AI Code Editor Showdown

What's in this pack

These five are not "AI plugins on top of an editor" — they are editors (or terminal interfaces) designed around AI from the ground up. Each takes a different bet on what matters most.

Why this matters

Cursor is the dominant AI-first editor today. But "dominant" doesn't mean "best fit for everyone." Five concrete reasons people look elsewhere:

1. Latency: Zed renders at 120fps, Cursor at 60fps with stutter on large repos. If you live in the editor 8 hours a day, that gap compounds.
2. Model freedom: Cursor's pricing assumes you use their routed models. Continue and Cody let you point at any provider — Anthropic direct, Bedrock, your local Ollama, Together, Fireworks.
3. Source-graph context: Cody indexes your monorepo and feeds the LLM real cross-file references, not just embedding similarity. For 1M+ LOC codebases, this is a different quality tier.
4. Open weights and self-host: Cursor is closed. Zed, Continue, Cody, Morphic, OpenCode all run locally with auditable code — required for enterprises with strict data policies.
5. Terminal-first workflows: Some engineers never leave the terminal. Morphic and OpenCode skip the GUI entirely and embed the AI loop where they already work.

Install in one command

# Install the entire showdown pack
tokrepo install pack/ai-code-editor-showdown

# Or pick the editor you want to try
tokrepo install zed
tokrepo install continue
tokrepo install cody

Each TokRepo asset page lists install instructions for macOS / Linux / Windows, the recommended starting model config, and the migration notes for moving rules and prompts from Cursor.

Common pitfalls

• Settings drift from Cursor: don't expect .cursorrules to work as-is. Each editor has its own rules format. The Cursor Rules Library pack documents the conversions for the most popular ones.
• Continue requires model setup: it's BYOM by design, so first-run is empty. You must edit config.json and add an Anthropic, OpenAI, or local provider. Many bounce here.
• Cody indexer needs to run: Cody's quality advantage comes from its code graph. On a fresh repo, the first index can take 10-30 minutes. Don't judge quality before indexing finishes.
• Zed AI requires login: even though Zed is open-source, the AI panel uses Zed's hosted routing by default. Switch to direct API mode in settings if you want to BYOK.
• OpenCode's AGENTS.md is mandatory: without one in the repo, the agent has no guardrails and can wander. Treat AGENTS.md like a CLAUDE.md.

When this pack alone isn't enough

This pack is about editors. If you also want to compare the four big hosted coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor's own agent mode, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI), see the AI Coding Agents Compared pack — that one is the orthogonal axis. Most engineers eventually use both: an editor for interactive work and a hosted agent for long-running tasks.

After picking your editor, layer the Cursor Rules Library pack to drop in proven .cursorrules / .continuerules / AGENTS.md files for Python, React, Go, and engineer-mode operation. The editor sets the surface; the rules set the policy.

A common 2026 setup: Zed as the daily driver, Continue as a VS Code fallback for legacy debugging, Cody indexing the monorepo in the background, Claude Code on the side for autonomous refactors. Pack-level install means swapping out one of these is a single command, not a weekend.