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.
Ever try editing like, a Google Doc, while multiple people are in it? It's not fun. I can't imagine how that would go when people could be changing functions I'm referencing, etc. Isn't this was version control is for?
> 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.
I've definitely used the live sharing session with VS Code in the past to help coworkers debug or give them some suggestions for how to structure things (usually giving Rust pointers to people newer to the language). I haven't done it in a while though, probably because nowadays people will just ask their agent rather than me.
Even if you're not both typing at once, being able to trade off quickly without having to manually pass the ownership back and forth has had value for me in the past.
Yeah, YC also has their own "multiplayer agent", qm (https://github.com/yc-software/qm), though it doesn't seem to be focused on code, which makes a little more sense.
I remember the fad. I was around for the Extreme Programming era. But, I've never worked anywhere that pair programming was the norm, nor have I known any developers that wanted to pair program, in the general case.
My personal experience is, of course, not representative of an entire industry, but I just have a hard time imagining it being a common thing. I like working with other people and helping juniors sort out their problems, but I'd quit my job if I had to take turns writing code while someone else watched and just sitting and watching someone else writing code. Both of those things seem horrible, to me.
I don't understand the fixation the industry has on multi-player development either. Zed isn't the first. It's been 10 or 15 years since I started seeing multi-player development (sometimes called peer programming in an earlier iteration) being championed in various ways. VS, Intellij, Eclipse, and vscode had plugins for it and all of them are from the 2015-2018 time. One can even say that the Google Wave demo from 2007 was one of the earliest demonstrations for this concept.
I even worked on a team where one engineer loved the idea and championed doing it as early as 2013. Most of these IDE extensions didn't exist back then. He ended up picking a buddy, and they moved to the same office, hooked 2 keyboards and 2 mice into the same PC and spend literally the entire day alternating who's writing code in the same IDE.
I think the concept was supposed to be about helping developers share their skills. Every developer has an experience of looking over somebody's shoulder and having an "oh shit, I didn't realize there is a shortcut/tool/command for that" moment. And the idea with multi-player programming is to get you to see that and learn from it more. But. It. Doesn't. Work.
My assumption is that people who want multi-user code editors are the same people who are forced to work in a place that requires heavy pair programming.
I could see it being useful if you're helping someone debug something, but chances are it's easier just to screenshare.
I feel I’ve seen the multiplayer thing being pushed ten years ago or so, guess it’s time for another round. It’s one of those things that makes for cool product videos but I’ve never met anyone who actually uses it or has expressed any desire for the feature.
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.
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.
One thing worth flagging: summaries can provide context that is important, but you should always remember to thoroughly comb through the information in case there are caveats in the text that may act as a heads up, which is important.
I've found that I don't mind getting a lot of text back from an LLM, when I was the one who prompted it. I can easily enough let my eyes flit around in the text and figure out what I need to, and I expect that putting all that text in the context window will help with the rest of the conversation.
It's when that text gets copied and pasted into a blog, or a PR, etc. that it really galls.
I don't like the default explanations. But I prompt for small code snippets with explanations of a problem and the solution. This is in the context of extending features, fixing bugs, reviewing new code etc. I still skim the code, but it's nice to have a somewhat thoughtful overview of the key points like database schema, API spec, algorithm or abstraction. It makes it easier to skim a large diff without feeling lost. It also quite often catches some weird choices that might slip through it not carefully reasoning about the code. For me it is hard to understand code I didn't write myself so I have landed on this workflow.
The "language model" aspect shows IMO, at least for someone who grew up with the material of 90s and 2000s where we describe things more in mechanical, engineering terms. When gpt4 landed it was somehow amazing to see the output, but yeah nowadays I keep skimming through the explanation. It's like an intermediate dev who has nothing else to do but create long sentences to describe what could be simpler.
I'm a bit confused by your use of 'pithy, but at least its terse'. Don't pithy and terse mostly mean similar things? Here it seems like you're contrasting them. Not trying to be pedantic, apologies if it comes off that way.
Right, the value is not so clear of having multiple people wade through lengthy LLM responses. Part of the value that a human in the loop adds is figuring out what's correct and important in the response and passing on a more polished result.
I use AI explainers a lot in my own projects and have skills that give outputs I like. I'll even pipe the output into NotebookLM to make a video sometimes. This is actually a decent way to grok complex subsystems (YMMV).
What I don't care for is the pretty-yet-verbose HTML outputs that I see from some teams. They can be way too long and it's often the case that the engineer who made it didn't read the whole thing.
We need a new specification language for summaries. I think just a (pseudo?-)programming language’s API (modules, interfaces, method signatures), but more concise and descriptive than Java, maybe Haskell or OCaml minus quirks (…the academics were this close to an ideal syntax, maybe they should’ve gave up those languages’ LR parsers…)
Your AI summary is raw output, like uncooked mince meat.
Ask for a rewriting pass! Get it to edit for word count, remove redundancies, remove run-on sentences, and change sentence structure to use active voice.
You wouldn't ship your first draft - why let AI do it?
I mean... the problem with that, as with all the "you have to go back and forth with the AI" scenarios, is that by the time I finish with that I may as well have just written it myself to begin with. Would take a similar amount of time, actually have my voice in it, and not cost money for tokens.
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. But I don't know if there's enough there to have a defensible product; if these features are excellent, others will clone them eventually.
> On (2), I do find myself consuming agents' gigantic text responses, writing 8-bullet-point responses to guide them, then iterating that way. It's pretty exhausting. I could see inline comments providing much better ergonomics.
For your 2 plannotator [1] has a nice way to annotate agent messages or documents and its integrated into the agent chat (codex app also adopted the pattern)
It's a solid experience so far (have been testing the alpha). Being able to work across model providers in parallel is my preference, rather than being stuck in Codex desktop, for example.
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?
For me it's probably time to learn to use vim or something similar. I'm the only one that likes coding manually, without all this AI shit? I'm faster writing code myself than trying to explain to artificial stupidity what I intend to do and correct its output. And if I write it myself the code just works, if it's written by the AI it has a ton of bugs. I don't see any value in AI generated code that is not mere code for doing experiments that you don't care about.
There is never a bad time to learn vim! Not only is it a super useful skill if you end up having to edit a file on a server (and you don't want to deal with nano), it also makes coding fun.
Hey me too. This is my morning Zen moment refactoring and cleaning some code before I go back to the agent to earn money. One of the only things that helps me to relax is to do some manual coding...
It seems reasonable that a professional-tier of software developers will have tools distinct from everyone else. No matter what the percentage looks like, experts will still be a thing that needs different things.
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.
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.
Thanks for pointing that out. I tried the Codex App before but didn't see that.
I want to like the app, but I'm not sure if it actually fits well to my use case. With my current setup I need to fully quit and restart it if I want to work on a different project (to get it to use a different API key) and I cannot work in two threads belonging to different projects at the same time.
Also I generally prefer to handle sandbox the entire agent and disable its internal safeguards. Beside any doubts regarding the quality of the relevant sandbox implementations, I have just gotten my projects to work better this way.
Directly annotating parts of the convo is the feature that really unlocked Delta for me (have been testing the alpha). So much easier than trying to explain to the agent what I'm responding to in their giant text blob.
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.
> 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. You will have some question later that you would never have entertained during your thousands of conversations about code.
You’ll ask your AI something fairly abstract but it will be deep in the context of some other idea.
And the AI will find among all your conversations those turns that are relevant to solving your problem or explaining why.
I know this is the case because I’ve built this and use it every day.
Here are some examples:
1. Resume unfinished work → "where did we leave off on that?"
2. Recover the intent/scope → "what was the actual goal of this whole effort?"
3. Verify it got done → "did we ever finish that, and which session proves it?"
4. Recall a fix → "how did we fix this the last time it broke?"
I shared these and more in my post in the August “what are you working on?” thread. [0]
You would be amazed how good the agent can be at assembling queries against a corpus of transcripts and assembling the results.
If one builds something with an agent, the process itself is largely opaque. Preserving the transcript shows the reasoning of the agent and the decision process of the builder. This way everyone's on the same page instead of re-prompting same CLAUDE.md but with different results, and/or going through similar work over and over again.
I understand the point, but shouldn't the code be documented and well structured so that the intent is clear without looking at the discussion around changes?
I'm working on a legacy system right now - I'd commit several felonies just to have well documented code, I don't really care about all the conversations that the original team had to decide what they eventually did.
surely you could imagine that being able to sit in on a meeting that was had when they were designing the system would be useful for you?
theres a lot of context and decision making that is useful but not documented in the code. The code tells you how the system works, not how its supposed to work.
This is just the classic rehash of are comments in code an anti-pattern.
I tend to agree that at a certain point if you need to constantly think "gee, I wish I was in the meeting when they came up with this" the code you are looking at might just suck.
In such contexts it is also often the case that being in the meeting may not have helped. As they say, garbage in, garbage out.
Sometimes it is useful to simply know something was brought up, but then someone had a sneezing fit and everyone lost track of the thread and the important edge case under discussion just fizzled.
A similar thing happens in agentic conversations, where a model may point out something but it is not recognized as important by the operator.
A few directives later and the model is being pushed another direction.
It can be very useful to have perfect recall of moments like these.
> We could have added DeltaDB to Zed, and eventually we will. But the best possible experience required an entirely new kind of application
The 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?
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!
I think the point is to incorporate it in the end in to Zed. Becoming the new thread panel or something. But it's just not something that is easy to fiddle with inside a working editor that many of us rely on to make some money.
It's not a full IDE but you can see the files and docs mentioned and created in the Delta chats. I often will pop open the right tab in Delta to check that.
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.
Delta.dev is the same Rust application as Delta, just compiled to WebAssembly and rendered through WebGL. So it's already web accessible, and can naturally extend to mobile platforms as well!
Have been following this for a while, but honestly still not exactly clear to me who/what this tool is meant for
After all, we already have safe conccurent edits, etc via regular git tooling
To 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)
Sure, they're backed by a VC company that is all in on LLM hysteria so everything they backed will have to back that narrative so they can dump their wares for a profit.
It will cause the community to fail because VC dev tooling is unsustainable as the community needs will never take priority over what their VC benefactors want. So if you want the slop that helps you pump out slop they got you covered.
It sounds counter intuitive but you have to remember nearly every business of the planet operates as a centrally planned economy with either a monarch at the helm or an aristocracy. These are some of the least efficient ways to collaborate as humans, at least if history is anything to go by.
I suggest you focus on real open source solutions like neovim, emacs, or helix.
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 if Zed announced anything related to what Zed actually is: a code editor.
This thing is fairly new in software years and has already stagnated. Bugs, glitches and rough edges all around. Almost feels like abandonware.
I first heard of Zed back when it was “the code editor that respected your choices”, you could turn off AI entirely with a single switch and all that… guess it was too much of a pipe dream to hope it would continue down that road.
This thing is now just a white-label version of Visual Code. Nothing more. Nothing less. Same software, different case.
Just because they started out as a code editor doesn't mean it has to stay that way. I was looking forward to a more modern Sublime Text in Zed but I also know that nobody is going to make money off a simple code editor.
> This thing is now just a white-label version of Visual Code.
That's a wild hot take, and pretty ignorant to the people working on that for years.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
i've had a similar idea for a while. Creating almost a multiplayer grill-me interface so teams can collaborate on spec definitions. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
You know it’s ironic that the first featured post showing up on the bottom is one where Zed proudly proclaims to not be doing AI just for the money that’s in it, and all posts that follow it are about AI too…
Does Zed even remember it is a code editor? Or are these guys just interested in building more AI slop to add to the never-ending pile? What even is Zed supposed to be at this point?
I hate to be that guy who complains about style over substance, but man, is that font they use for body text ugly. Not just the glyphs themselves, but the spacing is way off, too.
I see Zed abandoned their principles regarding AI. Shame, I really do like the editor. Any decent alternatives that aren't VSCode or a Jetbrains product?
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.
Maybe an approach for interactive code reviews with distributed teams.
Also see: https://subethaedit.net/
Ever try editing like, a Google Doc, while multiple people are in it? It's not fun. I can't imagine how that would go when people could be changing functions I'm referencing, etc. Isn't this was version control is for?
> 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.
I've definitely used the live sharing session with VS Code in the past to help coworkers debug or give them some suggestions for how to structure things (usually giving Rust pointers to people newer to the language). I haven't done it in a while though, probably because nowadays people will just ask their agent rather than me.
during those cases, i've just asked them to give me control over zoom and it's worked fine.
I've never desired to have two people working on the same file at the same time during a debugging/teaching session.
Even if you're not both typing at once, being able to trade off quickly without having to manually pass the ownership back and forth has had value for me in the past.
Multiplayer agent thingy is a VC keyword these days.
Yeah, YC also has their own "multiplayer agent", qm (https://github.com/yc-software/qm), though it doesn't seem to be focused on code, which makes a little more sense.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of fans of "pair programming", including the zed people...
I remember the fad. I was around for the Extreme Programming era. But, I've never worked anywhere that pair programming was the norm, nor have I known any developers that wanted to pair program, in the general case.
My personal experience is, of course, not representative of an entire industry, but I just have a hard time imagining it being a common thing. I like working with other people and helping juniors sort out their problems, but I'd quit my job if I had to take turns writing code while someone else watched and just sitting and watching someone else writing code. Both of those things seem horrible, to me.
I don't understand the fixation the industry has on multi-player development either. Zed isn't the first. It's been 10 or 15 years since I started seeing multi-player development (sometimes called peer programming in an earlier iteration) being championed in various ways. VS, Intellij, Eclipse, and vscode had plugins for it and all of them are from the 2015-2018 time. One can even say that the Google Wave demo from 2007 was one of the earliest demonstrations for this concept.
I even worked on a team where one engineer loved the idea and championed doing it as early as 2013. Most of these IDE extensions didn't exist back then. He ended up picking a buddy, and they moved to the same office, hooked 2 keyboards and 2 mice into the same PC and spend literally the entire day alternating who's writing code in the same IDE.
I think the concept was supposed to be about helping developers share their skills. Every developer has an experience of looking over somebody's shoulder and having an "oh shit, I didn't realize there is a shortcut/tool/command for that" moment. And the idea with multi-player programming is to get you to see that and learn from it more. But. It. Doesn't. Work.
My assumption is that people who want multi-user code editors are the same people who are forced to work in a place that requires heavy pair programming.
I could see it being useful if you're helping someone debug something, but chances are it's easier just to screenshare.
I feel I’ve seen the multiplayer thing being pushed ten years ago or so, guess it’s time for another round. It’s one of those things that makes for cool product videos but I’ve never met anyone who actually uses it or has expressed any desire for the feature.
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.
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.
AI summaries are great for learning which parts of the codebase are load bearing.
One thing worth flagging: summaries can provide context that is important, but you should always remember to thoroughly comb through the information in case there are caveats in the text that may act as a heads up, which is important.
I've found that I don't mind getting a lot of text back from an LLM, when I was the one who prompted it. I can easily enough let my eyes flit around in the text and figure out what I need to, and I expect that putting all that text in the context window will help with the rest of the conversation.
It's when that text gets copied and pasted into a blog, or a PR, etc. that it really galls.
I don't like the default explanations. But I prompt for small code snippets with explanations of a problem and the solution. This is in the context of extending features, fixing bugs, reviewing new code etc. I still skim the code, but it's nice to have a somewhat thoughtful overview of the key points like database schema, API spec, algorithm or abstraction. It makes it easier to skim a large diff without feeling lost. It also quite often catches some weird choices that might slip through it not carefully reasoning about the code. For me it is hard to understand code I didn't write myself so I have landed on this workflow.
The "language model" aspect shows IMO, at least for someone who grew up with the material of 90s and 2000s where we describe things more in mechanical, engineering terms. When gpt4 landed it was somehow amazing to see the output, but yeah nowadays I keep skimming through the explanation. It's like an intermediate dev who has nothing else to do but create long sentences to describe what could be simpler.
There is a reason Caveman (https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman) is as popular as it is
I'm a bit confused by your use of 'pithy, but at least its terse'. Don't pithy and terse mostly mean similar things? Here it seems like you're contrasting them. Not trying to be pedantic, apologies if it comes off that way.
"Bob can be blunt but at least he's honest." Words can have positive or negative connotations for the same notion.
That's insightful! In a negative way.
I think he’s saying that’s it’s dense and _too_ full of meaning. So, while terse, it can also hide extra meaning in its density.
Gnomic, then (on my mind because I saw it used yesterday, thanks flir).
Right, the value is not so clear of having multiple people wade through lengthy LLM responses. Part of the value that a human in the loop adds is figuring out what's correct and important in the response and passing on a more polished result.
I wish LLM summary of code was put aside the actual code, like the Jasmine documentation[0].
[0]: https://jasmine.github.io/tutorials/your_first_suite
I use AI explainers a lot in my own projects and have skills that give outputs I like. I'll even pipe the output into NotebookLM to make a video sometimes. This is actually a decent way to grok complex subsystems (YMMV).
What I don't care for is the pretty-yet-verbose HTML outputs that I see from some teams. They can be way too long and it's often the case that the engineer who made it didn't read the whole thing.
Those HTML reports are almost always filled with fluff.
As someone who likes a nicely designed report document, slapping a coat of paint on slop output isn’t helpful
We need a new specification language for summaries. I think just a (pseudo?-)programming language’s API (modules, interfaces, method signatures), but more concise and descriptive than Java, maybe Haskell or OCaml minus quirks (…the academics were this close to an ideal syntax, maybe they should’ve gave up those languages’ LR parsers…)
Your AI summary is raw output, like uncooked mince meat.
Ask for a rewriting pass! Get it to edit for word count, remove redundancies, remove run-on sentences, and change sentence structure to use active voice.
You wouldn't ship your first draft - why let AI do it?
I mean... the problem with that, as with all the "you have to go back and forth with the AI" scenarios, is that by the time I finish with that I may as well have just written it myself to begin with. Would take a similar amount of time, actually have my voice in it, and not cost money for tokens.
If all you need is a readable summary you can understand you should definitely try asking. You might get a surprise!
Worst case you lose 10 seconds of your life. Not too bad!
Ask for a walkthrough of the highlights (with '...' omissions so that the most important parts are quickly visible) instead of a verbal summary.
You're absolutely right!
I hate fighting with the AI to get a good summary. Reading the good summary is great. Getting to it is the challenge.
First attempt: mountains of meta conversation and not answering the original question.
Second attempt: shorter and more concise, cuts out some of the nonsense, but terribly written.
Third attempt: goes off the rails, misunderstands what you are asking and tries pushing the work onto you.
Fourth attempt: finally something that's concise, reasonably well written, to the point and passable.
Yes this is why I ask the agent to summarize the code as a comic of a lizard explaining it to a cat.
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. But I don't know if there's enough there to have a defensible product; if these features are excellent, others will clone them eventually.
Regardless, would love to give this a shot!
> On (2), I do find myself consuming agents' gigantic text responses, writing 8-bullet-point responses to guide them, then iterating that way. It's pretty exhausting. I could see inline comments providing much better ergonomics.
For your 2 plannotator [1] has a nice way to annotate agent messages or documents and its integrated into the agent chat (codex app also adopted the pattern)
[1] https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
The Codex desktop app lets you highlight anything in the transcript and add it to the chat as an annotation.
You can also add comments directly in the diff view and they submit in the next message you send.
It's a solid experience so far (have been testing the alpha). Being able to work across model providers in parallel is my preference, rather than being stuck in Codex desktop, for example.
Paseo and other agent harnesses can let you work across model providers as well.
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
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?
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.
Zed already has a “agentic layout” for a while. It shifts the ai and threads to be more prominent and moves code + sidebar to the right
For me it's probably time to learn to use vim or something similar. I'm the only one that likes coding manually, without all this AI shit? I'm faster writing code myself than trying to explain to artificial stupidity what I intend to do and correct its output. And if I write it myself the code just works, if it's written by the AI it has a ton of bugs. I don't see any value in AI generated code that is not mere code for doing experiments that you don't care about.
There is never a bad time to learn vim! Not only is it a super useful skill if you end up having to edit a file on a server (and you don't want to deal with nano), it also makes coding fun.
Hey me too. This is my morning Zen moment refactoring and cleaning some code before I go back to the agent to earn money. One of the only things that helps me to relax is to do some manual coding...
The obvious next step is to remove the code editor entirely.
It seems reasonable that a professional-tier of software developers will have tools distinct from everyone else. No matter what the percentage looks like, experts will still be a thing that needs different things.
The product is not an IDE, it is exactly the agent-native experience you're saying is required for current gen models.
I guess my main point is that the additional features on top of DeltaDB don't seem terribly important to me anymore, compared to the alternatives.
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.
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.
The Codex App has inline comments on output/diffs and it has made such a difference for iterating. Like Delta I expect to see this adopted everywhere.
The interesting bit is this type of UI doesn't fit very well in any of the existing terminal TUIs, I have only seen it enabled working well in GUIs.
Thanks for pointing that out. I tried the Codex App before but didn't see that.
I want to like the app, but I'm not sure if it actually fits well to my use case. With my current setup I need to fully quit and restart it if I want to work on a different project (to get it to use a different API key) and I cannot work in two threads belonging to different projects at the same time.
Also I generally prefer to handle sandbox the entire agent and disable its internal safeguards. Beside any doubts regarding the quality of the relevant sandbox implementations, I have just gotten my projects to work better this way.
Directly annotating parts of the convo is the feature that really unlocked Delta for me (have been testing the alpha). So much easier than trying to explain to the agent what I'm responding to in their giant text blob.
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.
> 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. You will have some question later that you would never have entertained during your thousands of conversations about code.
You’ll ask your AI something fairly abstract but it will be deep in the context of some other idea.
And the AI will find among all your conversations those turns that are relevant to solving your problem or explaining why.
I know this is the case because I’ve built this and use it every day.
Here are some examples:
I shared these and more in my post in the August “what are you working on?” thread. [0]You would be amazed how good the agent can be at assembling queries against a corpus of transcripts and assembling the results.
My product is called Contextify: https://contextify.sh
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236853
If one builds something with an agent, the process itself is largely opaque. Preserving the transcript shows the reasoning of the agent and the decision process of the builder. This way everyone's on the same page instead of re-prompting same CLAUDE.md but with different results, and/or going through similar work over and over again.
I understand the point, but shouldn't the code be documented and well structured so that the intent is clear without looking at the discussion around changes?
I'm working on a legacy system right now - I'd commit several felonies just to have well documented code, I don't really care about all the conversations that the original team had to decide what they eventually did.
Maybe I'm just too old and don't get it.
surely you could imagine that being able to sit in on a meeting that was had when they were designing the system would be useful for you?
theres a lot of context and decision making that is useful but not documented in the code. The code tells you how the system works, not how its supposed to work.
This is just the classic rehash of are comments in code an anti-pattern.
I tend to agree that at a certain point if you need to constantly think "gee, I wish I was in the meeting when they came up with this" the code you are looking at might just suck.
In such contexts it is also often the case that being in the meeting may not have helped. As they say, garbage in, garbage out.
Sometimes it is useful to simply know something was brought up, but then someone had a sneezing fit and everyone lost track of the thread and the important edge case under discussion just fizzled.
A similar thing happens in agentic conversations, where a model may point out something but it is not recognized as important by the operator.
A few directives later and the model is being pushed another direction.
It can be very useful to have perfect recall of moments like these.
> We could have added DeltaDB to Zed, and eventually we will. But the best possible experience required an entirely new kind of application
The 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?
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!
I think the point is to incorporate it in the end in to Zed. Becoming the new thread panel or something. But it's just not something that is easy to fiddle with inside a working editor that many of us rely on to make some money.
It's not a full IDE but you can see the files and docs mentioned and created in the Delta chats. I often will pop open the right tab in Delta to check that.
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...)
Nathan is on today’s Syntax episode talking about Rust and Zed and Delta:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-devel...
Also here, it's a really cool conversation https://syntax.fm/show/1029/the-workflow-of-the-future-with-...
I expected a release today because they didn't want to date the podcast episode recording date lmao
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.
Delta.dev is the same Rust application as Delta, just compiled to WebAssembly and rendered through WebGL. So it's already web accessible, and can naturally extend to mobile platforms as well!
(i worked on this)
Awesome! I'll for sure look into that.
Have been following this for a while, but honestly still not exactly clear to me who/what this tool is meant for
After all, we already have safe conccurent edits, etc via regular git tooling
To 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)
Sure, they're backed by a VC company that is all in on LLM hysteria so everything they backed will have to back that narrative so they can dump their wares for a profit.
It will cause the community to fail because VC dev tooling is unsustainable as the community needs will never take priority over what their VC benefactors want. So if you want the slop that helps you pump out slop they got you covered.
It sounds counter intuitive but you have to remember nearly every business of the planet operates as a centrally planned economy with either a monarch at the helm or an aristocracy. These are some of the least efficient ways to collaborate as humans, at least if history is anything to go by.
I suggest you focus on real open source solutions like neovim, emacs, or helix.
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.
Would be nice if Zed announced anything related to what Zed actually is: a code editor.
This thing is fairly new in software years and has already stagnated. Bugs, glitches and rough edges all around. Almost feels like abandonware.
I first heard of Zed back when it was “the code editor that respected your choices”, you could turn off AI entirely with a single switch and all that… guess it was too much of a pipe dream to hope it would continue down that road.
This thing is now just a white-label version of Visual Code. Nothing more. Nothing less. Same software, different case.
What a shame.
Just because they started out as a code editor doesn't mean it has to stay that way. I was looking forward to a more modern Sublime Text in Zed but I also know that nobody is going to make money off a simple code editor.
> This thing is now just a white-label version of Visual Code.
That's a wild hot take, and pretty ignorant to the people working on that for years.
> That's a wild hot take, and pretty ignorant to the people working on that for years.
Hot take or not, it’s accurate. There’s little to nothing that differentiates Zed from VSCode now.
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
Because nobody's actually implemented it properly. VSCode's live share came close but was buggy and unusable.
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.
I feel like this fails to explain the benefits over something like git worktrees, like whats the benefit?
Zed in Identity crisis.
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.
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.
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.
Related HN post.
Last week, 300+ comments
https://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...
i've had a similar idea for a while. Creating almost a multiplayer grill-me interface so teams can collaborate on spec definitions. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
You know it’s ironic that the first featured post showing up on the bottom is one where Zed proudly proclaims to not be doing AI just for the money that’s in it, and all posts that follow it are about AI too…
Does Zed even remember it is a code editor? Or are these guys just interested in building more AI slop to add to the never-ending pile? What even is Zed supposed to be at this point?
It's a code editor. Are you using it in some other way?
I'm sorry, but this so-called "minimal code editor" jumped the shark a long time ago.
Nice my company will instantly block this if I use it.
wouldve been nice to see a video of what theyre talking about. words are so ambiguous in what the product is
The name is terrible. Maybe this is vanity, but theres too many conflicting names. Delta airlines, delta dental, delta faucets, etc
I hate to be that guy who complains about style over substance, but man, is that font they use for body text ugly. Not just the glyphs themselves, but the spacing is way off, too.
I see Zed abandoned their principles regarding AI. Shame, I really do like the editor. Any decent alternatives that aren't VSCode or a Jetbrains product?
There's Gram, a fork of Zed without the AI: https://gram-editor.com/
Sublime
What principles do you feel they abandoned?
neovim
I like using my mouse
set mouse=a
Emacs then? :)
I don’t understand the point of this. Now we need 2 or more humans to micromanage LLM(s)?
What happened to using "adversarial LLM"? Too expensive for plebs? So this is the middle ground?
I think zed has lost the plot.
When will this ai slop era end? Hopefully soon because I am tired of reviewing junk PRs