8 ms·

Zed DeltaDB

529 points by ahamez 2mo ago

g42gregory 2mo ago
Looks like a great feature/product/functionality. I hope that Zed editor will make it work with LLMs/agents that run in the terminal, not just the Zen Agent itself. Is it even possible? I use OMP.sh agent running in Zed terminal.
- randomblock1 2mo ago
  It supports anything with ACP. So it can actually run Codex and Claude Code, not just the Zed Agent. Looks like omp supports ACP, so all you have to do is specify a Custom Agent in Zed and it should just work. https://omp.sh/docs/acp https://omp.sh/docs/acp https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents
  - ok_dad 2mo ago
    This is the killer Zed feature, IMO, that they support almost any agent via extensions. I deleted Cursor but still use the agent via Zed because it’s a lot nicer experience, Zed never had popups telling me Grok is half off. I also use OpenRouter and Zed.dev with it, that’s three providers out of dozens that it supports.
    - vehemenz 2mo ago
      Exactly. The more competitive the space is, the more important it is that products purposefully support 3rd-party providers. Now that people are increasingly switching from Anthropic/OpenAI for inference reseellers and on-prem compute, transparency and portability will be the new values, not being slightly better than the next agent or model.
    - stusmall 2mo ago
      Even more than supporting any agent that support almost anything period. They seem to take the default approach of using open community standards first when adding new features. By investing very heavily in LSP, ACP, DAP, tree-sitter etc it makes it easy for Zed to integrate with tons of different workflows, language, ecosystems etc quickly and easily. Its just good engineering and I love to see it.
  - fireant 2mo ago
    Using OMP through ACP inside Zed is drastically worse experience than just running OMP inside Zed terminal. The ACP UI is dreadful and I had bunch of crashes even for first party Codex support.
    - g42gregory 2mo ago
      Yeah, I saw the same degradation. I will try the terminal threads that a poster below has mentioned. It sounds very interesting.
- joemccall86 2mo ago
  I use this every day — https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads
  - g42gregory 2mo ago
    This looks very promising.
imagetic 2mo ago
I have fallen in love with Zed.
NoDodgeQuestion 2mo ago
Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL. Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system?
- manmal 2mo ago
  Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex. For when I want to be near the code, I prefer it now over TUIs or the Codex app. It feels much more immediate that way. Sticking to the basics will kill them IMO. They have been pitching themselves as agent-native for a while btw. And the workflow they are describing in the post sounds amazing, I‘ve been wishing for that. It‘s orthogonal to CVS, no? You can still make PRs. But, crucially, you can loop people in early on, when it matters the most.
  - latchkey 2mo ago
    > Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex. you must not use it much. try pasting in an image, quitting zed and restarting (ie: upgrading the app). it shows you the base64 encoded data instead of just showing the image. heck, it doesn't even show you the image when you paste it in. it just shows the filename.
    - manmal 2mo ago
      I use it constantly but haven’t felt the need to paste an image yet. I guess I‘m using pi and the Codex app more for that.
      - latchkey 2mo ago
        sorry, i didn't mean a quantity of time, i meant depth of usage.
    - DangitBobby 2mo ago
teaearlgraycold 2mo ago
This is a big unsolved dev tooling problem. Glad someone competent is working on it.
- cute_boi 2mo ago
  Yes, but it saps away the time that could be used to improve zed.
  - whalesalad 2mo ago
    zed is open source, you are free to improve it on your own
    - cute_boi 2mo ago
      Yes, it is open source, and I am not saying they should not do it. Chromium is also open source, but if they added too much nonsensical AI functionality, I would be upset. I am free to improve it on my own, but that does not mean I cannot express how I feel. I have not gone to the Zed repository and created an issue telling them to stop developing DeltaDB because it takes away the maintainers’ time.
  - skhameneh 2mo ago
    Or it’s actively used to improve Zed faster (or more efficiently).
  - senderista 2mo ago
    I wonder if a large enough user community could fork zed and actually make progress on the bugs that matter?
  - teaearlgraycold 2mo ago
    Well this is going to be integrated into Zed. It’s an improvement by definition.
esafak 2mo ago
Basically what IntelliJ calls local history. It is a feature that has saved my bacon. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html
- lemonberry 2mo ago
  Ooooh, this is cool. I was unaware of this. Thanks for the link.
- jasonlotito 2mo ago
  Yes, I concur. Local History is wonderful; nice to see Zed getting its own version.
- vulkoingim 2mo ago
  Similar, but not as polished, also exists in VSCode and derivatives, named the same way. Definitely saved me a few times as well.
  - dunham 2mo ago
    This saved me from accidental resets in the past. I learned it existed because the files were showing up in mdfind
pknopf 2mo ago
A non-existent problem that nobody asked to solve...
- lightbendover 2mo ago
  VCs count as people unfortunately.
- TacticalCoder 2mo ago
  They say that "history between commits" matters. If it's really so for some people, a case could be made that their problems can already be half-solved by changing the granularity of their commits: just commit more often.
  - eviks 2mo ago
    What about the other half?
- insane_dreamer 2mo ago
  I disagree. JetBrains PyCharm has a similar "local history" feature that solves this very real and existing problem and has saved my ass more than once when accidentally overwriting changes before committing or fubar'ing a git reset.
- anon7000 2mo ago
  I think that: 1. Commits are really just manual checkpoints while you’re working. Why not automatically checkpoint everything so you can actually go back to an older implementation without needing to remember to commit it? 2. Agentic workflows are so deeply single player. It’s very annoying, I want to collaborate with my team with agents, not review the output of one dev’s agent which they’ll just shove back into their existing agent.
docheinestages 2mo ago
Sounds like a side-effect of being VC-backed. Like what the ex GitHub CEO went on to build (Entire). Unnecessary.
- bastardoperator 2mo ago
  It also feels like his former company could implement his new company in a couple of weeks if they choose to.
visiondude 2mo ago
i think a system that uses git and file system artifacts (txt/md/xml files whatever preference) is much better. eng teams need to define their artifacts, eg plan file, reqs etc whatever is needed and important to that team. the agent convo itself doesn’t add much value IMO and adds unnecessary bloat.
adastra22 2mo ago
Is this closed source?
m3kw9 2mo ago
It should work with github inbetween commits, that i may use. Right now I'm using staging as an in bewteen in a dangerous way.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
- spockz 2mo ago
  This local history has saved my bacon on occasion. E.g. when I went too long without committing and something silly overwrote the file I was working on. Or because I did something silly with git. Then it is nice that there is still an independent backup elsewhere with different failure modes.
  - exe34 2mo ago
    Like a branch on the server?
    - spockz 2mo ago
      That would still be in git. The local history in IntelliJ works independently of any VCS. Also I’ve had formatters botch files including changes I hadn’t committed yet. For that the local edit history is also useful.
      - exe34 2mo ago
        Or add it to git? What's wrong with git?
        spockz 2mo ago
        The whole point is that sometimes I or the build system performs an action that it cannot reverse. This happens in between commits as I’m not in the habit of committing after every few keystrokes.
drdexebtjl 2mo ago
This makes me uncomfortable. Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I think this just gives micro-managers the data they need to micro-manage you. It invites people to scrutinize the process, instead of the results. Not once have I wished to review a colleague’s conversation with an AI. I want to review finished work. I look at this and I can only imagine layoffs being justified with “bad prompt quality”. An incident retrospective broadcasting your agent conversations to the entire company, with people speculating where you should have put the “make no mistakes”. It’s a shame, really, because I like Zed as an editor, but I can’t bring myself to support them if this is the direction they’re choosing.
- 4lx87 2mo ago
  The way I’m seeing AI used by organizations is to produce process slop: tickets, summaries, docs, etc. rather than drive process change and optimization, or enable individuals to be more effective within the organization.
  - andersonpico 2mo ago
    this is the perfect description of how I've seen AI used in most organizations
- a2800276 2mo ago
  It's also delusional to think you can find that one edit that was really useful but you forgot to commit but then deleted in another giant commit. As anyone who's ever tried to split a days worth of work apart with `git add -p` is well aware. It may be feasible with a million agents, but they could remember what they typed three hours ago anyhow.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- mdotmertens 2mo ago
  Not only this. I'm also shuddering at the thought of how much more noise this adds which can only be filtered through LLMs.
Lucasoato 2mo ago
What problem does this product solve?
- gpm 2mo ago
  Collaborative (as in simultaneous multiplayer) editing I think, which has been Zed's mission since before LLMs were a thing... See https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb but also https://zed.dev/blog/crdts https://zed.dev/blog/crdts from years ago.
xlii 2mo ago
I start to sound like a Jujutsu fanboy but... Jujutsu already does this. I had agent screwing up changeset over couple hour long session and it took one shell command to split on pieces with longer pause. The only downside is that because of Jujutsu snapshots it can't be used inside sandbox (since all jj commands are mutating)
- ibejoeb 2mo ago
  Jujutsu is great, but it does not do this. It has no knowledge of agent sessions.
  - Valodim 2mo ago
    You still get snapshots of the working tree every time an agent calls a jj command, including reading ones. This is regular for me that I'm not worried to lose any intermediate state.
  - ithkuil 2mo ago
    would it make sense to add jj snapshotting commands in agent hooks?
- codethief 2mo ago
  > The only downside is that because of Jujutsu snapshots it can't be used inside sandbox (since all jj commands are mutating) I guess it depends? You could certainly start with another repo clone that's separate from the one you work on yourself?
manzu 2mo ago
this looks like jetbrains "local changes" but globally synced. "for the agents" mights scare people who jump to think about micromanagers, but these people mostly hide or fake work. even micromanagers will eventually give you an agent to use so it won't matter what is in the change log, what matters is speed+quality. and since you can iterate from any branch you have inginite try and retry possibilities
yza 2mo ago
Why develop this when the core editor is almost unusable? On Linux wayland, copypaste is broken, the file manager is laggy and snippets do not trigger before the heavy hint logic is done. This is just on top of my head, the list is long
- throwatdem12311 2mo ago
  Ha if you thought it was laggy try it on software accelerated graphics.
- Pavilion2095 2mo ago
  Because it's not broken, the issues you're describing are far from universal. Also, fixing them won't bring any money.
- dylanz 2mo ago
  I started using Zed a couple weeks ago and immediately had issues with copy/paste/buffer on an M1 Mac. I tried a few suggested fixes and they didn't work.
- Petersipoi 2mo ago
  > when the core editor is almost unusable Shit, as someone who uses Zed everyday, I didn't realize what I am using is unusable.
  - yza 2mo ago
    I guess we have slightly different standards and/or use cases
- mosburger 2mo ago
  I use it as a daily driver with few if any problems, but I'm on macOS. Maybe their Linux support is particularly crappy?
  - f311a 2mo ago
    There are a lot of subtle bugs. I'm on macOS too, but perhaps my workflow is unusual? Every time I open it, I find small bugs. There are so many features that it's hard to maintain them, I guess. For example, a lot of disable buttons do not actually disable stuff. They just hide it from the UI.
sanex 2mo ago
I really don't want management critiquing when I swear at Claude, thanks.
mynti 2mo ago
This feels very useful for training agents but almost completely useless to humans? Do I really want to go back to every change I made? Whatuse would that be?
- usef- 2mo ago
  Jetbrains has had a "local history" feature for many years that had this, and I only use it occasionally but it feels pretty essential now. I once accidentally wiped uncomimted work in the terminal, and brought up Local History to restore it in a click. Or more casually, I'm struggling with a CSS design: what did it look like at 3pm? It's an effortless escape or experimentation valve between commits. (It's also why you never need to manually save a file in jetbrains. It just assumes you want to save, because you can always safely go back if needed. Editors with manual saving feel cumbersome now)
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
systemvoltage 2mo ago
Snapshots have an intention behind them as a chunk that the programmer thought of. It has infinite flexibility depending on the programmer/team. IMO they are a necessary feature, but the article considers it a bug. It’s an explicit and deliberate chunking of code writing process which is what you want in a chaotic “collaborative” environment. The system doesn’t get to decide but you decide when to commit.
tetris11 2mo ago
I had the great pleasure/misfortune of being forced to work with LaminDB, and I can tell you folks; data provenance isn't going away -- it will be used to train the very AI models snapping at our heels
CharlesW 2mo ago
So is this basically Beads + Dolt? This isn’t to diminish it, it’d be great if this ends up being a less “vibe code-y” alternative to those.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  If not, beads + dolt seems like it would be pretty great.
- pwillia7 2mo ago
  that was my first question too. Here's hoping
smy20011 2mo ago
You can simulate this by having a jj repo with file system watches.
lrae 2mo ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492533 (June 11th, 225 comments) Is it available now? Still seems to be a waitlist?
iepathos 2mo ago
[flagged]
javierhonduco 2mo ago
I really love Zed and I want them to really succeed. Unfortunately it seems that they are swamped with various things and the issue tracker is not a priority for the team, which fair enough. OSS is a gift and I take it as such. Wild proposal but if someone is willing to start a "user advocate" contributor, I'll be happy to donate monthly so user requests can be taken a look at :)
umvi 2mo ago
Hmm, yeah before "DeltaDB" I have a big list of things I would rather they develop/fix: - Vertical activity bar (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecomment-4871602351 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecommen... - rejected because it "doesn’t match our design vision for Zed") This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views. - Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory - Don't freeze when resuming from suspension (I suspect this is GPU-driver related on linux) forcing me to `killall zed-editor`
- stusmall 2mo ago
  > Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory I don't think you can put this on Zed. An unprivileged userspace application, even if coded poorly, shouldn't crash the machine.
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    > An unprivileged userspace application, even if coded poorly, shouldn't crash the machine. How would you prevent that? It can write until root disk is full, can take all your memory, saturate your CPU and a whole bunch of other stuff we (users) like to be able to do for the things that need them. Unless you're suggesting something like Qubes or similar UX?
    - itishappy 2mo ago
      Disk, memory, and CPU limits? The app should crash, not the kernel.
      - embedding-shape 2mo ago
        Right, my point being that it's should be up to the user to decide, because most of the times I run programs, I actually want them to be able to gobble up GB of disk, RAM and fully make use of my CPU. That's why I bought the hardware I have :)
guess__who 2mo ago
[flagged]
- jackling 2mo ago
  I don't understand, what do you mean by this?
jackling 2mo ago
I really do like Zed, it's snappier than VS code and with pretty good vim emulation. Even through SSH, the native UI allows for no network latency, compared to something like vim+terminal. Like many other posters, I do feel like the core editor is getting worse. Some issues I've encountered recently at work: - Routinely encounter bugs with the python language server, it's particularly slow when compared to using VSCode. All that snappiest disappears when finding symbols after the '.' is considerably slower than my typing speed. - I found similar issues with C++ code bases. - It's also so hard to debug when something goes wrong. I was trying to find out why pyright keep spinning on startup, but the "LSP logs" never show anything. - Connecting via SSH always opens the repo in restricted mode, even though I check the "Trust all projects in" checkbox. Never happened before. - Debugger UI is a mess. Make a run, stop the run, edit the task.json, try running again, and 2 tasks show up. One for the old and one for the new. -- I stuck with it because I really do like the UI, the performance, and initially it seemed to be an improvement from VS Code for my workflows, but lately I've been moving back to code as it seems more stable. I don't really use agent features, so I don't think I'm the target customer for this or other priority Zed features. I do see the usefulness of something like this, I'm interested to see if the new agentic style of programming will result in the "code" part of editors becoming second class (for the better) and will allow for more rapid development. Although I'm not looking forward to read my coworker's "threads" of how a feature was made, I have a feeling that it will be more difficult to read than the raw code, as from my experience, LLMs don't really employ terse and effective communication (might not be entirely fair, I found ChatGPT /study mode pretty good.) -- Anyone know of a good replacement editor that might meet my usecase? I'm really a batteries included type of developer.
- nxc18 2mo ago
  Yeah apparently Zed was engineered for speed but I find it very slow in general, especially on startup. VS Code can slow down as you add functionality, but Zed often just doesn’t have that functionality at all. So the proper comparison is “VS Code minus all extension-provided features” which is actually pretty fast.
  - senderista 2mo ago
quacker 2mo ago
This landing page is not good. It's mired in out-of-context jargon and implementation detail. (What does "virtualize the worktree" mean? Git already has "effectively free" branching. What does branching "mid-run" mean? How does a teammate "join while the work is happening"? What/where are they joining?). What actually is it and what value do I get out of it? Reading the linked blog posts: It's a layer on top of git for CRDT-based collaborative editing that captures addressable code deltas + agent conversations. I could have real-time collaborative humans + agents development and can resume any agent conversation from any point in history, because it is all stored (powered by DeltaDB). I guess? I actually might want this, but wouldn't know it from the landing page.
- gcr 2mo ago
  I think this is an evolution of Zed’s “multiplayer” CRDT features from a few years back, but with some new agent affordances.
tamimio 2mo ago
I have been using zed for almost 2ish years now, great overall, but last month when I tried ACP with opencode and even omp, it gave me many issues that it was easier just to use the terminal directly, oh, and I couldn’t select the model that time not sure if it’s fixed now.
ralusek 2mo ago
Can maybe think of one time in the last 10 years that I would have wanted this. Its only purpose is for training LLMs
kuil009 2mo ago
[dead]
hollowturtle 2mo ago
> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it A total nightmare and imo every dev should push back using this stuff. You'd otherwise have management brag about you not being a good communicator with the ai agent, the same management that have no idea how to steer these tools. I really like Zed the editor, I'm not sure I like the path they getting into
- giancarlostoro 2mo ago
  These sort of paper trails are for developers not management though, does your manager open all your commits and start commenting on them? If so, maybe apply somewhere else.
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Management nowadays are for sure playing with surveillance software against their workers. Let's please not think otherwise, it's one of the main value adds that LLM companies are selling to businesses; about the ease of which you can collect metrics on employees after feeding whatever into an LLM. The neat thing is that they thing decide to make your life miserable based on their made up findings!
throwatdem12311 2mo ago
Please just make a good editor and stop getting distracted by AI nonsense.
- anon7000 2mo ago
  1. There is not much money in making a good editor. 2. There is money in AI products, and a huge demand for solid AI workflows from many developers. Lack of AI tooling is absolutely a dealbreaker for many developers, whether you like it or not. 3. The core primitive here is just as much about enabling live collaboration which has been on Zed’s roadmap for many years before agents took over the industry.
  - hollowturtle 2mo ago
    I would pay the cost of a license for a good editor. I did with sublime+sublime merge. I did with Intellij. I did many times
    - throwatdem12311 2mo ago
      The value you get for a sublime text+merge is so much higher than whatever you’d get by paying for an equivalent cost of a subscription to whatever Zed is selling to monetize their editor. Can’t believe people hem and haw about paying for a license for them. $168 is nothing. That’s less than a half a day of salary for me and the amount of time saved using them easily adds up to multiples of that.
  - throwatdem12311 2mo ago
    (1) If you wanted to make money don’t make an editor. And yet, somehow Sublime Text survives.. (2) hence why I call them “distractions”. And yet Sublime Text hasn’t gotten greedy.. (3) Nobody cares about the collaborative features either. You’ll pry Sublime Text from my cold dead hands. I tried Zed and it really was close but ever since they got greedy the editor has gone to crap. So for now I will continue to happily renew my Subl license every few years. For less than what it would cost for an ongoing subscription to Zed’s AI plans to “support them”.
prinny_ 2mo ago
I guess an interesting use case for this would be to pinpoint exactly which change was made by who in cases where multiple people / agents work on the same code at the same time. The Zed team is working on two features that are probably going to be built on top of DeltaDB: async collaboration and instant sharing. Instant sharing used to be talked about more in the past and it's still the feature I am most eager to see.
sarreph 2mo ago
A lot of the copy on this page feels like the kind of copy an AI would produce. But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy so I don’t want to accuse them of doing that. Marketing aside, this is the kind of thing (advancements in VCSes) that I’d usually be excited about, but which I’m less excited about coming from Zed because it makes me start to worry that they’re going to continue focussing less on the core editor experience. I love Zed and I hope that it doesn’t start to go flakey.
- dilap 2mo ago
  You're too kind. It's obviously AI copy, and a huge negative signal (to me, anyway).
  - sarreph 2mo ago
    I'm always hesitant to assert something is definitely AI copy because everyone's tone of voice is different. I'm also starting to wonder how much real, human-made copy is mimicking AI-created copy that has been filling marketing pages as of late. When people make marketing websites, they often riff and rip off other websites' (à la "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[0]) design ideas and language -- I wouldn't be surprised if there are humans now inadvertently adopting LLM's writing style like that. [0] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#:~:text=Good%20artists%20copy%3B%20great%20artists%20steal. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#:~:text=Good%20arti...
    - senderista 2mo ago
      Why do you think an AI-focused company would hesitate to put AI-generated copy on their website?
      - sarreph 2mo ago
        Hah :) In my opinion / experience, AI copy is a generally more cumbersome to read and process. So I would assume a company at Series B stage would have a human (with marketing guidelines) go over the language used on a one-pager to announce a new product. But -- evidently -- anyone's guess!
joshdavham 2mo ago
I’m curious, are many people using Zed as their daily driver in their professional work? (Not just in side projects)
- Sha1rholder 2mo ago
  I do but I do regret.
SignalM 2mo ago
Sounds a lot like JJ.. could just make JJ a first class citizen in zed and skip the hard part.. plus it’s git compatible
mococa 2mo ago
Nice, how about fix bugs?
chermi 2mo ago
I kind of do the conversation tracing thing already. Every change is attributed by Claude code session id (and timestamped obviously), then I have a jq based tool over cc session jsons that I save indefinitely. I've found it very important to be loud about what I actually wrote vs what the llm wrote. Personal use solo repo. I don't know id want people seeing my cc sessions lol.
- gcr 2mo ago
  For others considering this, note that Claude removes session history files from ~/.claude after 30 days
steve_taylor 2mo ago
It'll take more than a mouse jiggler to fool this new bossware.
zeroq 2mo ago
tangent Once I've tried one SCM to track every single change to my files, and the other for bulk commits. The result was quite satisfying. It was some 15 years ago, we just switched from CVS to SVN and everyone thought it was the end of the history, at least for SCMs. Main branch was called master, and we were locking files by simply telling our teammates not to touch them. At one time I decided I really missed the Eclipse feature which was tracking all local changes to the files, even without an active SCM. Making tiny commits was not an option, because I want it to track every file save, and we haven't yet figured out working with branches. So I decided to install mercurial and made a hook which made a dummy commit every time I saved a file. Everything mercurial related was ignored by SVN. Suddenly I was able to teleport myself to a version from before the lunch while SVN history was crystal clear. Somehow I still miss integrated, per file, timeline in IDE.
- flossly 2mo ago
  Some time ago I found Zed did not have undo-trees (like Emacs and Vim have, possible with plugin). I think DeltaDB is probably going to power undo-trees for Zed.
Sha1rholder 2mo ago
A "smooth" editor with uncountable bugs and without smooth scrolling... I agree they should focus on basics.
UnfitFootprint 2mo ago
Is this just any Jetbrains IDE file history?
- dyzone 2mo ago
  Intellij is the emacs of this generation. https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
ukd1 2mo ago
Zed used to be good, now it hogs CPU for no reason and they don't bother fixing it.
hackermanai 2mo ago
There’s also Koi Editor. No telemetry, no tracking, and much faster than Zed: https://koieditor.com/benchmarks/ https://koieditor.com/benchmarks/ Dev solely focused on performance and bug fixing.
hi5ato 2mo ago
VSCode is great, but its lack of a sandbox for extensions makes it extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks. Zed is one of the few major editors that isolates plugins, which is why I like it. However, it has far too many bugs. Regarding DeltaDB’s request to 'log conversations and changes together', I think the Linux kernel's development model — which combines mailing lists, patch exchanges and Git — provides a good solution. I suspect that, to secure funding or land enterprise contracts, they need to showcase a “showcase” project like DeltaDB, but I believe they also want to focus on the core parts of the editor. --- I wrote the original text, but I had an LLM polish it, so there are em dashes in it
- gcr 2mo ago
  The problem with combining mailing lists, patch exchanges, and Git is that you have to combine mailing lists, patch exchanges, and Git. Most projects are not created under those conditions.
- chiffaa 2mo ago
  I wouldn't really say DeltaDB is a showcase project, given Zed has been working on it for at least a year, so it's likely been a focal point of development for quite some time. If there is funding to secure, they either should've been louder on the initial announcement, or not thrown a year on this, right?
  - hi5ato 2mo ago
    I missed that the announcement was actually from two months ago. It will be interesting to see how they handle balancing both an editor and a VCS without Big Tech resources like Microsoft's. Considering how many contributions and years it took for Git to reach its current level of maturity, taking on both projects seems like a massive undertaking.
rashkov 2mo ago
To all the people complaining about not getting upstream fixes.. why don't you just fork it and fix it for yourself? The cost and difficulty of that is on the floor. Genuine question, and to be clear I don't think you're wrong to be frustrated with upstream Zed
- sghiassy 2mo ago
  Being a maintainer of a popular open source package sucks. You get hundreds of PRs and it takes a considerable amount time to only merge the good ones. LLMs have only exacerbated the problem. So to your question, if you submit a perfect fix upstream and it doesn’t get merged. You either deal with immense friction for which your company won’t understand to get it merged. Or you silently diverge from source.
corytheboyd 2mo ago
If every commit has full ai conversation baggage, and you feed that history back to an ai… aren’t you wildly inflating context with stuff that may or may not matter? How does this even work with thousands of “commits?”
- senor_digimon 2mo ago
  There is a universe where prompting with large context will be near instantaneous and pretty much free. In that universe, there would be no reason not to have even more robust and verbose logging like this. For thousands of commits, a chunking mechanism and a running summary of the chunks would roughly get you there.
zie 2mo ago
It will be interesting to see how this works out in practice. Personally I don't see much use from it, but I'll give it a try after it ships and see how it works in practice.
cemoktra 2mo ago
reads like the same could have been achieved by using JJ
subarctic 2mo ago
Whoever on the zed team came up with this must be coding with agents way more than i am, because it hasn't come up for me as something I'd really need yet. But it sounds cool anyway. I guess it's kind of like undo history but persistent and with more visibility, and with branching? Anyone from zed here to comment?
- thewhitetulip 2mo ago
  The fallacy here is that if you have LLM then just start a new thread. That's what all vibe coders do anyways
  - subarctic 2mo ago
    Not sure I get what you're saying?
    - thewhitetulip 2mo ago
      Vibe coders don't bother reading code. They won't bother reading the logs For any problem they just start chatting with LLM for 4 straight hours.
irawita 2mo ago
A version control system that I cannot host myself? Count me out
plaxiotech 2mo ago
I really liked it
redsaber 2mo ago
I wish Zed in Windows(W11) would have fix the problem with windows(like opening the settings window on Zed) where if your scale is more than 100%(Settings -> System -> Display -> Scale) the title bar doesn't show as it is way up. Been having this problem since forever.
nullbio 2mo ago
So basically a layer built over Jujutsu?
hresvelgr 2mo ago
Commercially speaking, going against Git is a fool's errand. As much as I'd like to see Git usurped, I can't imagine the people backing this would sign off on a competitor to Git unless it was some type of sidecar. No doubt it'll be tightly coupled to Zed as well which is concerning. Perhaps this is pessimistic but I don't have faith the team are going to deliver anything groundbreaking given their entire business is existing technology, but less shit. No one is going to move core infrastructure for less shit or slightly better, otherwise we'd be using Mercurial or Darcs.
- adamnemecek 2mo ago
  Dude the writing is on the wall, git had a good run but it's time for something else. Lore is also solid.
- rolymath 2mo ago
  That's what people would have said 3 years ago about going against google (and search engines in general), yet here we are. Revolution is in the air.
  - ryan_n 2mo ago
    Google is doing great... Record profits this year, not sure I'd call that a "revolution".
    - rolymath 2mo ago
      Google of Thesseus.
- jonkoops 2mo ago
  This isn't trying to be a replacement for Git. Maybe read up first?
  - conartist6 2mo ago
    That's what's trouble: git is reaching the end of its useful life. It's 25 years old, and the patch files that make up the core of the decentralized collaboration system are fully 50 years old. Have the design requirements and constraints perhaps changed over the last 50 years?
wodenokoto 2mo ago
I think there is a ton of value of being able to rewind in between commits. I always felt that asking for a description of a commit is way too much. I can write a bunch of checkpoint commits and then squash them, I suppose, but the interface for doing it isn't super inviting and there are a lot of things I need to consider in terms of tracked and untracked files. If I understand this correctly, I can deltaDB all my untracked and ignored files and git push my thought-out commits, fully respecting things ignored. And If I realise that I should have git-commited 10 minutes ago, I can rewind, commit, fast forward and continue.
rldjbpin 2mo ago
nice to see more initiatives to improve vcs in the current chaos and paradigm change. simultaneously, i find it curious that the ide's git integration feels incomplete in front of vs code and its forks. git is not perfect but for a lot of users, a better ux can help solve most of their grievances. regardless, network effect exists and it would take more than a killer app/site to get this going. i would not outright dismiss this attempt, just like svn guys may have treated git back in the day.
pixlmint 2mo ago
this type of sh*t is why i'm glad i didn't switch from neovim to zed
xvrgdrt 2mo ago
I've been working on a somewhat related tool called Spor: https://github.com/emprcl/spor https://github.com/emprcl/spor It's primarily aimed at creative workflows. I mainly use it for creative coding, but I realize now it could also serve the same purpose for tracking changes made by AI agents.
ashot 2mo ago
You can do this all today and more with codecast.sh
WinstonSmith84 2mo ago
What am I missing in Zed is actually a "File History" - like in VS Code, which keeps a history of every time a file was saved to the disk, and it's very easy to review that history. Now this DeltaDB goes way beyond that
mmikeff 2mo ago
Lots of negativity here, but this is interesting to me and moves Zed towards something that is more than 'just' an IDE in a future where IDE users may be in the minority of people creating software.
aranw 2mo ago
When I saw the blog post about DeltaDB I thought oh okay cool but so what I don't really know what this is for me and how it helps me or what it does for me. Then again today I saw this link and looked at it and I can't help thing what is this to me? How does this help me, why would I want to request early access cause I have no idea what it does? I'd much prefer some more time spent building a solid editor which is why I switched to Zed early on in it's development cause I was frustrated and tired of VSCode. But saying that ever since Zed AI I've felt more and more frustrated with Zed and it's quality is starting to lack?
eayomi 2mo ago
[dead]
- yellottyellott 2mo ago
  yo wtf
Jean-Papoulos 2mo ago
[dead]
pluto_modadic 2mo ago
Seems like Zed needs to clean up shop and fix their IDE first.
elendilm 2mo ago
Attempted multiple times to use zed. Gave up. I still want to. I will give it another try when I am free. But the whole environment has something that feels "invasion of privacy". Maybe its me. I want an installation where typing latency must be invisible, literal invisible to the eye. Heard zed is great at that. But I don't want my sensitive code to be put in a state that might lead it to exist in a cloud environment without my explicit permission. Besides, the concept is good. Many a times I have wanted this exact feature - where what happens between commits can in principle be snapshoted with full checkout to any point - without of course any conscious effort from my side.
mococa 2mo ago
If you like Zed, but hate their decisions on non fixing bugs, try https://gram-editor.com https://gram-editor.com (zed fork)
adityazero 2mo ago
[dead]
manlymuppet 2mo ago
Why are people in this thread being so incessantly cynical? I expect more out of HN. I get that some wish Zed had other priorities, but the features being touted sound really promising. Of course it's just marketing until we get an actual product, but I for one look forward to seeing this stuff in action.
nvegater 2mo ago
A lot of haters in the comments, but I think it’s a bit too much negativity. It’s true that they could focus on polishing the edit experience, but given that I rarely code anymore by hand, I have some doubts that it’s future proof to do that. I think is not a bad bet trying to innovate in the LLM-coding space. Looking forward to try deltaDB and I hope it works outside of Zed !
mmmmbbbhb 2mo ago
I don't see a need for a code editor anymore, though I understand that others feel differently. However, I think zed is going against the tide, and not in a productive way.

529 points by ahamez 2mo ago

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

randomblock1 2mo ago
It supports anything with ACP. So it can actually run Codex and Claude Code, not just the Zed Agent. Looks like omp supports ACP, so all you have to do is specify a Custom Agent in Zed and it should just work. https://omp.sh/docs/acp https://omp.sh/docs/acp https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents
- ok_dad 2mo ago
  This is the killer Zed feature, IMO, that they support almost any agent via extensions. I deleted Cursor but still use the agent via Zed because it’s a lot nicer experience, Zed never had popups telling me Grok is half off. I also use OpenRouter and Zed.dev with it, that’s three providers out of dozens that it supports.
  - vehemenz 2mo ago
    Exactly. The more competitive the space is, the more important it is that products purposefully support 3rd-party providers. Now that people are increasingly switching from Anthropic/OpenAI for inference reseellers and on-prem compute, transparency and portability will be the new values, not being slightly better than the next agent or model.
  - stusmall 2mo ago
    Even more than supporting any agent that support almost anything period. They seem to take the default approach of using open community standards first when adding new features. By investing very heavily in LSP, ACP, DAP, tree-sitter etc it makes it easy for Zed to integrate with tons of different workflows, language, ecosystems etc quickly and easily. Its just good engineering and I love to see it.
- fireant 2mo ago
  Using OMP through ACP inside Zed is drastically worse experience than just running OMP inside Zed terminal. The ACP UI is dreadful and I had bunch of crashes even for first party Codex support.
  - g42gregory 2mo ago
    Yeah, I saw the same degradation. I will try the terminal threads that a poster below has mentioned. It sounds very interesting.
joemccall86 2mo ago
I use this every day — https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads
- g42gregory 2mo ago
  This looks very promising.

imagetic 2mo ago

I have fallen in love with Zed.

NoDodgeQuestion 2mo ago

Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL. Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system?

manmal 2mo ago
Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex. For when I want to be near the code, I prefer it now over TUIs or the Codex app. It feels much more immediate that way. Sticking to the basics will kill them IMO. They have been pitching themselves as agent-native for a while btw. And the workflow they are describing in the post sounds amazing, I‘ve been wishing for that. It‘s orthogonal to CVS, no? You can still make PRs. But, crucially, you can loop people in early on, when it matters the most.
- latchkey 2mo ago
  > Their ACP integration is good (finally), at least with Codex. you must not use it much. try pasting in an image, quitting zed and restarting (ie: upgrading the app). it shows you the base64 encoded data instead of just showing the image. heck, it doesn't even show you the image when you paste it in. it just shows the filename.
  - manmal 2mo ago
    I use it constantly but haven’t felt the need to paste an image yet. I guess I‘m using pi and the Codex app more for that.
    - latchkey 2mo ago
      sorry, i didn't mean a quantity of time, i meant depth of usage.
  - DangitBobby 2mo ago

teaearlgraycold 2mo ago

This is a big unsolved dev tooling problem. Glad someone competent is working on it.

cute_boi 2mo ago
Yes, but it saps away the time that could be used to improve zed.
- whalesalad 2mo ago
  zed is open source, you are free to improve it on your own
  - cute_boi 2mo ago
    Yes, it is open source, and I am not saying they should not do it. Chromium is also open source, but if they added too much nonsensical AI functionality, I would be upset. I am free to improve it on my own, but that does not mean I cannot express how I feel. I have not gone to the Zed repository and created an issue telling them to stop developing DeltaDB because it takes away the maintainers’ time.
- skhameneh 2mo ago
  Or it’s actively used to improve Zed faster (or more efficiently).
- senderista 2mo ago
  I wonder if a large enough user community could fork zed and actually make progress on the bugs that matter?
- teaearlgraycold 2mo ago
  Well this is going to be integrated into Zed. It’s an improvement by definition.

esafak 2mo ago

Basically what IntelliJ calls local history. It is a feature that has saved my bacon. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html

lemonberry 2mo ago
Ooooh, this is cool. I was unaware of this. Thanks for the link.
jasonlotito 2mo ago
Yes, I concur. Local History is wonderful; nice to see Zed getting its own version.
vulkoingim 2mo ago
Similar, but not as polished, also exists in VSCode and derivatives, named the same way. Definitely saved me a few times as well.
- dunham 2mo ago
  This saved me from accidental resets in the past. I learned it existed because the files were showing up in mdfind

pknopf 2mo ago

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

lightbendover 2mo ago
VCs count as people unfortunately.
TacticalCoder 2mo ago
They say that "history between commits" matters. If it's really so for some people, a case could be made that their problems can already be half-solved by changing the granularity of their commits: just commit more often.
- eviks 2mo ago
  What about the other half?
insane_dreamer 2mo ago
I disagree. JetBrains PyCharm has a similar "local history" feature that solves this very real and existing problem and has saved my ass more than once when accidentally overwriting changes before committing or fubar'ing a git reset.
anon7000 2mo ago
I think that: 1. Commits are really just manual checkpoints while you’re working. Why not automatically checkpoint everything so you can actually go back to an older implementation without needing to remember to commit it? 2. Agentic workflows are so deeply single player. It’s very annoying, I want to collaborate with my team with agents, not review the output of one dev’s agent which they’ll just shove back into their existing agent.

docheinestages 2mo ago

Sounds like a side-effect of being VC-backed. Like what the ex GitHub CEO went on to build (Entire). Unnecessary.

bastardoperator 2mo ago
It also feels like his former company could implement his new company in a couple of weeks if they choose to.

visiondude 2mo ago

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

adastra22 2mo ago

Is this closed source?

m3kw9 2mo ago

It should work with github inbetween commits, that i may use. Right now I'm using staging as an in bewteen in a dangerous way.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

spockz 2mo ago
This local history has saved my bacon on occasion. E.g. when I went too long without committing and something silly overwrote the file I was working on. Or because I did something silly with git. Then it is nice that there is still an independent backup elsewhere with different failure modes.
- exe34 2mo ago
  Like a branch on the server?
  - spockz 2mo ago
    That would still be in git. The local history in IntelliJ works independently of any VCS. Also I’ve had formatters botch files including changes I hadn’t committed yet. For that the local edit history is also useful.
    - exe34 2mo ago
      Or add it to git? What's wrong with git?
      - spockz 2mo ago
        The whole point is that sometimes I or the build system performs an action that it cannot reverse. This happens in between commits as I’m not in the habit of committing after every few keystrokes.

drdexebtjl 2mo ago

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

4lx87 2mo ago
The way I’m seeing AI used by organizations is to produce process slop: tickets, summaries, docs, etc. rather than drive process change and optimization, or enable individuals to be more effective within the organization.
- andersonpico 2mo ago
  this is the perfect description of how I've seen AI used in most organizations
a2800276 2mo ago
It's also delusional to think you can find that one edit that was really useful but you forgot to commit but then deleted in another giant commit. As anyone who's ever tried to split a days worth of work apart with `git add -p` is well aware. It may be feasible with a million agents, but they could remember what they typed three hours ago anyhow.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
mdotmertens 2mo ago
Not only this. I'm also shuddering at the thought of how much more noise this adds which can only be filtered through LLMs.

Lucasoato 2mo ago

What problem does this product solve?

gpm 2mo ago
Collaborative (as in simultaneous multiplayer) editing I think, which has been Zed's mission since before LLMs were a thing... See https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb but also https://zed.dev/blog/crdts https://zed.dev/blog/crdts from years ago.

xlii 2mo ago

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

ibejoeb 2mo ago
Jujutsu is great, but it does not do this. It has no knowledge of agent sessions.
- Valodim 2mo ago
  You still get snapshots of the working tree every time an agent calls a jj command, including reading ones. This is regular for me that I'm not worried to lose any intermediate state.
- ithkuil 2mo ago
  would it make sense to add jj snapshotting commands in agent hooks?
codethief 2mo ago
> The only downside is that because of Jujutsu snapshots it can't be used inside sandbox (since all jj commands are mutating) I guess it depends? You could certainly start with another repo clone that's separate from the one you work on yourself?

manzu 2mo ago

this looks like jetbrains "local changes" but globally synced. "for the agents" mights scare people who jump to think about micromanagers, but these people mostly hide or fake work. even micromanagers will eventually give you an agent to use so it won't matter what is in the change log, what matters is speed+quality. and since you can iterate from any branch you have inginite try and retry possibilities

yza 2mo ago

Why develop this when the core editor is almost unusable? On Linux wayland, copypaste is broken, the file manager is laggy and snippets do not trigger before the heavy hint logic is done. This is just on top of my head, the list is long

throwatdem12311 2mo ago
Ha if you thought it was laggy try it on software accelerated graphics.
Pavilion2095 2mo ago
Because it's not broken, the issues you're describing are far from universal. Also, fixing them won't bring any money.
dylanz 2mo ago
I started using Zed a couple weeks ago and immediately had issues with copy/paste/buffer on an M1 Mac. I tried a few suggested fixes and they didn't work.
Petersipoi 2mo ago
> when the core editor is almost unusable Shit, as someone who uses Zed everyday, I didn't realize what I am using is unusable.
- yza 2mo ago
  I guess we have slightly different standards and/or use cases
mosburger 2mo ago
I use it as a daily driver with few if any problems, but I'm on macOS. Maybe their Linux support is particularly crappy?
- f311a 2mo ago
  There are a lot of subtle bugs. I'm on macOS too, but perhaps my workflow is unusual? Every time I open it, I find small bugs. There are so many features that it's hard to maintain them, I guess. For example, a lot of disable buttons do not actually disable stuff. They just hide it from the UI.

sanex 2mo ago

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

mynti 2mo ago

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

usef- 2mo ago
Jetbrains has had a "local history" feature for many years that had this, and I only use it occasionally but it feels pretty essential now. I once accidentally wiped uncomimted work in the terminal, and brought up Local History to restore it in a click. Or more casually, I'm struggling with a CSS design: what did it look like at 3pm? It's an effortless escape or experimentation valve between commits. (It's also why you never need to manually save a file in jetbrains. It just assumes you want to save, because you can always safely go back if needed. Editors with manual saving feel cumbersome now)

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

systemvoltage 2mo ago

Snapshots have an intention behind them as a chunk that the programmer thought of. It has infinite flexibility depending on the programmer/team. IMO they are a necessary feature, but the article considers it a bug. It’s an explicit and deliberate chunking of code writing process which is what you want in a chaotic “collaborative” environment. The system doesn’t get to decide but you decide when to commit.

tetris11 2mo ago

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

CharlesW 2mo ago

So is this basically Beads + Dolt? This isn’t to diminish it, it’d be great if this ends up being a less “vibe code-y” alternative to those.

__MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
If not, beads + dolt seems like it would be pretty great.
pwillia7 2mo ago
that was my first question too. Here's hoping

smy20011 2mo ago

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

lrae 2mo ago

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

iepathos 2mo ago

[flagged]

javierhonduco 2mo ago

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

umvi 2mo ago

Hmm, yeah before "DeltaDB" I have a big list of things I would rather they develop/fix: - Vertical activity bar (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecomment-4871602351 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecommen... - rejected because it "doesn’t match our design vision for Zed") This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views. - Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory - Don't freeze when resuming from suspension (I suspect this is GPU-driver related on linux) forcing me to `killall zed-editor`

stusmall 2mo ago
> Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory I don't think you can put this on Zed. An unprivileged userspace application, even if coded poorly, shouldn't crash the machine.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > An unprivileged userspace application, even if coded poorly, shouldn't crash the machine. How would you prevent that? It can write until root disk is full, can take all your memory, saturate your CPU and a whole bunch of other stuff we (users) like to be able to do for the things that need them. Unless you're suggesting something like Qubes or similar UX?
  - itishappy 2mo ago
    Disk, memory, and CPU limits? The app should crash, not the kernel.
    - embedding-shape 2mo ago
      Right, my point being that it's should be up to the user to decide, because most of the times I run programs, I actually want them to be able to gobble up GB of disk, RAM and fully make use of my CPU. That's why I bought the hardware I have :)

guess__who 2mo ago

[flagged]

jackling 2mo ago
I don't understand, what do you mean by this?

jackling 2mo ago

I really do like Zed, it's snappier than VS code and with pretty good vim emulation. Even through SSH, the native UI allows for no network latency, compared to something like vim+terminal. Like many other posters, I do feel like the core editor is getting worse. Some issues I've encountered recently at work: - Routinely encounter bugs with the python language server, it's particularly slow when compared to using VSCode. All that snappiest disappears when finding symbols after the '.' is considerably slower than my typing speed. - I found similar issues with C++ code bases. - It's also so hard to debug when something goes wrong. I was trying to find out why pyright keep spinning on startup, but the "LSP logs" never show anything. - Connecting via SSH always opens the repo in restricted mode, even though I check the "Trust all projects in" checkbox. Never happened before. - Debugger UI is a mess. Make a run, stop the run, edit the task.json, try running again, and 2 tasks show up. One for the old and one for the new. -- I stuck with it because I really do like the UI, the performance, and initially it seemed to be an improvement from VS Code for my workflows, but lately I've been moving back to code as it seems more stable. I don't really use agent features, so I don't think I'm the target customer for this or other priority Zed features. I do see the usefulness of something like this, I'm interested to see if the new agentic style of programming will result in the "code" part of editors becoming second class (for the better) and will allow for more rapid development. Although I'm not looking forward to read my coworker's "threads" of how a feature was made, I have a feeling that it will be more difficult to read than the raw code, as from my experience, LLMs don't really employ terse and effective communication (might not be entirely fair, I found ChatGPT /study mode pretty good.) -- Anyone know of a good replacement editor that might meet my usecase? I'm really a batteries included type of developer.

nxc18 2mo ago
Yeah apparently Zed was engineered for speed but I find it very slow in general, especially on startup. VS Code can slow down as you add functionality, but Zed often just doesn’t have that functionality at all. So the proper comparison is “VS Code minus all extension-provided features” which is actually pretty fast.
- senderista 2mo ago

quacker 2mo ago

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

gcr 2mo ago
I think this is an evolution of Zed’s “multiplayer” CRDT features from a few years back, but with some new agent affordances.

tamimio 2mo ago

I have been using zed for almost 2ish years now, great overall, but last month when I tried ACP with opencode and even omp, it gave me many issues that it was easier just to use the terminal directly, oh, and I couldn’t select the model that time not sure if it’s fixed now.

ralusek 2mo ago

Can maybe think of one time in the last 10 years that I would have wanted this. Its only purpose is for training LLMs

kuil009 2mo ago

[dead]

hollowturtle 2mo ago

> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it A total nightmare and imo every dev should push back using this stuff. You'd otherwise have management brag about you not being a good communicator with the ai agent, the same management that have no idea how to steer these tools. I really like Zed the editor, I'm not sure I like the path they getting into

giancarlostoro 2mo ago
These sort of paper trails are for developers not management though, does your manager open all your commits and start commenting on them? If so, maybe apply somewhere else.
- shimman 2mo ago
  Management nowadays are for sure playing with surveillance software against their workers. Let's please not think otherwise, it's one of the main value adds that LLM companies are selling to businesses; about the ease of which you can collect metrics on employees after feeding whatever into an LLM. The neat thing is that they thing decide to make your life miserable based on their made up findings!

throwatdem12311 2mo ago

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

anon7000 2mo ago
1. There is not much money in making a good editor. 2. There is money in AI products, and a huge demand for solid AI workflows from many developers. Lack of AI tooling is absolutely a dealbreaker for many developers, whether you like it or not. 3. The core primitive here is just as much about enabling live collaboration which has been on Zed’s roadmap for many years before agents took over the industry.
- hollowturtle 2mo ago
  I would pay the cost of a license for a good editor. I did with sublime+sublime merge. I did with Intellij. I did many times
  - throwatdem12311 2mo ago
    The value you get for a sublime text+merge is so much higher than whatever you’d get by paying for an equivalent cost of a subscription to whatever Zed is selling to monetize their editor. Can’t believe people hem and haw about paying for a license for them. $168 is nothing. That’s less than a half a day of salary for me and the amount of time saved using them easily adds up to multiples of that.
- throwatdem12311 2mo ago
  (1) If you wanted to make money don’t make an editor. And yet, somehow Sublime Text survives.. (2) hence why I call them “distractions”. And yet Sublime Text hasn’t gotten greedy.. (3) Nobody cares about the collaborative features either. You’ll pry Sublime Text from my cold dead hands. I tried Zed and it really was close but ever since they got greedy the editor has gone to crap. So for now I will continue to happily renew my Subl license every few years. For less than what it would cost for an ongoing subscription to Zed’s AI plans to “support them”.

prinny_ 2mo ago

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

sarreph 2mo ago

A lot of the copy on this page feels like the kind of copy an AI would produce. But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy so I don’t want to accuse them of doing that. Marketing aside, this is the kind of thing (advancements in VCSes) that I’d usually be excited about, but which I’m less excited about coming from Zed because it makes me start to worry that they’re going to continue focussing less on the core editor experience. I love Zed and I hope that it doesn’t start to go flakey.

dilap 2mo ago
You're too kind. It's obviously AI copy, and a huge negative signal (to me, anyway).
- sarreph 2mo ago
  I'm always hesitant to assert something is definitely AI copy because everyone's tone of voice is different. I'm also starting to wonder how much real, human-made copy is mimicking AI-created copy that has been filling marketing pages as of late. When people make marketing websites, they often riff and rip off other websites' (à la "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[0]) design ideas and language -- I wouldn't be surprised if there are humans now inadvertently adopting LLM's writing style like that. [0] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#:~:text=Good%20artists%20copy%3B%20great%20artists%20steal. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#:~:text=Good%20arti...
  - senderista 2mo ago
    Why do you think an AI-focused company would hesitate to put AI-generated copy on their website?
    - sarreph 2mo ago
      Hah :) In my opinion / experience, AI copy is a generally more cumbersome to read and process. So I would assume a company at Series B stage would have a human (with marketing guidelines) go over the language used on a one-pager to announce a new product. But -- evidently -- anyone's guess!

joshdavham 2mo ago

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

Sha1rholder 2mo ago
I do but I do regret.

SignalM 2mo ago

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

mococa 2mo ago

Nice, how about fix bugs?

chermi 2mo ago

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

gcr 2mo ago
For others considering this, note that Claude removes session history files from ~/.claude after 30 days

steve_taylor 2mo ago

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

zeroq 2mo ago

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

flossly 2mo ago
Some time ago I found Zed did not have undo-trees (like Emacs and Vim have, possible with plugin). I think DeltaDB is probably going to power undo-trees for Zed.

Sha1rholder 2mo ago

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

UnfitFootprint 2mo ago

Is this just any Jetbrains IDE file history?

dyzone 2mo ago
Intellij is the emacs of this generation. https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/

ukd1 2mo ago

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

hackermanai 2mo ago

There’s also Koi Editor. No telemetry, no tracking, and much faster than Zed: https://koieditor.com/benchmarks/ https://koieditor.com/benchmarks/ Dev solely focused on performance and bug fixing.

hi5ato 2mo ago

VSCode is great, but its lack of a sandbox for extensions makes it extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks. Zed is one of the few major editors that isolates plugins, which is why I like it. However, it has far too many bugs. Regarding DeltaDB’s request to 'log conversations and changes together', I think the Linux kernel's development model — which combines mailing lists, patch exchanges and Git — provides a good solution. I suspect that, to secure funding or land enterprise contracts, they need to showcase a “showcase” project like DeltaDB, but I believe they also want to focus on the core parts of the editor. --- I wrote the original text, but I had an LLM polish it, so there are em dashes in it

gcr 2mo ago
The problem with combining mailing lists, patch exchanges, and Git is that you have to combine mailing lists, patch exchanges, and Git. Most projects are not created under those conditions.
chiffaa 2mo ago
I wouldn't really say DeltaDB is a showcase project, given Zed has been working on it for at least a year, so it's likely been a focal point of development for quite some time. If there is funding to secure, they either should've been louder on the initial announcement, or not thrown a year on this, right?
- hi5ato 2mo ago
  I missed that the announcement was actually from two months ago. It will be interesting to see how they handle balancing both an editor and a VCS without Big Tech resources like Microsoft's. Considering how many contributions and years it took for Git to reach its current level of maturity, taking on both projects seems like a massive undertaking.

rashkov 2mo ago

To all the people complaining about not getting upstream fixes.. why don't you just fork it and fix it for yourself? The cost and difficulty of that is on the floor. Genuine question, and to be clear I don't think you're wrong to be frustrated with upstream Zed

sghiassy 2mo ago
Being a maintainer of a popular open source package sucks. You get hundreds of PRs and it takes a considerable amount time to only merge the good ones. LLMs have only exacerbated the problem. So to your question, if you submit a perfect fix upstream and it doesn’t get merged. You either deal with immense friction for which your company won’t understand to get it merged. Or you silently diverge from source.

corytheboyd 2mo ago

If every commit has full ai conversation baggage, and you feed that history back to an ai… aren’t you wildly inflating context with stuff that may or may not matter? How does this even work with thousands of “commits?”

senor_digimon 2mo ago
There is a universe where prompting with large context will be near instantaneous and pretty much free. In that universe, there would be no reason not to have even more robust and verbose logging like this. For thousands of commits, a chunking mechanism and a running summary of the chunks would roughly get you there.

zie 2mo ago

It will be interesting to see how this works out in practice. Personally I don't see much use from it, but I'll give it a try after it ships and see how it works in practice.

cemoktra 2mo ago

reads like the same could have been achieved by using JJ

subarctic 2mo ago

Whoever on the zed team came up with this must be coding with agents way more than i am, because it hasn't come up for me as something I'd really need yet. But it sounds cool anyway. I guess it's kind of like undo history but persistent and with more visibility, and with branching? Anyone from zed here to comment?

thewhitetulip 2mo ago
The fallacy here is that if you have LLM then just start a new thread. That's what all vibe coders do anyways
- subarctic 2mo ago
  Not sure I get what you're saying?
  - thewhitetulip 2mo ago
    Vibe coders don't bother reading code. They won't bother reading the logs For any problem they just start chatting with LLM for 4 straight hours.

irawita 2mo ago

A version control system that I cannot host myself? Count me out

plaxiotech 2mo ago

I really liked it

redsaber 2mo ago

I wish Zed in Windows(W11) would have fix the problem with windows(like opening the settings window on Zed) where if your scale is more than 100%(Settings -> System -> Display -> Scale) the title bar doesn't show as it is way up. Been having this problem since forever.

nullbio 2mo ago

So basically a layer built over Jujutsu?

hresvelgr 2mo ago

Commercially speaking, going against Git is a fool's errand. As much as I'd like to see Git usurped, I can't imagine the people backing this would sign off on a competitor to Git unless it was some type of sidecar. No doubt it'll be tightly coupled to Zed as well which is concerning. Perhaps this is pessimistic but I don't have faith the team are going to deliver anything groundbreaking given their entire business is existing technology, but less shit. No one is going to move core infrastructure for less shit or slightly better, otherwise we'd be using Mercurial or Darcs.

adamnemecek 2mo ago
Dude the writing is on the wall, git had a good run but it's time for something else. Lore is also solid.
rolymath 2mo ago
That's what people would have said 3 years ago about going against google (and search engines in general), yet here we are. Revolution is in the air.
- ryan_n 2mo ago
  Google is doing great... Record profits this year, not sure I'd call that a "revolution".
  - rolymath 2mo ago
    Google of Thesseus.
jonkoops 2mo ago
This isn't trying to be a replacement for Git. Maybe read up first?
- conartist6 2mo ago
  That's what's trouble: git is reaching the end of its useful life. It's 25 years old, and the patch files that make up the core of the decentralized collaboration system are fully 50 years old. Have the design requirements and constraints perhaps changed over the last 50 years?

wodenokoto 2mo ago

I think there is a ton of value of being able to rewind in between commits. I always felt that asking for a description of a commit is way too much. I can write a bunch of checkpoint commits and then squash them, I suppose, but the interface for doing it isn't super inviting and there are a lot of things I need to consider in terms of tracked and untracked files. If I understand this correctly, I can deltaDB all my untracked and ignored files and git push my thought-out commits, fully respecting things ignored. And If I realise that I should have git-commited 10 minutes ago, I can rewind, commit, fast forward and continue.

rldjbpin 2mo ago

nice to see more initiatives to improve vcs in the current chaos and paradigm change. simultaneously, i find it curious that the ide's git integration feels incomplete in front of vs code and its forks. git is not perfect but for a lot of users, a better ux can help solve most of their grievances. regardless, network effect exists and it would take more than a killer app/site to get this going. i would not outright dismiss this attempt, just like svn guys may have treated git back in the day.

pixlmint 2mo ago

this type of sh*t is why i'm glad i didn't switch from neovim to zed

xvrgdrt 2mo ago

I've been working on a somewhat related tool called Spor: https://github.com/emprcl/spor https://github.com/emprcl/spor It's primarily aimed at creative workflows. I mainly use it for creative coding, but I realize now it could also serve the same purpose for tracking changes made by AI agents.

ashot 2mo ago

You can do this all today and more with codecast.sh

WinstonSmith84 2mo ago

What am I missing in Zed is actually a "File History" - like in VS Code, which keeps a history of every time a file was saved to the disk, and it's very easy to review that history. Now this DeltaDB goes way beyond that

mmikeff 2mo ago

Lots of negativity here, but this is interesting to me and moves Zed towards something that is more than 'just' an IDE in a future where IDE users may be in the minority of people creating software.

aranw 2mo ago

When I saw the blog post about DeltaDB I thought oh okay cool but so what I don't really know what this is for me and how it helps me or what it does for me. Then again today I saw this link and looked at it and I can't help thing what is this to me? How does this help me, why would I want to request early access cause I have no idea what it does? I'd much prefer some more time spent building a solid editor which is why I switched to Zed early on in it's development cause I was frustrated and tired of VSCode. But saying that ever since Zed AI I've felt more and more frustrated with Zed and it's quality is starting to lack?

eayomi 2mo ago

[dead]

yellottyellott 2mo ago
yo wtf

Jean-Papoulos 2mo ago

[dead]

pluto_modadic 2mo ago

Seems like Zed needs to clean up shop and fix their IDE first.

elendilm 2mo ago

Attempted multiple times to use zed. Gave up. I still want to. I will give it another try when I am free. But the whole environment has something that feels "invasion of privacy". Maybe its me. I want an installation where typing latency must be invisible, literal invisible to the eye. Heard zed is great at that. But I don't want my sensitive code to be put in a state that might lead it to exist in a cloud environment without my explicit permission. Besides, the concept is good. Many a times I have wanted this exact feature - where what happens between commits can in principle be snapshoted with full checkout to any point - without of course any conscious effort from my side.

mococa 2mo ago

If you like Zed, but hate their decisions on non fixing bugs, try https://gram-editor.com https://gram-editor.com (zed fork)

adityazero 2mo ago

[dead]

manlymuppet 2mo ago

Why are people in this thread being so incessantly cynical? I expect more out of HN. I get that some wish Zed had other priorities, but the features being touted sound really promising. Of course it's just marketing until we get an actual product, but I for one look forward to seeing this stuff in action.

nvegater 2mo ago

A lot of haters in the comments, but I think it’s a bit too much negativity. It’s true that they could focus on polishing the edit experience, but given that I rarely code anymore by hand, I have some doubts that it’s future proof to do that. I think is not a bad bet trying to innovate in the LLM-coding space. Looking forward to try deltaDB and I hope it works outside of Zed !

mmmmbbbhb 2mo ago

I don't see a need for a code editor anymore, though I understand that others feel differently. However, I think zed is going against the tide, and not in a productive way.