zed-industries
Agent Panel: Agent is missing tools
Summary
Zed Agent is missing several documented tools, including file/directory manipulation and terminal access.
Description
Zed Version: 0.185.13 OS: macOS 15.4.1 LLM Provider: Anthropic, Zed Hosted LLM Model: claude-3.7-sonnet Agent Profile Used: Write profile used
Steps to trigger the problem:
- Open the Zed editor.
- Open the Agent Panel (e.g., using the ✨ icon or command palette
agent: new thread). - Ensure an LLM provider and model that supports tool use is configured and selected.
- Ensure a profile that should grant access to all or most tools (e.g., "Write" profile) is active.
- Attempt to use or observe the available tools, or ask the agent to perform an action that would require one of the missing tools (e.g., "create a directory named 'test_dir'").
- Compare the tools the agent can use (or indicates it has) against the official Zed AI tools documentation (https://zed.dev/docs/ai/tools).
Actual Behavior: The Zed agent indicates or demonstrates that it does not have access to several tools listed in the official documentation. Specifically, the following tools appear to be unavailable based on my interaction and the agent's feedback (see attached screenshot for an example of the agent's own analysis):
copy_pathcreate_directorycreate_filedelete_pathedit_filemove_pathterminalweb_search
The agent is unable to perform actions that rely on these tools, such as creating directories or executing shell commands.
Expected Behavior:
The Zed agent, when using an appropriate profile (like "Write") and a compatible LLM, should have access to all tools listed in the official documentation at https://zed.dev/docs/ai/tools, including those for file system manipulation (copy_path, create_directory, create_file, delete_path, edit_file, move_path), terminal execution (terminal), and web searching (web_search). The agent should be able to utilize these tools to fulfill relevant user requests.
Zed Version and System Specs
Zed: v0.185.13 (Zed) OS: macOS 15.4.1 Memory: 48 GiB Architecture: aarch64
Two versions ago mine was working as expected, but now it fails the same way yours does. Same machine but 16GB RAM instead (not that that should matter here). I'm wondering if the profile says I have write selected but is actually using ask, because I cannot switch them (clicking does nothing).
Correction: In some projects I cannot use any tool. For example, after just getting the above output that was mostly the same as yours, in a different project (again, profile indicates write is selected) I get the output:
I apologize for the inconvenience, but as an AI, I am unable to fetch external URLs directly. You can provide the content of the URL here, and I will help you compare it with what I can currently use. If you have any questions or need assistance, please let me know!
Update: My issues have been solved. Removing the Model Context Server fixed my issues.
How did you remove it?
I'm running into an issue where the read files tool is returning stale information to the LLM.
Hey all, I think this was likely because we did some migrations on some internals before we went public with the feature, but things should be more stabilized now. Can anyone who had issues here confirm if they are still having these issues now? Is the agent able to use your configured tools?
Going to close this issue out, feel free to reopen if you are still having issues with the agent accessing tools.
Good by me, sorry for the late confirmation but I have not run into this problem recently.
This is still happening for me, although only when I am using my own API key (Google):
The lack of web_search is, for me, quite a loss.
Zed's AI seems to have access to all tools. Intentional?
FWIW I explicitly enabled all tools in Write mode and ensured I was using write mode.
NixOS 25.11 ~Zed nightly 0.196.5-nightly~ Just realised I've got 2 versions of Zed on my system. This isn't the correct version number for this screenshot. I'll update it in a moment.
