Delta

I think Zed is an excellent editor (fast!) with a pretty good AI agent built-in, but I have no desire to do multi-player development in my editor. Never have had any such desire. Coding is a single-player game and I can't think of a single thing that would be improved by having someone else in the same editor.So, this seems like a lot of work on really cool tech for no useful purpose at all?Are there people crying out for a multi-user code editor? I mean, we have to have code reviews, sure. That involves other people or other agents. But, I don't need to stand over someone's shoulder while they work. That seems like the worst thing in the world for everyone involved. I don't want an audience for my dumb looking experiments because I forgot how to do something. reply: Pair programming is a great way to do knowledge sharing and collaborate on tricky problems. Now, I don't really want a multiplayer editor, but I'll highly contest that coding is solely a solo activity.Sometimes I feel like people online hate all their coworkers. Thankfully, such people have not been highly represented amonst those I've worked with.

Does anyone else hate reading AI summaries of code? Code can be pithy, but at least its terse compared to prose. When you add how verbose LLMs can be, I often end up reading a paragraph to explain a few lines. Or the opposite happens where the summary skips important edge cases or criteria. "You're right, X also does Y. I missed that in my initial analysis," is much too common of a phrase.I like the idea of using LLMs to transform code into something more readable, and vice versa. I am not sure if meandering paragraphs and linear lists are the best targets. reply: I wonder if a productive avenue might be "doing aspect-oriented programming in reverse": asking the LLM not to "summarize" the code per se, but rather to "clarify" it by transforming it into what a programming blog post would call a "toy example" of what the code is doing, by stripping out all the (non-semantic) error-handling, logging, metrics incrementing, etc — all the things that you might treat as their own "aspects" under AOP.

This is intriguing. The two relevant features seem to be 1) realtime collaborative multiplayer conversations and 2) conversation-as-document - basically, letting you comment inline in an agent conversation.For (1), the main value I'd see is in mentoring junior engineers or less technical contributors on a team. If someone puts up a PR with sloppy results, you could actually jump into the thread that produced that PR and see how the results came about, or even coach that contributor on how to do better next time. Also might make it easier to hand off work from one person to another - right now most coding agent sessions are user-local.On (2), I frequently find myself consuming agents' gigantic text responses and tediously writing 8-bullet-point responses to guide them. It's pretty exhausting. I could see inline comments providing much better ergonomics.All that being said, Zed has largely fallen out of the conversation for "agentic coding tools", and so this feels like their attempt at creating something like the Cursor Agents Window, Codex, or Claude Code. These two features seem compelling, and I understand they're even compatible with other coding harnesses.... reply:...

Off-topic:Sorry, my brain just fried trying to read the post.Aside from the H1 and H2 headers, nearly everything on the page is ultra-low contrast.Darkish gray text combined with the faded gray background, along with the (nearly) undetectable highlight makes for a terrible reading experience. I'm sorry, but somebody has to say it.Surely it can't just be my own eyes that are squinting to see the images and the small text therein? The page design as such is fairly minimal with bold blue theme; would it hurt to add a bit more contrast to the typography?Thanks/offtopic reply: Yeah it just feels like the whole post is unimportant.

I'm sure this seemed like a great idea a year ago (they first mentioned it with their Series B).But a lot has changed in those 12 months.Frontier models and coding agents have advanced so much that I don't really see much value in this anymore.Not sure the DeltaDB based features really add anything significant compared to the alternatives.I reckon the game here has to be adding a service that stores the data and runs agent sessions? reply: To be fair: a year ago the editor was in the center and the AI chat was in the sidebar-- Cursor.Here they've moved the AI chat to the center and code editor has been pushed to the side.

This does look legitimately exciting. A surprisingly large pain point when doing agentic work has been commenting on something in a larger plan document. I always find myself summarizing the surrounding text to contextualize a comment when all I really want to do is highlight and click "add comment".Unrelatedly, I have been looking at Zed to centralize my agentic work at $job, where we use different API keys per project to better attribute spend and control model availability based on per-project data protection controls. All of the standard UIs I've tried for this don't really work, but the CLIs mostly do. Using ACP in Zed I was able to bridge that into the UI world and I'm quite happy with it.I signed up for the beta and I look forward to trying it. reply: Precision feedback for CLI-based coding agents is terrible. We built and open sourced PlanBridge (https://plan.contextbridge.ai) to fix this. It is a CLI that lets your coding agent open a local browser with a rendered plan/spec (or just the last agent message) so you can select and comment directly on the text and iterate with precision.

I don't quite get it - it reminds me of using Slack as the decision making places, sure it works for hashing out the details, but it's not great for being the decision record store. I'm not sure what is the value of preserving hundreds of lines of conversations about how code came to be if the code keeps changing? What happens in 5 years? Do I have to read the whole transcript just to understand what's going on? AI will summarize it for me?This feels like engaging with a prog lang community for the first time, and answer to a basic question is "this has been covered before, read the IRC chat history"It's not like Pull Requests are perfect, and with discipline they do the job well - but this looks like a step in the wrong direction. reply: > Do I have to read the whole transcript just to understand what's going on?No but you will want all of the transcripts anyway.> AI will summarize it for me?Not exactly....

> We could have added DeltaDB to Zed, and eventually we will. But the best possible experience required an entirely new kind of applicationThe following demo is a version of a text editor - a chat window and a diff. How would building a new limited text editor be the best possible experience? Like you've setup your Zed schemes/keybinds to your liking, why would jumping to a totally different app improve your experience? reply: Presumably it’s easier to iterate upon and judge solely on its own merits when it’s a standalone application. Maybe this isn’t optimized for user comfort, but for efficient product exploration (for now).

So, DeltaDB is not for Zed, but for an entirely new product? At least it won't bloat the editor...Nevertheless another Zed post, another plea to focus on basics https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 [how can developers work with agents in zed when developers cannot see files agents create] best luck to Delta but please do not neglect the text editor!

Nathan is on today’s Syntax episode talking about Rust and Zed and Delta:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-devel...

My personal hatred of LLMs aside, an I the only one who thinks "saving the conversation" is an incredibly naive and useless approach?The conversation may have been long and meandering, for legitimate reasons, but what matters is the decision you reached at the end and the reasons for the choice.If your project cares about those things, they should be captured in your specifications / docs / ADRs, in a concise form that respects the reader's time.If you don't care about why the choices were made, then why save the discussion in a fancy database at all?I guess everyone's just too cool to actually write good docs now?(I've had some runins with the auto-generate specs based on LLM chats tools lately, like OpenSpec and an internal equivalent, and boy do I have some choice words about them. So much verbosity for so little clarity...)

I feel like for a little bit I was worried about Zed's ability to stay up to date in the cli coding agent-focused market, but it seems like every time they publish a new product release, it's always very compelling. I feel like they're one of the more promising companies innovating in the space of human-AI interaction, and I'm very excited to see where they go from here. I hope they launch a web-accessible or mobile-accessible app one day. I've been enjoying being able to code from Termux on my phone over SSH or using any of the browser-native orchestration systems.

Have been following this for a while, but honestly still not exactly clear to me who/what this tool is meant forAfter all, we already have safe conccurent edits, etc via regular git toolingTo me it this seems a bit backwards looking. Increasingly code review is more on verifying the functional requirements, and less about reading every line an agent has written (or watching it write those lines live)

As an indie dev, I'm not really in a position to judge Delta's potential for large-scale collaboration. Maybe Delta will end up being great for teams of all sizes. But I really wish they'd put more care into Zed's core editing experience. In my opinion, Zed has so many bugs and rough edges that it's hard to consider it software that deserves a 1.0 version number. Also, there's still no timeline in sight for GPUI to become a standalone project...

I have been testing the alpha for the last few weeks. It's very good, especially compared to tools like Conductor. Very bullish on where Zed will take Delta!

I was hoping Zed will do a really good built-in diff editor with AI notes and comments, like https://github.com/modem-dev/hunk Perhaps this is going into this direction?I kind of like the Hunk workflow for reviews (of both AI and human-generated code), you basically tell the agent "walk me through the diff by annotating and controlling this diff viewer". If it could control Zed diff views it would be even better.

Huh. The idea is interesting, but I don't understand the decision of keeping it chat-like: it looks like the mix of the worst parts of Google Docs and Slack, I struggle to see how this will help people track decisions.This can be improved though - I think that simply a separate collaborative doc and a chat linked to that doc would work way better.

Would be nice for Zed to announce something that was immediately available for use.

Honest question, do any of you actually use this type of multiplayer feature in editors? I have worked on small, medium, large and FAANG(Google and Amazon) companies. Never have I seen anyone, even talking about coding with somebody else in the same editor.Edit: grammar

I feel like this fails to explain the benefits over something like git worktrees, like whats the benefit?

Doesn't appear to be opensource (and neither is DeltaDB, it seems), unlike Zed. Any plans to change that?

maybe I am old. has anyone else really tired to collaboratively chat with an agent like this? in my experience, people on my team tend to work more in isolation with agents. Ive never seen them collaborate ON the chat. they do collaborate on the PR...

Seems like "multiplayer AI" is the buzz word for next year, just starting to ramp up now.

So the Zed team essentially sidelined numerous requests for a UI extension API to make something that will only ever be used in demos.Good thing I can just fork the editor. This is how you lose the trust and goodwill of your users.

Would be cool to have a single-user ADE tool like that from the Zed folks - because Kepler focuses a bit too much on the ticketing integration and Paseo sometimes has issues with sub-agents.

Is anyone who’s not a control freak employer/manager actually excited about storing every single agent conversation alongside code in an easy to reference manner? It’s like attaching all office chat recordings and screencasts of your working hours to code for eternity. Just suffocating, and easily abused by nosy people.Plus a substantial percentage of people in the industry probably never used git blame ffs.

Related HN post.Last week, 300+ commentshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187256

I can imagine this being useful, but unlike Zed, this looks like it'll come with some fairly significant lock-in. Great for the investors, but it makes me hesitant...