How to Break Up with Your Agent
The biggest shift in developer tooling over the last year wasn't the rise of agents. It was the rise of agent subscriptions. We stopped choosing LLM platforms and counting tokens. We started choosing an agent CLI and paying a flat monthly fee.
That works until you realize each agent implies a specific frontend. Cursor is its own editor (a VS Code fork). Claude Code started as a terminal-only tool. Many agents only work well inside one specific environment. Even agents with broad IDE support, like Copilot, tie deeper features to their own ecosystem. If you want a different agent in your favorite editor, you're often out of luck.
Agent Client Protocol (ACP) is a community specification led by Zed Industries that decouples agents from editors. Goose implements ACP in both directions: editors can plug into goose, and goose can plug into other agents. This post walks through what that looks like in practice today.