Bitfield Consulting

A Rust developer shares their 2026 development setup, centered around four main tools: Zed editor (fast, native, with rust-analyzer LSP integration and optional AI), ChatGPT (used as a pair programmer, code reviewer, and teacher rather than code generator), Wispr Flow (voice-to-text input for all apps), and Nushell (a structured-data shell written in Rust). The author emphasizes a minimal, low-maintenance setup, skipping Homebrew and heavy configuration in favor of tools that work well out of the box. Rust's built-in toolchain (rustup, Cargo, rust-analyzer) handles most development needs.

My Rust dev setup in 2026 — Bitfield Consulting

Zeta2 is Zed's updated edit prediction model with a 30% higher acceptance rate than Zeta1. Key improvements include a new training pipeline scaling from ~500 hand-curated examples to nearly 100,000 opt-in examples from open-source repositories, LSP-based context retrieval for better symbol awareness, and reduced latency. Zeta2 is open-weight and available on Hugging Face. Upcoming features include 'jumps' for propagating edits to related call sites, and ongoing experiments with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to personalize predictions based on user accept/dismiss behavior.

Best of Zed — March 2026