currently limited to use from withing Zed. Having it available as a standalone CLI, with ACP support. Would make it available to a wider available and could potnentially establish itself as one of the leading agent harnesses in Rust. This potentially could attract more contributions spcififically for agent harness capability, which in turn would benefit the Zed editor.

Are there any examples or context?

Cli and TUI interface similar to opencode.

Possible approach

From my exploration of the current codebase I see several architectures to approache this:

1. Turn the Zed Agent into a standalone agent with only an ACP interface. Then use this standalone from Zed via ACP. This means basically going all in on ACP. Not sure how limiting this would be and how fast the ACP protocol can evolve to fullfil the needs of Zed.
2. Add a CLI/TUI interface the the zed agent in tree that allows to run the agent standalone as oposed to being part of Zed. This would however mean another GUI (TUI) library in the main repository.
3. Refactor the current Zed Agent to expose all the functionallity needed so that an external project could implement a TUI on top of it. The external project would then just pull in the crate and add a slim UI on top.