Zed DeltaDB

Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good.https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL.Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system? reply: There should be a concept called "engineering privilege".I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to their companies, etc.It must be awesome to be able to work in these conditions and still get paid. I'm not hating on it, it's how we get a lot of the good stuff we use.

Hmm, yeah before "DeltaDB" I have a big list of things I would rather they develop/fix:- Vertical activity bar (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecommen... - rejected because it "doesn’t match our design vision for Zed")This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.- Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory- Don't freeze when resuming from suspension (I suspect this is GPU-driver related on linux) forcing me to `killall zed-editor` reply: >This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.It’s crazy that is still an issue. I really tried to use Zed because I was trying to move away from VSCode and VSCodium did not have a featureful python lsp. I just couldn’t stand little things like that that. Also, the font was really blurry. VSCodium now has Pyfly which is decent, so I just switched back.

Why develop this when the core editor is almost unusable? On Linux wayland, copypaste is broken, the file manager is laggy and snippets do not trigger before the heavy hint logic is done. This is just on top of my head, the list is long reply: I had to stop using Zed because of this issue (which persists despite being closed): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/38109I can't use an editor where the file contents I'm being shown don't match the reality of the file. I guess this issue doesn't affect most people somehow, but in the age of CLI agents I'm not sure how more people aren't running into it.I was really enjoying Zed for a short while before I ran into this fundamental issue.

A lot of the copy on this page feels like the kind of copy an AI would produce. But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy so I don’t want to accuse them of doing that.Marketing aside, this is the kind of thing (advancements in VCSes) that I’d usually be excited about, but which I’m less excited about coming from Zed because it makes me start to worry that they’re going to continue focussing less on the core editor experience.I love Zed and I hope that it doesn’t start to go flakey. reply: Anytime a company/group announces some random new project now, I tend to immediately suspect over-reliance on AI. From what I’ve seen, AI addiction frequently manifests as an explosion in scope, possibly because LLMs make so much initial “progress” on new projects which you can then demo and have resource allocators extrapolate to some glorious shipping version. But then you have to go back & clean up the slop, progress slows to a crawl, and it’s all way less exciting. That initial rush can be addicting. Ultimately a supercharged version of eternal human impulses I guess.

Zed used to be good, now it hogs CPU for no reason and they don't bother fixing it.

Sounds like a side-effect of being VC-backed. Like what the ex GitHub CEO went on to build (Entire). Unnecessary. reply: It also feels like his former company could implement his new company in a couple of weeks if they choose to.

> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced itA total nightmare and imo every dev should push back using this stuff. You'd otherwise have management brag about you not being a good communicator with the ai agent, the same management that have no idea how to steer these tools.I really like Zed the editor, I'm not sure I like the path they getting into reply: These sort of paper trails are for developers not management though, does your manager open all your commits and start commenting on them? If so, maybe apply somewhere else.

I really love Zed and I want them to really succeed. Unfortunately it seems that they are swamped with various things and the issue tracker is not a priority for the team, which fair enough. OSS is a gift and I take it as such. Wild proposal but if someone is willing to start a "user advocate" contributor, I'll be happy to donate monthly so user requests can be taken a look at :)

A non-existent problem that nobody asked to solve...

tangentOnce I've tried one SCM to track every single change to my files, and the other for bulk commits. The result was quite satisfying.It was some 15 years ago, we just switched from CVS to SVN and everyone thought it was the end of the history, at least for SCMs. Main branch was called master, and we were locking files by simply telling our teammates not to touch them.At one time I decided I really missed the Eclipse feature which was tracking all local changes to the files, even without an active SCM. Making tiny commits was not an option, because I want it to track every file save, and we haven't yet figured out working with branches.So I decided to install mercurial and made a hook which made a dummy commit every time I saved a file. Everything mercurial related was ignored by SVN.Suddenly I was able to teleport myself to a version from before the lunch while SVN history was crystal clear.Somehow I still miss integrated, per file, timeline in IDE.

A "smooth" editor with uncountable bugs and without smooth scrolling... I agree they should focus on basics.

This feels very useful for training agents but almost completely useless to humans? Do I really want to go back to every change I made? Whatuse would that be?

Looks like a great feature/product/functionality. I hope that Zed editor will make it work with LLMs/agents that run in the terminal, not just the Zen Agent itself. Is it even possible? I use OMP.sh agent running in Zed terminal.

I kind of do the conversation tracing thing already. Every change is attributed by Claude code session id (and timestamped obviously), then I have a jq based tool over cc session jsons that I save indefinitely. I've found it very important to be loud about what I actually wrote vs what the llm wrote.Personal use solo repo. I don't know id want people seeing my cc sessions lol.

Is this just any Jetbrains IDE file history?

I guess an interesting use case for this would be to pinpoint exactly which change was made by who in cases where multiple people / agents work on the same code at the same time. The Zed team is working on two features that are probably going to be built on top of DeltaDB: async collaboration and instant sharing. Instant sharing used to be talked about more in the past and it's still the feature I am most eager to see.

i think a system that uses git and file system artifacts (txt/md/xml files whatever preference) is much better. eng teams need to define their artifacts, eg plan file, reqs etc whatever is needed and important to that team. the agent convo itself doesn’t add much value IMO and adds unnecessary bloat.

This makes me uncomfortable.Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I think this just gives micro-managers the data they need to micro-manage you. It invites people to scrutinize the process, instead of the results.Not once have I wished to review a colleague’s conversation with an AI. I want to review finished work.I look at this and I can only imagine layoffs being justified with “bad prompt quality”. An incident retrospective broadcasting your agent conversations to the entire company, with people speculating where you should have put the “make no mistakes”.It’s a shame, really, because I like Zed as an editor, but I can’t bring myself to support them if this is the direction they’re choosing.

I really don't want management critiquing when I swear at Claude, thanks.

You can simulate this by having a jj repo with file system watches.

This landing page is not good. It's mired in out-of-context jargon and implementation detail. (What does "virtualize the worktree" mean? Git already has "effectively free" branching. What does branching "mid-run" mean? How does a teammate "join while the work is happening"? What/where are they joining?).What actually is it and what value do I get out of it?Reading the linked blog posts: It's a layer on top of git for CRDT-based collaborative editing that captures addressable code deltas + agent conversations. I could have real-time collaborative humans + agents development and can resume any agent conversation from any point in history, because it is all stored (powered by DeltaDB). I guess?I actually might want this, but wouldn't know it from the landing page.

I start to sound like a Jujutsu fanboy but...Jujutsu already does this. I had agent screwing up changeset over couple hour long session and it took one shell command to split on pieces with longer pause.The only downside is that because of Jujutsu snapshots it can't be used inside sandbox (since all jj commands are mutating)

Please just make a good editor and stop getting distracted by AI nonsense.

Sounds a lot like JJ.. could just make JJ a first class citizen in zed and skip the hard part.. plus it’s git compatible

I’m curious, are many people using Zed as their daily driver in their professional work? (Not just in side projects)

It'll take more than a mouse jiggler to fool this new bossware.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492533 (June 11th, 225 comments)Is it available now? Still seems to be a waitlist?

I had the great pleasure/misfortune of being forced to work with LaminDB, and I can tell you folks; data provenance isn't going away -- it will be used to train the very AI models snapping at our heels