Software development has always been a team sport, yet most AI coding tools focus on boosting individual productivity. Today, we’re changing the game with Zen Agents—a platform bringing the power of customizable, shareable AI agents to dev teams big and small.
Our Zen Agents release marks a significant shift in how teams leverage AI throughout the software development lifecycle, addressing the collaborative reality of modern engineering—where the most significant delays often occur between coding and feedback loops.
At its core, Zen Agents lets your team create and share specialized AI agents for software development across your organization. While our Coding Agent and Unit Test Agent have already been helping you write and test code, Zen Agents expands the power of agentic pipelines to your whole team. You can create custom agents tailored to your unique workflows, frameworks, and codebases—and then share them organization-wide. Built with security and sharing in mind, Zen Agents is designed to meet the needs of modern dev teams that want to scale without compromising safety.
To share Zen Agents with your team, simply select “organization” when creating the agent—and voilà! Your entire team will instantly have access. This ensures consistent, approved tools are used across the board, while removing the setup burden from individual developers.
Zen Agents are especially powerful because they automate the “in-between steps” of development—handoffs, reviews, and integration points where traditional pipelines often hit friction and delays.
For example, you can create:
The potential is limitless. These agents can be shared across your entire organization, ensuring consistent practices while eliminating repetitive tasks.
We asked Matt Walker (Co-founder and CTO, Simon Data) about his experience with Zen Agents.
“Zen Agents unlocked the next level of productivity for our teams. Through integration with our tools, we've eliminated hours of context-switching and created an organization that benefits from our collective expertise.”
On top of accelerating existing workflows, Zen Agents also address one of the biggest challenges in adopting AI tools: the "cold start" problem for team members with less AI experience, who may not know the best way to prompt or utilize these assistants.
On top of customization and sharing, Zencoder takes integration to the next level with our seamless, UI-based adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—the latest standard that allows large language models to interact with external tools and data sources. Think of it as the "USB-C of the AI world," providing a consistent way to connect AI models to databases, APIs, and applications. It was originally proposed by Anthropic and later embraced by OpenAI as well.
With our new MCP Library, we've introduced over 100 pre-built MCP servers that you can install with one click. You can easily browse, search, and manage these connections through the Agent Tools interface, extending what your AI agents can achieve.
This means your agents can now access:
The beauty of the MCP approach is that it's not limited to what we provide. If you need to connect to a system we haven't supported yet, you can add your own custom MCP servers, creating a truly extensible development environment. Pro tip: our Coding Agent is very good at writing custom MCP servers, so you can fully “embrace the exponentials.”
Underpinning the Zen Agents ecosystem is our open-source, community-powered Zencoder Agent Marketplace.
Available at zencoder.ai/marketplace, this easy-to-browse marketplace lets you explore 20+ specialized agents (with many more coming soon) covering the entire software development lifecycle, from architecture design and API creation to debugging, refactoring, and maintenance.
Using these agents is seamless—simply browse the marketplace, click on an agent that interests you, view its details and instructions, then paste those configurations into your Zencoder extension to create your own instance of that agent. It's a simple way to expand your development toolkit without having to craft complex prompts or instructions from scratch.
The marketplace is designed to grow continuously, and plans are underway to expand beyond agents to include MCPs as well, creating a comprehensive library of agent configurations and tool connections, all accessible through the same intuitive interface.
What makes this Marketplace truly powerful is that it’s backed by an open-source repository at github.com/zencoderai/zenagents-library under an MIT license. This repo hosts the JSON configuration files that define these specialized agents, making community contributions not just possible, but a breeze.
Contributing your own agents to the marketplace is straightforward:
I’m excited to see the momentum of community contributions vastly expand capabilities beyond what any single vendor could develop. We're particularly excited to see both agents and MCPs contributed by the community, creating a rich library of specialized tools for every development need. We can’t wait to showcase and promote the best ones on our press tours and other activities!
This release is more than a feature; it’s a strategic evolution in how teams approach software development with AI. This launch helps you address more use cases than we could ever offer alone, customize agents for your unique needs, and adopt AI across broader teams by solving the “cold start” problem for those with less experience using AI agents.
If we dare to predict the future, the Zen Agents platform has the potential to evolve into a key component of autonomous development pipelines. As we move toward agents that can be invoked through CLI, API, CI/CD, and various triggers, the foundation we’re building today will enable increasingly sophisticated development workflows.
The Zen Agents platform, MCP Library, and Marketplace are live—and we’re just getting started. We’re excited to see what the community builds. Whether you’re crafting agents for niche workflows, wiring up custom MCPs, or sharing config tips, your contributions push the ecosystem forward.
Get started at zencoder.ai/marketplace or contribute at github.com/zencoderai/zenagents-library.
Together, we’re not just boosting productivity—we’re rethinking how teams build software at scale.