Zed v1.6 is out, and this release is less about headline features and more about tightening the screws on everything that matters day-to-day: Git workflows, AI agent ergonomics, and the small editor interactions that add up to a lot of friction over time. The biggest additions land squarely in the agent panel, where the team has been steadily building out a skills system to give your AI coding assistant reusable, shareable instructions.

Skills you can actually share

Skills in Zed are reusable instruction sets for the agent -- think of them as named prompts that the agent can discover and invoke automatically when a task matches their description. A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with metadata and instructions, and 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.

The new feature in v1.6 is the ability to share those skills with teammates via a link. You can hand a skill to a teammate without hosting it anywhere: in the Skills settings page, click the link icon on a skill row to copy a zed://skill?data=… link to your clipboard. The link is self-contained -- it embeds the full SKILL.md contents (base64url-encoded), so the recipient doesn't need access to your project or any registry.

The recipient can review the name, description, and full body, choose a scope (global or project-local), and click Save to install it. Nothing is written to disk until they explicitly save, so a shared link can never silently install instructions into someone's agent. That last part is a meaningful security property -- no surprise prompt injection from a link someone pastes into Slack.