zed v1.25.2

The change in Zed v1.25.2 most worth knowing about is a security fix for remote development. When a project was open on a remote machine, environment variables that Zed passed to external agents and MCP servers, "including secrets," were visible in the local machine's process list. Environment variables are a common way to hand API keys and tokens to those tools, and a process list is something other programs on the computer can usually read, as can other users on a shared machine. The release notes say only that this is fixed; they don't say how the values ended up there, which earlier versions were affected, or whether anyone should rotate keys, and the linked pull request could not be read for this explanation.

The release also gives external agents two new features. In Zed's terms, external agents are tools such as Claude Agent, Codex or Gemini CLI that run as separate processes and talk to the editor over the Agent Client Protocol, ACP, while usually keeping their own models, sign-in and tools. They now get session notices and context compaction. Compaction is the technique of summarizing the older part of a long conversation so it still fits in the model's context window, letting a long session continue instead of hitting the limit. The notes give this a single line and don't describe how Zed and each agent divide that work. A related fix addresses prompts to external agents that were slow to send, or never sent, because of unneeded Git checkpoints.

Two smaller items are worth a sentence. Zed's binary is about 33% smaller on macOS, 28% on Windows and 7% on Linux, and the Amazon Bedrock provider adds GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5.