Zed v1.4 ships with a new agent feature that replaces the editor's previous Rules library entirely: Skills. The old @rule system is gone. In its place is a more structured, on-demand approach to giving the AI agent specialized knowledge , one that scales from a single personal workflow to a shared team standard.

Rules are dead, long live Skills

The rules library has been removed and replaced with skills support, and the @rule autocomplete entry in the agent chat input has been replaced with @skill. This is a breaking change , if you have existing rules configured, you'll need to migrate them.

Skills are reusable instruction packages that give the agent specialized knowledge for specific tasks: test-driven development workflows, document processing, database integrations, or your team's internal coding standards. Think of them as prompt templates with structure , not just a wall of text dumped into every conversation, but something the agent can selectively load when relevant.

How Skills actually work

A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with metadata and instructions. The agent sees a catalog of all installed skills and can load one on demand, or you can invoke any skill directly from the message editor with a slash command. This lazy-loading design is intentional.