Cursor vs Windsurf vs Zed: The AI IDE Showdown (2026)

I have a bad habit of switching editors the moment something shinier appears on my timeline. Over the last six months I have used Cursor as my daily driver for two features, Windsurf for one side project, and Zed for the last month with Claude Code wired in. I have opinions. Most of them are different from the opinions I had at the start. The short version: these are three genuinely different tools that happen to all call themselves AI IDEs. Picking between Cursor, Windsurf, and Zed in 2026 is n