Delta

dexwiz

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.

the_duke

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?

handfuloflight

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

NoDodgeQuestion

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!

vipshek

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!

imagetic

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

Vinnl

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...

Sha1rholder

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...

zcaceres

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!

Cu3PO42

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.

otterley

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.

isjejfjjwj

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?

quux0r

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.

KronisLV

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.

bearjaws

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

slopinthebag

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?

subygan

wouldve been nice to see a video of what theyre talking about. words are so ambiguous in what the product is

lukaszkorecki

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.

Palmik

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

gandhiandy69

Nice my company will instantly block this if I use it.