10 ms·

Software is made between commits

319 points by jeremy_k 4mo ago

hyperhello 4mo ago
I hate software tools now. I really do. A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly. If you think about your hammer it’s because something is wrong with it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  It's not just tools. Pretty much all software is like that. The problem is, is that it works, if you assume "working" means the software sellers get wealthy. There's a reason that most waitstaff wear black. They should blend into the background, and not be what the folks at the table are talking about. In rare instances, restaurants exist, where the waitstaff is the service. In software, though, you're being served by a waiter wearing a clown suit, screaming slogans at you, and serving you lukewarm, pre-chewed goo.
  - hyperhello 4mo ago
    Ah, McDonald’s isn’t that bad.
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    I use OpenBSD as a daily driver (but could use Alpine or VoidLinux too) and my setup is pretty much silent. No notifications, no rainbows of colors, no glitz. Let’s take mail. I use a combination of mutt hto directly connect via imap) and fdm/mu4e (to have them locally). I”m not interested in having counters or notifications for any of those. The “calm technology” book has an handful of advices, but one of the best example is the xbiff program. It switches picture when you have new mail on your local spool.
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    My favorite new-to-me cathartic feature is Safari’s hide distracting items. Probably easier with an ad blocker or just Reader view. But I really enjoy tapping on all the overlays and moving ads and videos and see them evaporate one by one, leaving just the text I wanted to read. The default state of the page is much like the restaurant you describe.
- darepublic 4mo ago
  From a Casey m podcast I think of agentic driven software dev as code extrusion. I guide and massage the steady output of content
- BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago
  > A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly A table saw does tho.
timuthang 4mo ago
Music is the silence between notes
- llamacld 4mo ago
  [dead]
pjm331 4mo ago
so i think the thing that everyone building these git alternatives is missing is a multi-repo story - unless the expectation is that everyone is going to start operating out of monorepos i've settled on all of this context attached to issues in a project management system and referenced from commits it works just fine - its not like your agent cannot read your issue tracker
- QuercusMax 4mo ago
  I've built some skills to help work with multiple repos, but it's really annoying how e.g. repo-specific .claude/ configs are only read when you start the agent in the repo folder. There's a ton of low hanging fruit to improve dev experience.
- jackxlau 4mo ago
  I came across the conclusion here since a change sometimes spans several repos, per-repo history optimizes the wrong target.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Maybe there’s a case to be made for a system that combines issue tracking, Slack conversations, PR reviewing, angent harness, and collaborative editing in a single tool. And Zed could make a nice system to build that tool on top of.
axegon_ 4mo ago
I'll probably get more hate for saying this but fine: I use Zed 50% of the time (the other 50% dedicated to vim) for two reasons: 1. It is fast and snappy. Nothing comes even close besides vim (and I don't mind going full time to it if I have to) 2. The ability to completely shut off and block any slop machine features from interfering with my workflow or leak code back to sloppenai, sloppus or any other self-installed-worst-security-practice-backdoor garbage. Having said that, I hope they don't remove that ability in the future and enforce the "slop is so good man, you should try it" philosophy.
- dematz 4mo ago
  there is a fork of zed against ai: https://gram-editor.com/ https://gram-editor.com/ I am happy about even though I've never tried gram, because if zed goes to shit there will be an alternative, which hopefully pressures zed to stay sane
  - axegon_ 4mo ago
    Oh, that's a breath of fresh air. And they are on codeberg. Nice! Thank you! Edit: After further inspection, I think I'm jumping ship before it's too late. And I'll look, see if there's a way to lend a hand or two when I have time!
  - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    Thank you for that link! Looks like it fixes all of my annoyances with Zed; I'll have to try it out.
  - Aerolfos 4mo ago
    From their mission statement: > I also object to making myself and my work depend on paying a subscription fee to anyone. I don't want an outage at Anthropic to affect my ability to do my work. I think it is a grave mistake to build anything on such shaky foundations as the sustainability and profit margins of the AI industry. Someone actually sensible, excellent.
    - 4mo ago
hmokiguess 4mo ago
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localhoster 4mo ago
Sad to see zed going the same route everybody is screaming them not to. Altough, I never expected otherwise.
- dkdbejwi383 4mo ago
  What route is that, and why is everyone screaming at them, for someone out of the loop?
  - selicos 4mo ago
    It sounds like they ship a fairly minimal and efficient set of tools or text editor. This would be unwanted bloat by those choosing them for those advantages.
    - jimbokun 4mo ago
      Although the collaboration functionality has been there from the beginning.
slopinthebag 4mo ago
I really like Zed. It's customisable enough for me to make it look how I want, it's faster than every other editor I've tried (scrolling is silk, zero lag anywhere), it has enough features that I don't need an IDE (debugger, refactoring tools), and it generally gets out of my way. I also like the AI tools, the inline assistant is good and the agent is also pretty nice and well integrated into the editor without it being the focus point. I'm not against using AI but I certainly don't use it as much as a lot of people do. That being said, I really dislike this recent push towards becoming more like a cursor wannabe. They have a new (for now) opt-in default layout that almost hides the editor panel in favour of the agent threads and agent panels. And now this. I don't want to switch editors, but if they keep pushing a different workflow from what I use it might send me back to Jetbrains...
thesurlydev 4mo ago
I'm glad to see this feature and looking forward to see how it evolves. Many of the product decisions that Zed's made caused me to switch to Zed for my daily driver IDE (previously JetBrains). The recent AI agent threads and improvements around diffs really solidified the move.
- b33j0r 4mo ago
  JetBrains’ AI offering peaked last year when Junie was briefly better than Codex. Now it’s a wash. Honestly all of this drives me back towards nvim or notepad sometimes. I have had a jetbrains subscription since pycharm came out, and the killer feature was always the visual debugger. Seems nearly quaint now. What specific things do you like about zed?
prodigycorp 4mo ago
I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good.
- darepublic 4mo ago
  They drove up to my house with a dump truck full of money... Im not made of stone!
- whazor 4mo ago
  Seems like where anthropic or openai want to go, there are no editors anymore. I personally want better read-only code tools, or maybe the return of UML?
  - prodigycorp 4mo ago
    I think it's the other way around. OpenAI is definitely recreating the IDE from scratch with codex app.
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    Hmm has there been much success just feeding mermaid diagrams to an agent and having it generate code to implement it? I imagine many people have tried this but I haven’t yet. And mermaid swim lane diagrams are my go to tool for designing system architecture.
- elevation 4mo ago
  > I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good. Why stop at zed? The trillion dollar investment AI companies have amassed was nominally for datacenters, but as those costs rise and completion timelines extend past the typical business planning horizon, it becomes more efficient to put the money to work elsewhere. You can buy whatever you want with a trillion dollars.
- clickety_clack 4mo ago
  Ya, their coding harness is way better than Claude code, but because it’s directly using the clause api it’s way more expensive. Rolling it into the family would make it product-class-defining.
tomjakubowski 4mo ago
I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process. I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4
- fridder 4mo ago
  The collaboration part I’m skeptical of but I get it, as it sounds like a feature made for business consumers
  - sdesol 4mo ago
    This sounds like it is more aligned with what I have created which is "We need to capture your conversations with AI". If you look at https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/root.go https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r... you can see that every file has a code block header with a UUID and the AI that was attributed to it. With the UUID, I can tell exactly how the code came about. What they are working on will be more useful for AI code provenance. It is only a matter of time before you are expected to show your chats with AI as part of the code review and for performance reviews. So I don't see human collaboration being the main use case. I see tracking, studying and improving the Human-AI relationship...and seeing if somebody should be promoted or not. An interesting take I've heard is, we will have a token/impact stat where if you spent a shitload of tokens to produce the same impact as somebody else who spent a lot less, you will be the prime candidate for layoffs and/or less pay. This is why I think AI code provenance will become a serious thing in the future.
    - jorl17 4mo ago
      FYI your link 404s. Seems like you copied the ellipsified version, so what we get is https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r
bronlund 4mo ago
Just what we need, a new kind of version control %]
yurlyCLOCLOCK 4mo ago
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mplanchard 4mo ago
There are so many early-stage startups also competing in this space right now. I’ve been on the interview circuit the past few weeks and talked to at least two. It’s going to be stiff competition for any of these tools to get well-established enough to be successful at a large scale. I can’t help but feel like it is all enabling a level of developer surveillance with which I am deeply uncomfortable, though.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Too many managers have nowhere near enough real work to do or actual business concerns to worry about, if they are spending all their time observing every keystroke of every developer working for them.
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    They do have work to do, but micromanaging the developers is easier, so that’s what they do.
fridder 4mo ago
Well shoot, they beat me to the punch. I’d been circling around something like this, just not collaborative and obviously more thought out than my random experiments. Minus the collab portions I’m interested to see how it compares to jujutsu
csours 4mo ago
The work product is not the work.
skydhash 4mo ago
> Before agents, it was easier to believe that the ceremony of trading comments on snapshots was an effective way to collaborate on software, I’m highly skeptical of this claim. For any complicated feature, there’s always a design doc (or an RFC, or a wireframe) and that’s what people used for discussion. Discussion in a PR are mostly about whether to accept the code, reject the feature, or provide feedback about alternate implementations. It’s not for pair programming or directing design. Collaborating together in a research lab (brainstorm session) is not the same as asking feedback for a journal article (PR). What is described in the article is pair programming with extra steps.
ivanjermakov 4mo ago
Just a stream of thoughts: if git commits were a list of sequential primitive changes instead of diff snapshots, conflict resolution would be trivial in most cases. Not without cons of course: commit byte size, public WIP work and leaked secrets/unwanted edits.
- pgedge_postgres 4mo ago
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yaodub 4mo ago
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these 4mo ago
This seems like a great way to facilitate data gathering for improving LLMs coding performance. If previously you needed to take action 1, 2, 3 to go from state A to B, all you saw was the change from A, B. Now you see intermediates 1, 2, 3 and can train the models to skip straight to B with the added context of the intermediate states.
Xotic007 4mo ago
A commit is useful because you cleaned it up first. The messing around in between is where you try things and delete the dead ends and most of it is meant to be thrown away. Saving every change and every agent message keeps all that junk around instead.
OtherShrezzing 4mo ago
I don’t see the value proposition here. I’ve seen roughly this feature proposed by multiple companies, and absolutely none of the have given a convincing reason for the technology to exist.
- teach 4mo ago
  It's interesting that your experience/workflow is so much different than mine. This (claims to) solve a real problem that I deal with every day. My company is remote-only, and my coworkers mostly don't live anywhere near me. We see each other a couple of times a day on video chat, but communicate mostly during the day via Slack. We're also, uh, pretty far along the curve in adopting LLM agents to write good code for us. With a good model and the extremely good guardrails our of specific coding harness, LLMs are writing the majority of our code these days. So on a typical day I'll grab a ticket off the top of the stack, point my LLM at it, and start working with it to solve the problem. We'll make architectural decisions, etc, create a plan and execute the plan. The feature I shipped most recently cost $19 in tokens and the LLM was churning without my input for like half an hour at one point in the thick of it. MAYBE if there's a question I'm not sure which way is best I'll post a question in the team chat for my teammates to weigh in on. But a lot of my tickets are done completely autonomously. Then I'll open a PR, and post a link to the PR in Slack, requesting their review and my teammates will see the implementation for the first time. They sometimes have questions! Often, they'll post these questions in the Slack thread rather than as PR comments, because we're having a fast real-time conversation and GitHub comments aren't a great fit for that. These questions have answers in the chat log with the LLM that lives on my laptop, but I can't trivially show it to them. So I end up playing telephone with the LLM -- copying my teammate's questions from Slack to the LLM chat, pasting the answers back, etc The idea that my coworkers and the LLM and I can all be more easily a part of the same conversation appeals to me greatly None of this means the Zed team is on the right track. Nor that my team might work better in a different way! But we're too "successful" with this approach for there to be much institutional pressure to change our ways at the moment. Hope that helps.
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    I’ve seen Zed promoted as an alternative to Slack or Teams and you describe how that can be true for development where the collaboration revolves around text files. Which makes more sense I think than describing it as an alternative for Git PRs.
ukprogrammer 4mo ago
With LLMs now being responsible for the physical typing of code and mundane plumbing tasks, this is a wise direction to go into Our human ability is not defined by our _absolute_ output, but, by the quality of the _delta_ applied to an engineering artefact Great engineers obsess over every keystroke With LLMs, a much smaller number of keystrokes can create a much larger and more positively impactful delta Every delta to the codebase can tell us some informational property about the behaviour of the system and storing that information WILL prove to be useful in the future
lijok 4mo ago
I swear a lot in my chats with Claude..
seanclayton 4mo ago
> What we're really after is simple: the conversation with the agent becomes the only conversation you need to have. This benefits those who make the machines you have conversations with and those that invest in them.
jmole 4mo ago
Google has been doing this for maybe a decade now with citc [0]. I don't know when Gemini is actually going to be taking advantage of this, but I do know that google has essentially a full history at "Ctrl-S" granularity, from ~every developer that works there, for at least 10 years now. If Gemini seems stupid nowadays, it's only because they're being stingy with compute allocation. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system)
shibel 4mo ago
A bit O/T but: > I have never been a big fan of pull requests. I guess this partly explains why Zed (still) lacks a PR review flow, let alone a coherent one, despite some interest [1]. Pretty much the only reason I’m still with JetBrains. [1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/34759 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/34759
jerf 4mo ago
I would be interested in a clear statement about how this scales. I've not used this workflow myself, but I've seen teams that did it. Whether they got huge benefits out of it I don't know, but I do know that watching them, I was not jealous of what I saw. If I make a change, and I run some tests that were passing a moment ago, and they fail, and the reason why they failed is that Bob hit "save" on his editor (or his editor autosaves) and he made a syntax error in a shared library, and this happened often... I would go insane. I cause enough problems for myself without other people's problems actively intruding at uncontrolled times into my tests. AI's code writing velocity makes this even worse, there's no way I can be simultaneously working on a code base while an AI agent is running around it doing something else. It feels like maybe there's a ghost of an idea here about how to get the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure I follow the throughline on it.
_pdp_ 4mo ago
What is apparent to me is that we are moving towards dark factories if the promise of LLMs writing most of the code is fulfilled. So this means that it is less about conversations and it is more about iteration.
abahgat 4mo ago
I can see how this is a great building block for what Zed is doing around collaboration. One thing I would really love to see, however, is a way to better attach code review comments to the specific version of code they were left on. I find it quite difficult to do with git and github, considering that commit hashes change every time one is forced to rebase (say, for example, to handle a merge conflict). Do you expect DeltaDB to help address this problem?
gnunicorn 4mo ago
I totally see where they are coming from, jitsu, too is making every change its own artifact. And it plays hard to the "faster shipping" that especially AI-driven teams are pushing hard, and find the review process to be the next big bottleneck now (as I just saw with my last client as well). There has also been a lot of discussion about the value of the peer review process recently, in in general. But I wonder if this isn't all going into the wrong direction. Quite honestly, even with the previous review and discussion system of (squashed) commits how often did you really use git blame and opened up the original PR discussion of that changed line that caused the bug? And how often did it help you beyond learning it was done by that rockstar developer who has left long ago? And that the discussion on that PR was a point in time and the code around it has evolves beyond that and it would need looking at another 10 PR discussion to get the entire context. What I am saying is that git (and before that Subversion and CVS) has a full history is so that it can resolve the latest state. Period. We made that commit ritual somewhat of a hallmark in putting more supposed meaning into recording ever more in that history. But we rarely stopped to check if that is all that useful. Recording even more, all the time, reminds me of these work group meetings that have minute records of every bike shedding meeting word said by everyone, that, honestly, no one ever looks at after the next meeting ever again. I don't think there is value in minute record keeping, it becomes too much noise that just makes it harder to parse. Now also adding all AI conversation and agent thinking to that tree? What's the value of that in like 3 months down the line? I don't see it.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  I often find it helpful to see the entire commit and message leading to a specific line of code getting into its current state. That’s about it.
WorldMaker 4mo ago
This just sounds to me like "frequent auto-commits" with less trust in git. git can handle frequent auto-commits just fine. If you want to "rollup" frequent auto-commits into "cleaner" top-level commits but also keep all the point-in-time "conversation" of your auto-commits, then `git merge --no-ff` from time to time and use tools like `--first-parent` to focus in on "top-level" commits over "conversation" commits. The git backend already has a ton of "delta DB optimizations" (in git packs and other tools) and it's really just the git frontend that needs a little massaging (`--first-parent`, primarily) and the vast world of "subway-diagram-first/only" Git UIs that should have more "drill down" `--first-parent` counterparts simply because so many people find the subway diagrams ugly/confusing/distasteful.
- tectec 4mo ago
  This is what what I do. I never see the commits from branches but they are there if I need them. Even git blame can be setup to use --first-parent
  - WorldMaker 4mo ago
    git bisect also works great with --first-parent. It will never stop surprising me how many people see the two-dimensional DAG of git as a bug to be avoided rather than a very useful feature (and then spend time reinventing things that git could do natively if they just used the second dimension of the git graph a bit more intentionally).
chrishill89 4mo ago
Many years ago I helped a friend with some draft that had to do with him finishing his doctorate. It ended up being maybe 50-60 between three of us and as fine grained as possible. That agents need something "beyond git" is lost on me but it keeps coming up. For one subject the tool doesn't matter -- in fact it can be obtuse like git or bash and it's fine because agents will handle it. Then for another thing the story is opposite.
- softwareseko 4mo ago
  The interesting question is whether agents actually benefit from finer-grained history or whether they're better served by semantic checkpoints – "this works, this doesn't" rather than line-by-line diffs. Git wasn't designed for that, but neither is anything else yet.
  - chrishill89 4mo ago
    If works/doesn't are semantic checkpoints, then I use that every day for myself with Git notes.
wxw 4mo ago
Agents can certainly use a new substrate as they can eat dense information quickly. Not convinced DeltaDB is useful for humans directly but assume new and interesting interfaces can arise from the abstractions it provides. Agree that PRs/snapshots is an antiquated way of sharing information.
tengbretson 4mo ago
This is going to have so many api keys stored in it.
- commentsaregood 4mo ago
  Likewise, what happens if someone does a npm install or slap a venv or some other thing like that, before adding the equivalent of a gitignore for these things? Did you then just flood two times 200 MB worth of changes into the tracker? What if I just simply build in golang to a subfolder early on, is that v0.0.1 stuck there until someone decides to do the second layer of githistory inspection? Perhaps not. But I'm not going to be the guy training the Team on how not to do it. They have shaky grasp of the full set of standards for PR's as is.
flerchin 4mo ago
If that works for someone, great. I would never pay for it, and would run not walk away from any shop that asked me to use it. The mess in-between working software is not something I care to have version controlled.
Lindby 4mo ago
All the things in between my commits is a messy soup. Looking there is not useful to anyone. I rewrite my history with git rebase so each commit is small and atomic. The story I create with my commits is what explains why things are as they are, it doesn't matter if it's the true chronological story on how it actually happened. I agree with the author that reviewing pull requests is too late. The problem with pull request is that they make it hard to review individual commits since they are geared towards reviewing the result of an entire branch at once. But the answer is not to share all the noise, it should be to encourage small atomic commits so you can review the early work before the entire feature/fix is complete.
- isityettime 4mo ago
  > The problem with pull request is that they make it hard to review individual commits since they are geared towards reviewing the result of an entire branch at once. But the answer is not to share all the noise, it should be to encourage small atomic commits so you can review the early work before the entire feature/fix is complete. Isn't that just a GitHub problem, as opposed to Phabricator, Gerrit, etc.?
  - danpalmer 4mo ago
    It is, but I think it's hard to explain to folks who have only used the Git/GitHub model – I know, I've been that person not really getting it. I think what's missed is two things: - In the Phabricator/Gerrit model you typically end up with changes that are smaller than a PR, but bigger than a commit. - You lose some history, or track it in a different way. With a PR you might add code to address comments in a new commit on the end, but with Phabricator/Gerrit you don't. If you already aggressively rebase in Git to absorb changes into commits that they make sense to go in, this won't be much of a change, and some systems give you views on the history happening within each change. But if you expect to see everything like that in the Git history, you may not get that, but the workflow changes around it and that's ok. I think both types of review are in a local maxima, where you lose some things to move to the other type, and it was fear of losing those from my workflow that made me resist the change a bit. When you get there though, you realise it's just not a problem.
sangeeth96 4mo ago
This is what I’ve been thinking of ever since coming across Ramp’s agent[1] and other orgs trying to build their own remote dev envs with agents at the center. Makes so much more sense in this kind of a dev spree to not wait for a PR. Because all actors end up repeating the same thing with their own agents which can be totally avoided. Conversations and code to jump in and out of, to collaborate etc seems like the right way to go. Excited to see what Zed team comes up with! :) [1]: https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-agent https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-a...
thom 4mo ago
A software team’s job is to collaboratively learn an effective model for operating in a domain. They express that model and those learnings in code, tests and associated documentation. So on the one hand I wholeheartedly agree that pull requests and code reviews fatally undermine this process, but immediately recoil that we’re creating yet more secondary processes and artefacts to distract ourselves. This stuff should all be evident from your codebase. It’s not an extra thing. It’s not a bunch of commit messages or ADRs. If your codebase isn’t entirely self explanatory (both the what and the why) to both humans and AIs you’ve failed and will spend your whole life creating more and more process to manage that failure.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Cheap branching for features and experiments, ability to rollback specific commits quickly, reading the commit message for the last time a line of code changed, are all incredibly important and made possible by distributed version control systems. The current state of the code is not sufficient for modern software development.
  - thom 4mo ago
    At least we agree “modern software development” is the root cause.
cbovis 4mo ago
The approach sounds interesting but perhaps still too focused on current development paradigms. Where shared collaboration I think becomes much more interesting is when agents start behaving like a member of your team. Not someone you delegate to, but someone that actively seeks out conversations and interacts with others as though they're just another member of the team. You shouldn't be aware that version control is happening behind the scenes, you're just interacting with a persistent persona through Slack/teams/notion/figma/linear/etc with something that's logging issues, fixing bugs, writing PRDs, designing mockups, etc. The only point at which you know there's version control is when you're asked to review something before it's integrated.
opem 4mo ago
> DeltaDB captures every operation in between and gives each one a stable identity Gives jj vibes, interesting!
- nchmy 4mo ago
  especially when using Watchman https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/config/#watchman https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/config/#watchman
messh 4mo ago
Technically, this is true
fHr 4mo ago
Lmao an ad
bison_fan 4mo ago
Like others, I really like Zed as a text editor. I was a Sublime user before but I switched to Zed because it was even faster and cleaner than Sublime. The multi-buffer editing is a nice step up of multi-cursor editing. I just want a fast text editor with a few conveniences for development. I don't care about any of the collaboration or AI tools that they are working on and I hope that these efforts don't detract from the text editor. At the very least I hope I can hide these features in the UI and continue to ignore them. I also hope that these features don't lead to a bloated, sluggish text editor like VSCode and IntelliJ.
amichayg 4mo ago
This seems like such a weird article. Software is made at build time, which is usually due to a cicd process in place, which is dependent on committing code. It works. There’s no magical way of avoiding the idea that code usually exists in a commit someplace without proper justification.
gib444 4mo ago
Next up: a kit to wire up a developer's brain activity direct to the AI companies, so not a single part of their thought process remains in control of the developer, in order to feed the models. You must brainsignalmaxx 8 hours a day or be fired. Your boss will also demand that you narrate your thought process 8 hours a day. Speakmaxxing will be required to keep your job. There will be a "silence" wall of shame for the non-compliers.
- overtomanu 4mo ago
  It is almost happening in a different way, for automating physical labor, some companies are collecting data by making people wear camera on their heads The Indian workers training AI robots to take their jobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQoPoLUJWic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQoPoLUJWic
overgard 4mo ago
I'd have to see the implementation in the editor to really know if I'd want it or not, but my initial impression is that I don't think it's something I would use. I've worked on a couple of products with in-editor collaboration built in (not text editors, but, content creation tools). For the most part collaboration just wasn't something users wanted that much. The problem was that the in-editor collaboration was only really useful for things that were 100% on the web, it never caught on with the more file-centric workflows. It works in something like Google Docs because it's natural that your data is in the cloud there, but for something that lives on your filesystem it feels like it takes extra steps that most people aren't going to be willing to do (especially if they have to use an editor different from their normal one)
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  I guess it would be perfect for pair programming in a remote work environment.
BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago
Sounds like "google docs with code formatting". I didn't see anything in there about branching which seems like a big thing not to have.
ericyd 4mo ago
Where are these developers who are willing to talk to you about your code and hash out ideas? Everyone I’ve ever worked with is always too busy, too many other priorities. Sounds nice though. Unrelated: I started using Zed a few weeks ago and really love it, it is everything it promises to be.
vitally3643 4mo ago
Like most/all engineers (I assume), I have entire notebooks that are filled front to back and in the margins with scratch. Random calculations and notes, equations running into each other, any piece of information that was too fleeting to stay in my head or overspill from an already full working memory. Most engineers I know keep such notebooks when they're full, because it's kind of neat to open a random page and see a brain dump scrawled out. Nobody has ever looked at another engineer's scratch notes and drawn useful insight. Frankly, I wouldn't even want to other than for novelty.
coneonthefloor 4mo ago
Zed are doing a great job at making the exact things developers don’t want. It’s clear that their focus is on raising funding rather than making a great text editor.
jumploops 4mo ago
> the conversation that generates the code is becoming the true source of our software This is close, but not quite spot on. I've found that I'll test more ideas _with code_ using agentic tools, then before, leading to an excess of conversation history that is no longer representative of the final outcome. A simple example I encountered recently was dealing with performance issues on an iOS application (I haven't written mobile code since before Swift..). If you viewed the chat, you'd dive down a diverging path of rabbit holes, few of which were relevant to the final outcome[0]. To solve this in my own work, I've started relying on "context hierarchy" - which is essentially live documentation that lives next to the source files (using markdown). This approach avoids comments being removed erroneously, and helps codify the intent behind the code and how it relates to the overall architecture. As an added bonus, it also forces the LLM to edit _two_ things instead of just one (which might actually be the biggest benefit). My workflow is currently maintained via some repo level scripts and AGENTS.md prompts, but I've tried to pull it out into a skill for others to use[1]. Candidly, I'm not sure the skill is the best approach yet, as the agent can sometimes get too focused on the "skill" as a separate tool rather than a core part of the workflow. I'm currently exploring other options here (repo bootstrap, side-loaded subagents, hooks, etc.) [0]For more context, I was using a 3rd party library and trying to make it performant during a streaming operation, by removing the SwiftUI view layer (LazyVStack) and implementing a custom rendering path with UIViewController. The final solution ended up as a custom implementation of the 3rd party library, and moving back to LazyVStack. [1]https://github.com/jumploops/chum https://github.com/jumploops/chum
jchw 4mo ago
> Software is made between commits Yes. > DeltaDB captures every operation in between [each commit] No. First of all, that feels intrusive. I would also prefer to not have a screen recorder that is running 24/7 while I work. Yes, I suppose there's nothing wrong with having my mistakes on display, but also, if I'm doing my job, all of the value I produce is captured by the commit, and it just feels significantly less intrusive that way. Second of all, I use many different tools, and I don't really want to have to have all of them be integrated into some weird DB. What's the point of capturing everything if randomly it has to go "some external process did something"? Yes I do like that Zed can integrate so many things but that doesn't mean I will use everything integrated into Zed. Last I checked if you use Claude Code in Zed via ACP you can't even rewind and edit old messages. Finally, personally, I think that we've already lost the plot with commits. It's clear to me that most people are just doing some arbitrary unbounded set of changes then running git commit, then the changeset is reviewed as one giant blob, and then those commits get squashed together. It isn't the end of the world, but having nice hand-crafted commits is amazing. If you've ever ran `git blame` on a project that enforces this, you will understand exactly what I am talking about. Doing stuff like DeltaDB is just going to re-enforce and solidify the practice of slopping together commits. Wonder what's going on? Now you can voyeuristically replay it and view the conversation the user had with LLMs... And that last point is as interesting as it is frustrating. You couldn't convince someone to write documentation for their changes and the motivation behind those changes just because it's good engineering practice that helps your teammates, but everyone will happily explain it to an LLM. Sure that is in large part because it's needed for the LLM to do the work for them, but it is interesting how much work we will do to please the LLMs that we would not have done before. Suddenly a bunch of weird undocumented things are documented. In CLAUDE.md.
soulbadguy 4mo ago
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afzalive 4mo ago
Could you just give me reference peeking without opening a full tab?
ins199 4mo ago
[flagged]
commentsaregood 4mo ago
I spent the entire article thinking > this is what comments are for > that is usually unnecessary, but if it were, a comment would fulfill it > I literally solved this problem with a comment yesterday > if the AI needs to know that, I'd explicitly ask it to put it in a skill or AGENTS.md. if a human needs it, I'd put it in a comment > this is overengineering a purpose comments already fulfill I dont want a second set of commit changes and a freaking schema that tracks me Ctrl+Z and Shift+Ctrl+Z'ing a bunch just to accomplish what comments already do, wtf.
- UndyingHorse 4mo ago
  someone with your nickname would say :)
nicechianti 4mo ago
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j16sdiz 4mo ago
That recording capture code, but not intent and thought. The only alternative to PR review is pair programming - where you can discuss with your peer in real time, discuss the design, asking questions or clarifications. Without real time communication, those small delta are pure noise.
alok-g 4mo ago
This is something I have been looking for. I agree with a lot of comments here saying that the "conversation that generates the code" is often not meaningful once the code is there. It is however important to me as development history. Commit messages, meanwhile, are not the right places to hold this conversation. As of now: 1. I save the conversations as "Prompt ###-XX.md" files into a 'completed prompts' folder within the repository and cite "Prompt ###" in the commit message. 2. I explicitly have the coding agent explain the decisions from the conversations in the generated code/artifacts.
boomlinde 4mo ago
So this is is intended to smooth over the poor work, bad commit hygiene and bad commit messages of "agents", presumably not meaning just any agent but LLM-based ones specifically. I can already see the change. What I need to know is why, not how exactly. It should be clear from a commit message why a change was made. If it's not, that problem should be addressed during review. I shouldn't have to watch a recap of your conversation with a virtual idiot to understand your commit. If the tools you use to generate code can't be coaxed into producing that level of quality, or if you don't understand the output of your generative tools to the extent that you can describe for someone else why they made a particular change, you have a tooling and competency problem. If further tooling can solve these problems, then I'm all for it, but the idea here seems to be to not solve that problem, but to burden anyone interrogating the history of a repository with also scrolling through chat histories so that virtual idiots can keep shitting out low-quality changes and so that operators can keep accepting those changes as-is without thinking too much about why. I guess it doesn't help that tools like GitHub don't really care about commit messages. You can't even comment directly on commit messages during review.
protocolture 4mo ago
The door is open when it isnt shut.
brainless 4mo ago
I agree with the core idea. I am building a coding agent for non-engineers on small/local LLMs only. Commits are great but for an agent that works for the non-engineers (what I am building), commits cannot be represent the chain of thought since that chain has happened before - in English and has lots of debate/discussion with agents. Zed is focused on engineers. I am focused on everyone else but I came to similar conclusions since my situation is tighter. Software has to be defined by humans, then codified (in development) by agents and then tested by humans. Deployment, rollbacks, etc. also has to come into the scene. I have been breaking down the conversation into agents playing roles like PO, PM, Architect, etc. Then taking outputs from those into structured inputs for Rust engineer, Typescript engineer and so on. It is all WIP but holding on to this chain of "chats" is key in my opinion. That is where the software is made. https://github.com/brainless/nocodo https://github.com/brainless/nocodo
distalx 4mo ago
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coldtea 4mo ago
No, software is made in the choice of what to keep in the final commit.
Zanfa 4mo ago
This seems exactly backwards. Most commits should not exist, because the majority of people can't already help themselves from committing "wip" "fix lint", let alone anything more granular.
hackermanai 4mo ago
I think this is a cool approach, like a giant undo stack.
plq 4mo ago
With Gerrit, you have the patch that lands on master and then you have the stages that that patch went through to get to that point, reviews on older versions of the patch, etc. all recorded in the web interface. So maybe just switch to a code review tool and use its interface to converse with the bots?
uwagar 4mo ago
i keep comitting when i make a change. who cares. im solo dev. svn. git no thanks.
bicepjai 4mo ago
I love the title, there was another post that I thought was clever “If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort”
literallyroy 4mo ago
I think this makes a lot of sense in the context of Zed’s multiplayer editing. Maybe that works well for a small team working on a single product, but that doesn’t seem like it’d scale super well. I loved tight collaboration long ago on online notepads despite constantly breaking stuff for each person…

319 points by jeremy_k 4mo ago

I hate software tools now. I really do. A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly. If you think about your hammer it’s because something is wrong with it.

ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
It's not just tools. Pretty much all software is like that. The problem is, is that it works, if you assume "working" means the software sellers get wealthy. There's a reason that most waitstaff wear black. They should blend into the background, and not be what the folks at the table are talking about. In rare instances, restaurants exist, where the waitstaff is the service. In software, though, you're being served by a waiter wearing a clown suit, screaming slogans at you, and serving you lukewarm, pre-chewed goo.
- hyperhello 4mo ago
  Ah, McDonald’s isn’t that bad.
- skydhash 4mo ago
  I use OpenBSD as a daily driver (but could use Alpine or VoidLinux too) and my setup is pretty much silent. No notifications, no rainbows of colors, no glitz. Let’s take mail. I use a combination of mutt hto directly connect via imap) and fdm/mu4e (to have them locally). I”m not interested in having counters or notifications for any of those. The “calm technology” book has an handful of advices, but one of the best example is the xbiff program. It switches picture when you have new mail on your local spool.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  My favorite new-to-me cathartic feature is Safari’s hide distracting items. Probably easier with an ad blocker or just Reader view. But I really enjoy tapping on all the overlays and moving ads and videos and see them evaporate one by one, leaving just the text I wanted to read. The default state of the page is much like the restaurant you describe.
darepublic 4mo ago
From a Casey m podcast I think of agentic driven software dev as code extrusion. I guide and massage the steady output of content
BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago
> A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly A table saw does tho.

timuthang 4mo ago

Music is the silence between notes

llamacld 4mo ago
[dead]

pjm331 4mo ago

so i think the thing that everyone building these git alternatives is missing is a multi-repo story - unless the expectation is that everyone is going to start operating out of monorepos i've settled on all of this context attached to issues in a project management system and referenced from commits it works just fine - its not like your agent cannot read your issue tracker

QuercusMax 4mo ago
I've built some skills to help work with multiple repos, but it's really annoying how e.g. repo-specific .claude/ configs are only read when you start the agent in the repo folder. There's a ton of low hanging fruit to improve dev experience.
jackxlau 4mo ago
I came across the conclusion here since a change sometimes spans several repos, per-repo history optimizes the wrong target.
jimbokun 4mo ago
Maybe there’s a case to be made for a system that combines issue tracking, Slack conversations, PR reviewing, angent harness, and collaborative editing in a single tool. And Zed could make a nice system to build that tool on top of.

axegon_ 4mo ago

I'll probably get more hate for saying this but fine: I use Zed 50% of the time (the other 50% dedicated to vim) for two reasons: 1. It is fast and snappy. Nothing comes even close besides vim (and I don't mind going full time to it if I have to) 2. The ability to completely shut off and block any slop machine features from interfering with my workflow or leak code back to sloppenai, sloppus or any other self-installed-worst-security-practice-backdoor garbage. Having said that, I hope they don't remove that ability in the future and enforce the "slop is so good man, you should try it" philosophy.

dematz 4mo ago
there is a fork of zed against ai: https://gram-editor.com/ https://gram-editor.com/ I am happy about even though I've never tried gram, because if zed goes to shit there will be an alternative, which hopefully pressures zed to stay sane
- axegon_ 4mo ago
  Oh, that's a breath of fresh air. And they are on codeberg. Nice! Thank you! Edit: After further inspection, I think I'm jumping ship before it's too late. And I'll look, see if there's a way to lend a hand or two when I have time!
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago
  Thank you for that link! Looks like it fixes all of my annoyances with Zed; I'll have to try it out.
- Aerolfos 4mo ago
  From their mission statement: > I also object to making myself and my work depend on paying a subscription fee to anyone. I don't want an outage at Anthropic to affect my ability to do my work. I think it is a grave mistake to build anything on such shaky foundations as the sustainability and profit margins of the AI industry. Someone actually sensible, excellent.
  - 4mo ago

hmokiguess 4mo ago

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localhoster 4mo ago

Sad to see zed going the same route everybody is screaming them not to. Altough, I never expected otherwise.

dkdbejwi383 4mo ago
What route is that, and why is everyone screaming at them, for someone out of the loop?
- selicos 4mo ago
  It sounds like they ship a fairly minimal and efficient set of tools or text editor. This would be unwanted bloat by those choosing them for those advantages.
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    Although the collaboration functionality has been there from the beginning.

slopinthebag 4mo ago

I really like Zed. It's customisable enough for me to make it look how I want, it's faster than every other editor I've tried (scrolling is silk, zero lag anywhere), it has enough features that I don't need an IDE (debugger, refactoring tools), and it generally gets out of my way. I also like the AI tools, the inline assistant is good and the agent is also pretty nice and well integrated into the editor without it being the focus point. I'm not against using AI but I certainly don't use it as much as a lot of people do. That being said, I really dislike this recent push towards becoming more like a cursor wannabe. They have a new (for now) opt-in default layout that almost hides the editor panel in favour of the agent threads and agent panels. And now this. I don't want to switch editors, but if they keep pushing a different workflow from what I use it might send me back to Jetbrains...

thesurlydev 4mo ago

I'm glad to see this feature and looking forward to see how it evolves. Many of the product decisions that Zed's made caused me to switch to Zed for my daily driver IDE (previously JetBrains). The recent AI agent threads and improvements around diffs really solidified the move.

b33j0r 4mo ago
JetBrains’ AI offering peaked last year when Junie was briefly better than Codex. Now it’s a wash. Honestly all of this drives me back towards nvim or notepad sometimes. I have had a jetbrains subscription since pycharm came out, and the killer feature was always the visual debugger. Seems nearly quaint now. What specific things do you like about zed?

prodigycorp 4mo ago

I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good.

darepublic 4mo ago
They drove up to my house with a dump truck full of money... Im not made of stone!
whazor 4mo ago
Seems like where anthropic or openai want to go, there are no editors anymore. I personally want better read-only code tools, or maybe the return of UML?
- prodigycorp 4mo ago
  I think it's the other way around. OpenAI is definitely recreating the IDE from scratch with codex app.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Hmm has there been much success just feeding mermaid diagrams to an agent and having it generate code to implement it? I imagine many people have tried this but I haven’t yet. And mermaid swim lane diagrams are my go to tool for designing system architecture.
elevation 4mo ago
> I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good. Why stop at zed? The trillion dollar investment AI companies have amassed was nominally for datacenters, but as those costs rise and completion timelines extend past the typical business planning horizon, it becomes more efficient to put the money to work elsewhere. You can buy whatever you want with a trillion dollars.
clickety_clack 4mo ago
Ya, their coding harness is way better than Claude code, but because it’s directly using the clause api it’s way more expensive. Rolling it into the family would make it product-class-defining.

tomjakubowski 4mo ago

I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process. I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4

fridder 4mo ago
The collaboration part I’m skeptical of but I get it, as it sounds like a feature made for business consumers
- sdesol 4mo ago
  This sounds like it is more aligned with what I have created which is "We need to capture your conversations with AI". If you look at https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/root.go https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r... you can see that every file has a code block header with a UUID and the AI that was attributed to it. With the UUID, I can tell exactly how the code came about. What they are working on will be more useful for AI code provenance. It is only a matter of time before you are expected to show your chats with AI as part of the code review and for performance reviews. So I don't see human collaboration being the main use case. I see tracking, studying and improving the Human-AI relationship...and seeing if somebody should be promoted or not. An interesting take I've heard is, we will have a token/impact stat where if you spent a shitload of tokens to produce the same impact as somebody else who spent a lot less, you will be the prime candidate for layoffs and/or less pay. This is why I think AI code provenance will become a serious thing in the future.
  - jorl17 4mo ago
    FYI your link 404s. Seems like you copied the ellipsified version, so what we get is https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r

bronlund 4mo ago

Just what we need, a new kind of version control %]

yurlyCLOCLOCK 4mo ago

[dead]

mplanchard 4mo ago

There are so many early-stage startups also competing in this space right now. I’ve been on the interview circuit the past few weeks and talked to at least two. It’s going to be stiff competition for any of these tools to get well-established enough to be successful at a large scale. I can’t help but feel like it is all enabling a level of developer surveillance with which I am deeply uncomfortable, though.

jimbokun 4mo ago
Too many managers have nowhere near enough real work to do or actual business concerns to worry about, if they are spending all their time observing every keystroke of every developer working for them.
- skydhash 4mo ago
  They do have work to do, but micromanaging the developers is easier, so that’s what they do.

fridder 4mo ago

Well shoot, they beat me to the punch. I’d been circling around something like this, just not collaborative and obviously more thought out than my random experiments. Minus the collab portions I’m interested to see how it compares to jujutsu

csours 4mo ago

The work product is not the work.

skydhash 4mo ago

> Before agents, it was easier to believe that the ceremony of trading comments on snapshots was an effective way to collaborate on software, I’m highly skeptical of this claim. For any complicated feature, there’s always a design doc (or an RFC, or a wireframe) and that’s what people used for discussion. Discussion in a PR are mostly about whether to accept the code, reject the feature, or provide feedback about alternate implementations. It’s not for pair programming or directing design. Collaborating together in a research lab (brainstorm session) is not the same as asking feedback for a journal article (PR). What is described in the article is pair programming with extra steps.

ivanjermakov 4mo ago

Just a stream of thoughts: if git commits were a list of sequential primitive changes instead of diff snapshots, conflict resolution would be trivial in most cases. Not without cons of course: commit byte size, public WIP work and leaked secrets/unwanted edits.

pgedge_postgres 4mo ago
[flagged]

yaodub 4mo ago

[dead]

these 4mo ago

This seems like a great way to facilitate data gathering for improving LLMs coding performance. If previously you needed to take action 1, 2, 3 to go from state A to B, all you saw was the change from A, B. Now you see intermediates 1, 2, 3 and can train the models to skip straight to B with the added context of the intermediate states.

Xotic007 4mo ago

A commit is useful because you cleaned it up first. The messing around in between is where you try things and delete the dead ends and most of it is meant to be thrown away. Saving every change and every agent message keeps all that junk around instead.

OtherShrezzing 4mo ago

I don’t see the value proposition here. I’ve seen roughly this feature proposed by multiple companies, and absolutely none of the have given a convincing reason for the technology to exist.

teach 4mo ago
It's interesting that your experience/workflow is so much different than mine. This (claims to) solve a real problem that I deal with every day. My company is remote-only, and my coworkers mostly don't live anywhere near me. We see each other a couple of times a day on video chat, but communicate mostly during the day via Slack. We're also, uh, pretty far along the curve in adopting LLM agents to write good code for us. With a good model and the extremely good guardrails our of specific coding harness, LLMs are writing the majority of our code these days. So on a typical day I'll grab a ticket off the top of the stack, point my LLM at it, and start working with it to solve the problem. We'll make architectural decisions, etc, create a plan and execute the plan. The feature I shipped most recently cost $19 in tokens and the LLM was churning without my input for like half an hour at one point in the thick of it. MAYBE if there's a question I'm not sure which way is best I'll post a question in the team chat for my teammates to weigh in on. But a lot of my tickets are done completely autonomously. Then I'll open a PR, and post a link to the PR in Slack, requesting their review and my teammates will see the implementation for the first time. They sometimes have questions! Often, they'll post these questions in the Slack thread rather than as PR comments, because we're having a fast real-time conversation and GitHub comments aren't a great fit for that. These questions have answers in the chat log with the LLM that lives on my laptop, but I can't trivially show it to them. So I end up playing telephone with the LLM -- copying my teammate's questions from Slack to the LLM chat, pasting the answers back, etc The idea that my coworkers and the LLM and I can all be more easily a part of the same conversation appeals to me greatly None of this means the Zed team is on the right track. Nor that my team might work better in a different way! But we're too "successful" with this approach for there to be much institutional pressure to change our ways at the moment. Hope that helps.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  I’ve seen Zed promoted as an alternative to Slack or Teams and you describe how that can be true for development where the collaboration revolves around text files. Which makes more sense I think than describing it as an alternative for Git PRs.

ukprogrammer 4mo ago

With LLMs now being responsible for the physical typing of code and mundane plumbing tasks, this is a wise direction to go into Our human ability is not defined by our _absolute_ output, but, by the quality of the _delta_ applied to an engineering artefact Great engineers obsess over every keystroke With LLMs, a much smaller number of keystrokes can create a much larger and more positively impactful delta Every delta to the codebase can tell us some informational property about the behaviour of the system and storing that information WILL prove to be useful in the future

lijok 4mo ago

I swear a lot in my chats with Claude..

seanclayton 4mo ago

> What we're really after is simple: the conversation with the agent becomes the only conversation you need to have. This benefits those who make the machines you have conversations with and those that invest in them.

jmole 4mo ago

Google has been doing this for maybe a decade now with citc [0]. I don't know when Gemini is actually going to be taking advantage of this, but I do know that google has essentially a full history at "Ctrl-S" granularity, from ~every developer that works there, for at least 10 years now. If Gemini seems stupid nowadays, it's only because they're being stingy with compute allocation. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system)

shibel 4mo ago

A bit O/T but: > I have never been a big fan of pull requests. I guess this partly explains why Zed (still) lacks a PR review flow, let alone a coherent one, despite some interest [1]. Pretty much the only reason I’m still with JetBrains. [1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/34759 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/34759

jerf 4mo ago

I would be interested in a clear statement about how this scales. I've not used this workflow myself, but I've seen teams that did it. Whether they got huge benefits out of it I don't know, but I do know that watching them, I was not jealous of what I saw. If I make a change, and I run some tests that were passing a moment ago, and they fail, and the reason why they failed is that Bob hit "save" on his editor (or his editor autosaves) and he made a syntax error in a shared library, and this happened often... I would go insane. I cause enough problems for myself without other people's problems actively intruding at uncontrolled times into my tests. AI's code writing velocity makes this even worse, there's no way I can be simultaneously working on a code base while an AI agent is running around it doing something else. It feels like maybe there's a ghost of an idea here about how to get the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure I follow the throughline on it.

_pdp_ 4mo ago

What is apparent to me is that we are moving towards dark factories if the promise of LLMs writing most of the code is fulfilled. So this means that it is less about conversations and it is more about iteration.

abahgat 4mo ago

I can see how this is a great building block for what Zed is doing around collaboration. One thing I would really love to see, however, is a way to better attach code review comments to the specific version of code they were left on. I find it quite difficult to do with git and github, considering that commit hashes change every time one is forced to rebase (say, for example, to handle a merge conflict). Do you expect DeltaDB to help address this problem?

gnunicorn 4mo ago

I totally see where they are coming from, jitsu, too is making every change its own artifact. And it plays hard to the "faster shipping" that especially AI-driven teams are pushing hard, and find the review process to be the next big bottleneck now (as I just saw with my last client as well). There has also been a lot of discussion about the value of the peer review process recently, in in general. But I wonder if this isn't all going into the wrong direction. Quite honestly, even with the previous review and discussion system of (squashed) commits how often did you really use git blame and opened up the original PR discussion of that changed line that caused the bug? And how often did it help you beyond learning it was done by that rockstar developer who has left long ago? And that the discussion on that PR was a point in time and the code around it has evolves beyond that and it would need looking at another 10 PR discussion to get the entire context. What I am saying is that git (and before that Subversion and CVS) has a full history is so that it can resolve the latest state. Period. We made that commit ritual somewhat of a hallmark in putting more supposed meaning into recording ever more in that history. But we rarely stopped to check if that is all that useful. Recording even more, all the time, reminds me of these work group meetings that have minute records of every bike shedding meeting word said by everyone, that, honestly, no one ever looks at after the next meeting ever again. I don't think there is value in minute record keeping, it becomes too much noise that just makes it harder to parse. Now also adding all AI conversation and agent thinking to that tree? What's the value of that in like 3 months down the line? I don't see it.

jimbokun 4mo ago
I often find it helpful to see the entire commit and message leading to a specific line of code getting into its current state. That’s about it.

WorldMaker 4mo ago

This just sounds to me like "frequent auto-commits" with less trust in git. git can handle frequent auto-commits just fine. If you want to "rollup" frequent auto-commits into "cleaner" top-level commits but also keep all the point-in-time "conversation" of your auto-commits, then `git merge --no-ff` from time to time and use tools like `--first-parent` to focus in on "top-level" commits over "conversation" commits. The git backend already has a ton of "delta DB optimizations" (in git packs and other tools) and it's really just the git frontend that needs a little massaging (`--first-parent`, primarily) and the vast world of "subway-diagram-first/only" Git UIs that should have more "drill down" `--first-parent` counterparts simply because so many people find the subway diagrams ugly/confusing/distasteful.

tectec 4mo ago
This is what what I do. I never see the commits from branches but they are there if I need them. Even git blame can be setup to use --first-parent
- WorldMaker 4mo ago
  git bisect also works great with --first-parent. It will never stop surprising me how many people see the two-dimensional DAG of git as a bug to be avoided rather than a very useful feature (and then spend time reinventing things that git could do natively if they just used the second dimension of the git graph a bit more intentionally).

chrishill89 4mo ago

Many years ago I helped a friend with some draft that had to do with him finishing his doctorate. It ended up being maybe 50-60 between three of us and as fine grained as possible. That agents need something "beyond git" is lost on me but it keeps coming up. For one subject the tool doesn't matter -- in fact it can be obtuse like git or bash and it's fine because agents will handle it. Then for another thing the story is opposite.

softwareseko 4mo ago
The interesting question is whether agents actually benefit from finer-grained history or whether they're better served by semantic checkpoints – "this works, this doesn't" rather than line-by-line diffs. Git wasn't designed for that, but neither is anything else yet.
- chrishill89 4mo ago
  If works/doesn't are semantic checkpoints, then I use that every day for myself with Git notes.

wxw 4mo ago

Agents can certainly use a new substrate as they can eat dense information quickly. Not convinced DeltaDB is useful for humans directly but assume new and interesting interfaces can arise from the abstractions it provides. Agree that PRs/snapshots is an antiquated way of sharing information.

tengbretson 4mo ago

This is going to have so many api keys stored in it.

commentsaregood 4mo ago
Likewise, what happens if someone does a npm install or slap a venv or some other thing like that, before adding the equivalent of a gitignore for these things? Did you then just flood two times 200 MB worth of changes into the tracker? What if I just simply build in golang to a subfolder early on, is that v0.0.1 stuck there until someone decides to do the second layer of githistory inspection? Perhaps not. But I'm not going to be the guy training the Team on how not to do it. They have shaky grasp of the full set of standards for PR's as is.

flerchin 4mo ago

If that works for someone, great. I would never pay for it, and would run not walk away from any shop that asked me to use it. The mess in-between working software is not something I care to have version controlled.

Lindby 4mo ago

All the things in between my commits is a messy soup. Looking there is not useful to anyone. I rewrite my history with git rebase so each commit is small and atomic. The story I create with my commits is what explains why things are as they are, it doesn't matter if it's the true chronological story on how it actually happened. I agree with the author that reviewing pull requests is too late. The problem with pull request is that they make it hard to review individual commits since they are geared towards reviewing the result of an entire branch at once. But the answer is not to share all the noise, it should be to encourage small atomic commits so you can review the early work before the entire feature/fix is complete.

isityettime 4mo ago
> The problem with pull request is that they make it hard to review individual commits since they are geared towards reviewing the result of an entire branch at once. But the answer is not to share all the noise, it should be to encourage small atomic commits so you can review the early work before the entire feature/fix is complete. Isn't that just a GitHub problem, as opposed to Phabricator, Gerrit, etc.?
- danpalmer 4mo ago
  It is, but I think it's hard to explain to folks who have only used the Git/GitHub model – I know, I've been that person not really getting it. I think what's missed is two things: - In the Phabricator/Gerrit model you typically end up with changes that are smaller than a PR, but bigger than a commit. - You lose some history, or track it in a different way. With a PR you might add code to address comments in a new commit on the end, but with Phabricator/Gerrit you don't. If you already aggressively rebase in Git to absorb changes into commits that they make sense to go in, this won't be much of a change, and some systems give you views on the history happening within each change. But if you expect to see everything like that in the Git history, you may not get that, but the workflow changes around it and that's ok. I think both types of review are in a local maxima, where you lose some things to move to the other type, and it was fear of losing those from my workflow that made me resist the change a bit. When you get there though, you realise it's just not a problem.

sangeeth96 4mo ago

This is what I’ve been thinking of ever since coming across Ramp’s agent[1] and other orgs trying to build their own remote dev envs with agents at the center. Makes so much more sense in this kind of a dev spree to not wait for a PR. Because all actors end up repeating the same thing with their own agents which can be totally avoided. Conversations and code to jump in and out of, to collaborate etc seems like the right way to go. Excited to see what Zed team comes up with! :) [1]: https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-agent https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-a...

thom 4mo ago

A software team’s job is to collaboratively learn an effective model for operating in a domain. They express that model and those learnings in code, tests and associated documentation. So on the one hand I wholeheartedly agree that pull requests and code reviews fatally undermine this process, but immediately recoil that we’re creating yet more secondary processes and artefacts to distract ourselves. This stuff should all be evident from your codebase. It’s not an extra thing. It’s not a bunch of commit messages or ADRs. If your codebase isn’t entirely self explanatory (both the what and the why) to both humans and AIs you’ve failed and will spend your whole life creating more and more process to manage that failure.

jimbokun 4mo ago
Cheap branching for features and experiments, ability to rollback specific commits quickly, reading the commit message for the last time a line of code changed, are all incredibly important and made possible by distributed version control systems. The current state of the code is not sufficient for modern software development.
- thom 4mo ago
  At least we agree “modern software development” is the root cause.

cbovis 4mo ago

The approach sounds interesting but perhaps still too focused on current development paradigms. Where shared collaboration I think becomes much more interesting is when agents start behaving like a member of your team. Not someone you delegate to, but someone that actively seeks out conversations and interacts with others as though they're just another member of the team. You shouldn't be aware that version control is happening behind the scenes, you're just interacting with a persistent persona through Slack/teams/notion/figma/linear/etc with something that's logging issues, fixing bugs, writing PRDs, designing mockups, etc. The only point at which you know there's version control is when you're asked to review something before it's integrated.

opem 4mo ago

> DeltaDB captures every operation in between and gives each one a stable identity Gives jj vibes, interesting!

nchmy 4mo ago
especially when using Watchman https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/config/#watchman https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/config/#watchman

messh 4mo ago

Technically, this is true

fHr 4mo ago

Lmao an ad

bison_fan 4mo ago

Like others, I really like Zed as a text editor. I was a Sublime user before but I switched to Zed because it was even faster and cleaner than Sublime. The multi-buffer editing is a nice step up of multi-cursor editing. I just want a fast text editor with a few conveniences for development. I don't care about any of the collaboration or AI tools that they are working on and I hope that these efforts don't detract from the text editor. At the very least I hope I can hide these features in the UI and continue to ignore them. I also hope that these features don't lead to a bloated, sluggish text editor like VSCode and IntelliJ.

amichayg 4mo ago

This seems like such a weird article. Software is made at build time, which is usually due to a cicd process in place, which is dependent on committing code. It works. There’s no magical way of avoiding the idea that code usually exists in a commit someplace without proper justification.

gib444 4mo ago

Next up: a kit to wire up a developer's brain activity direct to the AI companies, so not a single part of their thought process remains in control of the developer, in order to feed the models. You must brainsignalmaxx 8 hours a day or be fired. Your boss will also demand that you narrate your thought process 8 hours a day. Speakmaxxing will be required to keep your job. There will be a "silence" wall of shame for the non-compliers.

overtomanu 4mo ago
It is almost happening in a different way, for automating physical labor, some companies are collecting data by making people wear camera on their heads The Indian workers training AI robots to take their jobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQoPoLUJWic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQoPoLUJWic

overgard 4mo ago

I'd have to see the implementation in the editor to really know if I'd want it or not, but my initial impression is that I don't think it's something I would use. I've worked on a couple of products with in-editor collaboration built in (not text editors, but, content creation tools). For the most part collaboration just wasn't something users wanted that much. The problem was that the in-editor collaboration was only really useful for things that were 100% on the web, it never caught on with the more file-centric workflows. It works in something like Google Docs because it's natural that your data is in the cloud there, but for something that lives on your filesystem it feels like it takes extra steps that most people aren't going to be willing to do (especially if they have to use an editor different from their normal one)

jimbokun 4mo ago
I guess it would be perfect for pair programming in a remote work environment.

BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago

Sounds like "google docs with code formatting". I didn't see anything in there about branching which seems like a big thing not to have.

ericyd 4mo ago

Where are these developers who are willing to talk to you about your code and hash out ideas? Everyone I’ve ever worked with is always too busy, too many other priorities. Sounds nice though. Unrelated: I started using Zed a few weeks ago and really love it, it is everything it promises to be.

vitally3643 4mo ago

Like most/all engineers (I assume), I have entire notebooks that are filled front to back and in the margins with scratch. Random calculations and notes, equations running into each other, any piece of information that was too fleeting to stay in my head or overspill from an already full working memory. Most engineers I know keep such notebooks when they're full, because it's kind of neat to open a random page and see a brain dump scrawled out. Nobody has ever looked at another engineer's scratch notes and drawn useful insight. Frankly, I wouldn't even want to other than for novelty.

coneonthefloor 4mo ago

Zed are doing a great job at making the exact things developers don’t want. It’s clear that their focus is on raising funding rather than making a great text editor.

jumploops 4mo ago

> the conversation that generates the code is becoming the true source of our software This is close, but not quite spot on. I've found that I'll test more ideas _with code_ using agentic tools, then before, leading to an excess of conversation history that is no longer representative of the final outcome. A simple example I encountered recently was dealing with performance issues on an iOS application (I haven't written mobile code since before Swift..). If you viewed the chat, you'd dive down a diverging path of rabbit holes, few of which were relevant to the final outcome[0]. To solve this in my own work, I've started relying on "context hierarchy" - which is essentially live documentation that lives next to the source files (using markdown). This approach avoids comments being removed erroneously, and helps codify the intent behind the code and how it relates to the overall architecture. As an added bonus, it also forces the LLM to edit _two_ things instead of just one (which might actually be the biggest benefit). My workflow is currently maintained via some repo level scripts and AGENTS.md prompts, but I've tried to pull it out into a skill for others to use[1]. Candidly, I'm not sure the skill is the best approach yet, as the agent can sometimes get too focused on the "skill" as a separate tool rather than a core part of the workflow. I'm currently exploring other options here (repo bootstrap, side-loaded subagents, hooks, etc.) [0]For more context, I was using a 3rd party library and trying to make it performant during a streaming operation, by removing the SwiftUI view layer (LazyVStack) and implementing a custom rendering path with UIViewController. The final solution ended up as a custom implementation of the 3rd party library, and moving back to LazyVStack. [1]https://github.com/jumploops/chum https://github.com/jumploops/chum

jchw 4mo ago

> Software is made between commits Yes. > DeltaDB captures every operation in between [each commit] No. First of all, that feels intrusive. I would also prefer to not have a screen recorder that is running 24/7 while I work. Yes, I suppose there's nothing wrong with having my mistakes on display, but also, if I'm doing my job, all of the value I produce is captured by the commit, and it just feels significantly less intrusive that way. Second of all, I use many different tools, and I don't really want to have to have all of them be integrated into some weird DB. What's the point of capturing everything if randomly it has to go "some external process did something"? Yes I do like that Zed can integrate so many things but that doesn't mean I will use everything integrated into Zed. Last I checked if you use Claude Code in Zed via ACP you can't even rewind and edit old messages. Finally, personally, I think that we've already lost the plot with commits. It's clear to me that most people are just doing some arbitrary unbounded set of changes then running git commit, then the changeset is reviewed as one giant blob, and then those commits get squashed together. It isn't the end of the world, but having nice hand-crafted commits is amazing. If you've ever ran `git blame` on a project that enforces this, you will understand exactly what I am talking about. Doing stuff like DeltaDB is just going to re-enforce and solidify the practice of slopping together commits. Wonder what's going on? Now you can voyeuristically replay it and view the conversation the user had with LLMs... And that last point is as interesting as it is frustrating. You couldn't convince someone to write documentation for their changes and the motivation behind those changes just because it's good engineering practice that helps your teammates, but everyone will happily explain it to an LLM. Sure that is in large part because it's needed for the LLM to do the work for them, but it is interesting how much work we will do to please the LLMs that we would not have done before. Suddenly a bunch of weird undocumented things are documented. In CLAUDE.md.

soulbadguy 4mo ago

[dead]

afzalive 4mo ago

Could you just give me reference peeking without opening a full tab?

ins199 4mo ago

[flagged]

commentsaregood 4mo ago

I spent the entire article thinking > this is what comments are for > that is usually unnecessary, but if it were, a comment would fulfill it > I literally solved this problem with a comment yesterday > if the AI needs to know that, I'd explicitly ask it to put it in a skill or AGENTS.md. if a human needs it, I'd put it in a comment > this is overengineering a purpose comments already fulfill I dont want a second set of commit changes and a freaking schema that tracks me Ctrl+Z and Shift+Ctrl+Z'ing a bunch just to accomplish what comments already do, wtf.

UndyingHorse 4mo ago
someone with your nickname would say :)

nicechianti 4mo ago

[dead]

j16sdiz 4mo ago

That recording capture code, but not intent and thought. The only alternative to PR review is pair programming - where you can discuss with your peer in real time, discuss the design, asking questions or clarifications. Without real time communication, those small delta are pure noise.

alok-g 4mo ago

This is something I have been looking for. I agree with a lot of comments here saying that the "conversation that generates the code" is often not meaningful once the code is there. It is however important to me as development history. Commit messages, meanwhile, are not the right places to hold this conversation. As of now: 1. I save the conversations as "Prompt ###-XX.md" files into a 'completed prompts' folder within the repository and cite "Prompt ###" in the commit message. 2. I explicitly have the coding agent explain the decisions from the conversations in the generated code/artifacts.

boomlinde 4mo ago

So this is is intended to smooth over the poor work, bad commit hygiene and bad commit messages of "agents", presumably not meaning just any agent but LLM-based ones specifically. I can already see the change. What I need to know is why, not how exactly. It should be clear from a commit message why a change was made. If it's not, that problem should be addressed during review. I shouldn't have to watch a recap of your conversation with a virtual idiot to understand your commit. If the tools you use to generate code can't be coaxed into producing that level of quality, or if you don't understand the output of your generative tools to the extent that you can describe for someone else why they made a particular change, you have a tooling and competency problem. If further tooling can solve these problems, then I'm all for it, but the idea here seems to be to not solve that problem, but to burden anyone interrogating the history of a repository with also scrolling through chat histories so that virtual idiots can keep shitting out low-quality changes and so that operators can keep accepting those changes as-is without thinking too much about why. I guess it doesn't help that tools like GitHub don't really care about commit messages. You can't even comment directly on commit messages during review.

protocolture 4mo ago

The door is open when it isnt shut.

brainless 4mo ago

I agree with the core idea. I am building a coding agent for non-engineers on small/local LLMs only. Commits are great but for an agent that works for the non-engineers (what I am building), commits cannot be represent the chain of thought since that chain has happened before - in English and has lots of debate/discussion with agents. Zed is focused on engineers. I am focused on everyone else but I came to similar conclusions since my situation is tighter. Software has to be defined by humans, then codified (in development) by agents and then tested by humans. Deployment, rollbacks, etc. also has to come into the scene. I have been breaking down the conversation into agents playing roles like PO, PM, Architect, etc. Then taking outputs from those into structured inputs for Rust engineer, Typescript engineer and so on. It is all WIP but holding on to this chain of "chats" is key in my opinion. That is where the software is made. https://github.com/brainless/nocodo https://github.com/brainless/nocodo

distalx 4mo ago

[dead]

coldtea 4mo ago

No, software is made in the choice of what to keep in the final commit.

Zanfa 4mo ago

This seems exactly backwards. Most commits should not exist, because the majority of people can't already help themselves from committing "wip" "fix lint", let alone anything more granular.

hackermanai 4mo ago

I think this is a cool approach, like a giant undo stack.

plq 4mo ago

With Gerrit, you have the patch that lands on master and then you have the stages that that patch went through to get to that point, reviews on older versions of the patch, etc. all recorded in the web interface. So maybe just switch to a code review tool and use its interface to converse with the bots?

uwagar 4mo ago

i keep comitting when i make a change. who cares. im solo dev. svn. git no thanks.

bicepjai 4mo ago

I love the title, there was another post that I thought was clever “If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort”

literallyroy 4mo ago

I think this makes a lot of sense in the context of Zed’s multiplayer editing. Maybe that works well for a small team working on a single product, but that doesn’t seem like it’d scale super well. I loved tight collaboration long ago on online notepads despite constantly breaking stuff for each person…