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Delta
- dexwiz 2mo agoDoes anyone else hate reading AI summaries of code? Code can be pithy, but at least its terse compared to prose. When you add how verbose LLMs can be, I often end up reading a paragraph to explain a few lines. Or the opposite happens where the summary skips important edge cases or criteria. "You're right, X also does Y. I missed that in my initial analysis," is much too common of a phrase. I like the idea of using LLMs to transform code into something more readable, and vice versa. I am not sure if meandering paragraphs and linear lists are the best targets.
- markstos 2mo agoRight, the value is not so clear of having multiple people wade through lengthy LLM responses. Part of the value that a human in the loop adds is figuring out what's correct and important in the response and passing on a more polished result.
- throwaway613746 2mo ago[dead]
- jvuygbbkuurx 2mo agoI don't like the default explanations. But I prompt for small code snippets with explanations of a problem and the solution. This is in the context of extending features, fixing bugs, reviewing new code etc. I still skim the code, but it's nice to have a somewhat thoughtful overview of the key points like database schema, API spec, algorithm or abstraction. It makes it easier to skim a large diff without feeling lost. It also quite often catches some weird choices that might slip through it not carefully reasoning about the code. For me it is hard to understand code I didn't write myself so I have landed on this workflow.
- zahlman 2mo agoI've found that I don't mind getting a lot of text back from an LLM, when I was the one who prompted it. I can easily enough let my eyes flit around in the text and figure out what I need to, and I expect that putting all that text in the context window will help with the rest of the conversation. It's when that text gets copied and pasted into a blog, or a PR, etc. that it really galls.
- fragmede 2mo agoYeah. Human psychology is weird.
- cmoski 2mo agoAI summaries are great for learning which parts of the codebase are load bearing.
- armchairhacker 2mo agoWe need a new specification language for summaries. I think just a (pseudo?-)programming language’s API (modules, interfaces, method signatures), but more concise and descriptive than Java, maybe Haskell or OCaml minus quirks (…the academics were this close to an ideal syntax, maybe they should’ve gave up those languages’ LR parsers…)
- jake_and_fatman 2mo ago[dead]
- bmurphy1976 2mo agoI hate fighting with the AI to get a good summary. Reading the good summary is great. Getting to it is the challenge. First attempt: mountains of meta conversation and not answering the original question. Second attempt: shorter and more concise, cuts out some of the nonsense, but terribly written. Third attempt: goes off the rails, misunderstands what you are asking and tries pushing the work onto you. Fourth attempt: finally something that's concise, reasonably well written, to the point and passable.
- lucascdotnet 2mo agoI'm a bit confused by your use of 'pithy, but at least its terse'. Don't pithy and terse mostly mean similar things? Here it seems like you're contrasting them. Not trying to be pedantic, apologies if it comes off that way.
- superturkey650 2mo agoI think he’s saying that’s it’s dense and _too_ full of meaning. So, while terse, it can also hide extra meaning in its density.
- card_zero 2mo agoGnomic, then (on my mind because I saw it used yesterday, thanks flir).
- jake_and_fatman 2mo ago"Bob can be blunt but at least he's honest." Words can have positive or negative connotations for the same notion.
- card_zero 2mo agoThat's insightful! In a negative way.
- lucascdotnet 2mo agoThats a good point, however, you wouldn't say "Bob can be honest, but at least he's blunt" which is I think more faithful to the initial quote. But point taken.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- derefr 2mo agoI wonder if a productive avenue might be "doing aspect-oriented programming in reverse": asking the LLM not to "summarize" the code per se, but rather to "clarify" it by transforming it into what a programming blog post would call a "toy example" of what the code is doing, by stripping out all the (non-semantic) error-handling, logging, metrics incrementing, etc — all the things that you might treat as their own "aspects" under AOP.
- redrove 2mo agoSo..pseudo code?
- cadamsdotcom 2mo agoYour AI summary is raw output, like uncooked mince meat. Ask for a rewriting pass! Get it to edit for word count, remove redundancies, remove run-on sentences, and change sentence structure to use active voice. You wouldn't ship your first draft - why let AI do it?
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoI mean... the problem with that, as with all the "you have to go back and forth with the AI" scenarios, is that by the time I finish with that I may as well have just written it myself to begin with. Would take a similar amount of time, actually have my voice in it, and not cost money for tokens.
- cadamsdotcom 2mo agoIf all you need is a readable summary you can understand you should definitely try asking. You might get a surprise! Worst case you lose 10 seconds of your life. Not too bad!
- gitaarik 2mo agoI agree, I also sometimes do stuff manually when it's easier to do manually than to ask AI. Took me years before I got it though.
- jbdamask 2mo agoI use AI explainers a lot in my own projects and have skills that give outputs I like. I'll even pipe the output into NotebookLM to make a video sometimes. This is actually a decent way to grok complex subsystems (YMMV). What I don't care for is the pretty-yet-verbose HTML outputs that I see from some teams. They can be way too long and it's often the case that the engineer who made it didn't read the whole thing.
- paulhebert 2mo agoThose HTML reports are almost always filled with fluff. As someone who likes a nicely designed report document, slapping a coat of paint on slop output isn’t helpful
- jnpnj 2mo agoThe "language model" aspect shows IMO, at least for someone who grew up with the material of 90s and 2000s where we describe things more in mechanical, engineering terms. When gpt4 landed it was somehow amazing to see the output, but yeah nowadays I keep skimming through the explanation. It's like an intermediate dev who has nothing else to do but create long sentences to describe what could be simpler.
- o_m 2mo agoThere is a reason Caveman (https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman) is as popular as it is
- gosolozero 2mo agoI thought Caveman was debunked in the token saving argument? In real sessions it doesn’t really save much longterm and made sessions more forgetful/take longer.
- Garlef 2mo agoAsk for a walkthrough of the highlights (with '...' omissions so that the most important parts are quickly visible) instead of a verbal summary.
- findjashua 2mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- ModernMech 2mo agoYes this is why I ask the agent to summarize the code as a comic of a lizard explaining it to a cat.
- sourdecor 2mo agoI wish LLM summary of code was put aside the actual code, like the Jasmine documentation[0]. [0]: https://jasmine.github.io/tutorials/your_first_suite https://jasmine.github.io/tutorials/your_first_suite
- dyauspitr 2mo agoIt’s an LLM, it does what you want. If you don’t like it verbose tell it you want it to be succinct and it’ll do exactly what you ask of it. What sort of complaint is this?
- AlfeG 2mo agoI use caveman to handle this. Not because to I want to spent less tokens, I want to spent less time reading.
- idk1 2mo agoYeah, I have a rule in my agents MD that essentially says the code doesn't need a comment because it should be readable. And ask me in the exceptionally rare instances where it needs a summary or a comment. I am a Ruby and JavaScript developer, so I suppose that is a lot more readable than some other languages, but broadly, I've found code summaries and code comments to not be necessary if the code is very elegantly written.
- sensanaty 2mo agoWhenever I read any AI-generated documentation of any kind, it feels like my brain immediately blanks and I can't comprehend what I'm reading. It's like my brain blocks out the particular combo of word AIs love to use and 0 information manages to make it in there. I think it's because it's basically always a high-level, rough overview of a topic that isn't quite correct. It's using 10x the words necessary to say nothing at all. It is a large, featureless wall of words that ultimately tells you absolutely nothing. It's simultaneously too verbose while also not actually saying anything useful. Maybe my attention span has just gotten worse or something, but I don't really get the same sensation reading good quality docs that I know were human-generated so it must be something specific to how AIs form their paragraphs of noise.
- sharno 2mo agoI like to ask for a code tour using snippets of the most important types and functions. Much better to read through
- gofreddygo 2mo agoOne thing i hate more is the tendency of people now to rely on such summaries over the code and copy-pasting 400 line summaries of something fundamentally wrong. Code is more precise than english language. If it wasn't everyone would just use english to write programs.
- the_duke 2mo agoI'm sure this seemed like a great idea a year ago (they first mentioned it with their Series B). But a lot has changed in those 12 months. Frontier models and coding agents have advanced so much that I don't really see much value in this anymore. Not sure the DeltaDB based features really add anything significant compared to the alternatives. I reckon the game here has to be adding a service that stores the data and runs agent sessions?
- markstos 2mo agoTo be fair: a year ago the editor was in the center and the AI chat was in the sidebar-- Cursor. Here they've moved the AI chat to the center and code editor has been pushed to the side.
- bakugo 2mo agoThe obvious next step is to remove the code editor entirely.
- apsurd 2mo agoIt seems reasonable that a professional-tier of software developers will have tools distinct from everyone else. No matter what the percentage looks like, experts will still be a thing that needs different things.
- Shorel 2mo agoIn my own agent there's no code editor, just the chat session. I have not missed an integrated text editor.
- alerighi 2mo agoFor me it's probably time to learn to use vim or something similar. I'm the only one that likes coding manually, without all this AI shit? I'm faster writing code myself than trying to explain to artificial stupidity what I intend to do and correct its output. And if I write it myself the code just works, if it's written by the AI it has a ton of bugs. I don't see any value in AI generated code that is not mere code for doing experiments that you don't care about.
- handfuloflight 2mo agoWould be nice for Zed to announce something that was immediately available for use.
- isjejfjjwj 2mo agoWould be nice if Zed announced anything related to what Zed actually is: a code editor. This thing is fairly new in software years and has already stagnated. Bugs, glitches and rough edges all around. Almost feels like abandonware. I first heard of Zed back when it was “the code editor that respected your choices”, you could turn off AI entirely with a single switch and all that… guess it was too much of a pipe dream to hope it would continue down that road. This thing is now just a white-label version of Visual Code. Nothing more. Nothing less. Same software, different case. What a shame.
- dewey 2mo agoJust because they started out as a code editor doesn't mean it has to stay that way. I was looking forward to a more modern Sublime Text in Zed but I also know that nobody is going to make money off a simple code editor. > This thing is now just a white-label version of Visual Code. That's a wild hot take, and pretty ignorant to the people working on that for years.
- oeifisjdjd 2mo ago> That's a wild hot take, and pretty ignorant to the people working on that for years. Hot take or not, it’s accurate. There’s little to nothing that differentiates Zed from VSCode now.
- neuronexmachina 2mo agoZed releases new stable versions weekly, with plenty of features and bugfixes in each version: https://zed.dev/releases/stable https://zed.dev/releases/stable
- NoDodgeQuestion 2mo agoSo, DeltaDB is not for Zed, but for an entirely new product? At least it won't bloat the editor... Nevertheless another Zed post, another plea to focus on basics https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 [how can developers work with agents in zed when developers cannot see files agents create] best luck to Delta but please do not neglect the text editor!
- zcaceres 2mo agoIt's not a full IDE but you can see the files and docs mentioned and created in the Delta chats. I often will pop open the right tab in Delta to check that.
- JonGretarB 2mo agoI think the point is to incorporate it in the end in to Zed. Becoming the new thread panel or something. But it's just not something that is easy to fiddle with inside a working editor that many of us rely on to make some money.
- vipshek 2mo agoThis is intriguing. The two relevant features seem to be 1) realtime collaborative multiplayer conversations and 2) conversation-as-document - basically, letting you comment inline in an agent conversation. For (1), the main value I'd see is in mentoring junior engineers or less technical contributors on a team. If someone puts up a PR with sloppy results, you could actually jump into the thread that produced that PR and see how the results came about, or even coach that contributor on how to do better next time. Also might make it easier to hand off work from one person to another - right now most coding agent sessions are user-local. On (2), I frequently find myself consuming agents' gigantic text responses and tediously writing 8-bullet-point responses to guide them. It's pretty exhausting. I could see inline comments providing much better ergonomics. All that being said, Zed has largely fallen out of the conversation for "agentic coding tools", and so this feels like their attempt at creating something like the Cursor Agents Window, Codex, or Claude Code. These two features seem compelling, and I understand they're even compatible with other coding harnesses. But I don't know if there's enough there to have a defensible product; if these features are excellent, others will clone them eventually. Regardless, would love to give this a shot!
- ramoz 2mo ago> On (2), I do find myself consuming agents' gigantic text responses, writing 8-bullet-point responses to guide them, then iterating that way. It's pretty exhausting. I could see inline comments providing much better ergonomics. For your 2 plannotator [1] has a nice way to annotate agent messages or documents and its integrated into the agent chat (codex app also adopted the pattern) [1] https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
- maherbeg 2mo agoThe Codex desktop app lets you highlight anything in the transcript and add it to the chat as an annotation.
- quinncom 2mo agoYou can also add comments directly in the diff view and they submit in the next message you send.
- imagetic 2mo agoNathan is on today’s Syntax episode talking about Rust and Zed and Delta: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-development-treats/id1253186678?i=1000782949195 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-devel...
- hooch 2mo agoAlso here, it's a really cool conversation https://syntax.fm/show/1029/the-workflow-of-the-future-with-zed https://syntax.fm/show/1029/the-workflow-of-the-future-with-...
- radicalriddler 2mo agoI expected a release today because they didn't want to date the podcast episode recording date lmao
- Vinnl 2mo agoI can imagine this being useful, but unlike Zed, this looks like it'll come with some fairly significant lock-in. Great for the investors, but it makes me hesitant...
- Sha1rholder 2mo agoAs an indie dev, I'm not really in a position to judge Delta's potential for large-scale collaboration. Maybe Delta will end up being great for teams of all sizes. But I really wish they'd put more care into Zed's core editing experience. In my opinion, Zed has so many bugs and rough edges that it's hard to consider it software that deserves a 1.0 version number. Also, there's still no timeline in sight for GPUI to become a standalone project...
- zcaceres 2mo agoI have been testing the alpha for the last few weeks. It's very good, especially compared to tools like Conductor. Very bullish on where Zed will take Delta!
- jamauro 2mo agoWhat makes it better than Conductor?
- Cu3PO42 2mo agoThis does look legitimately exciting. A surprisingly large pain point when doing agentic work has been commenting on something in a larger plan document. I always find myself summarizing the surrounding text to contextualize a comment when all I really want to do is highlight and click "add comment". Unrelatedly, I have been looking at Zed to centralize my agentic work at $job, where we use different API keys per project to better attribute spend and control model availability based on per-project data protection controls. All of the standard UIs I've tried for this don't really work, but the CLIs mostly do. Using ACP in Zed I was able to bridge that into the UI world and I'm quite happy with it. I signed up for the beta and I look forward to trying it.
- zcaceres 2mo agoDirectly annotating parts of the convo is the feature that really unlocked Delta for me (have been testing the alpha). So much easier than trying to explain to the agent what I'm responding to in their giant text blob.
- inickt 2mo agoThe Codex App has inline comments on output/diffs and it has made such a difference for iterating. Like Delta I expect to see this adopted everywhere. The interesting bit is this type of UI doesn't fit very well in any of the existing terminal TUIs, I have only seen it enabled working well in GUIs.
- Cu3PO42 2mo agoThanks for pointing that out. I tried the Codex App before but didn't see that. I want to like the app, but I'm not sure if it actually fits well to my use case. With my current setup I need to fully quit and restart it if I want to work on a different project (to get it to use a different API key) and I cannot work in two threads belonging to different projects at the same time. Also I generally prefer to handle sandbox the entire agent and disable its internal safeguards. Beside any doubts regarding the quality of the relevant sandbox implementations, I have just gotten my projects to work better this way.
- 2mo ago
- otterley 2mo agoI hate to be that guy who complains about style over substance, but man, is that font they use for body text ugly. Not just the glyphs themselves, but the spacing is way off, too.
- knighthacker 2mo ago[flagged]
- isjejfjjwj 2mo agoYou know it’s ironic that the first featured post showing up on the bottom is one where Zed proudly proclaims to not be doing AI just for the money that’s in it, and all posts that follow it are about AI too… Does Zed even remember it is a code editor? Or are these guys just interested in building more AI slop to add to the never-ending pile? What even is Zed supposed to be at this point?
- JonGretarB 2mo agoIt's a code editor. Are you using it in some other way?
- quux0r 2mo agoI feel like for a little bit I was worried about Zed's ability to stay up to date in the cli coding agent-focused market, but it seems like every time they publish a new product release, it's always very compelling. I feel like they're one of the more promising companies innovating in the space of human-AI interaction, and I'm very excited to see where they go from here. I hope they launch a web-accessible or mobile-accessible app one day. I've been enjoying being able to code from Termux on my phone over SSH or using any of the browser-native orchestration systems.
- morgankrey 2mo agoDelta.dev is the same Rust application as Delta, just compiled to WebAssembly and rendered through WebGL. So it's already web accessible, and can naturally extend to mobile platforms as well! (i worked on this)
- KronisLV 2mo agoWould be cool to have a single-user ADE tool like that from the Zed folks - because Kepler focuses a bit too much on the ticketing integration and Paseo sometimes has issues with sub-agents.
- bearjaws 2mo agoSeems like "multiplayer AI" is the buzz word for next year, just starting to ramp up now.
- slopinthebag 2mo agoI see Zed abandoned their principles regarding AI. Shame, I really do like the editor. Any decent alternatives that aren't VSCode or a Jetbrains product?
- oneeyedpigeon 2mo agoThere's Gram, a fork of Zed without the AI: https://gram-editor.com/ https://gram-editor.com/
- therepanic 2mo agoneovim
- slopinthebag 2mo agoI like using my mouse
- yifanl 2mo agoSublime
- JonGretarB 2mo agoWhat principles do you feel they abandoned?
- enshitificator 2mo ago[flagged]
- subygan 2mo agowouldve been nice to see a video of what theyre talking about. words are so ambiguous in what the product is
- lukaszkorecki 2mo agoI don't quite get it - it reminds me of using Slack as the decision making places, sure it works for hashing out the details, but it's not great for being the decision record store. I'm not sure what is the value of preserving hundreds of lines of conversations about how code came to be if the code keeps changing? What happens in 5 years? Do I have to read the whole transcript just to understand what's going on? AI will summarize it for me? This feels like engaging with a prog lang community for the first time, and answer to a basic question is "this has been covered before, read the IRC chat history" It's not like Pull Requests are perfect, and with discipline they do the job well - but this looks like a step in the wrong direction.
- vehemenz 2mo agoIf one builds something with an agent, the process itself is largely opaque. Preserving the transcript shows the reasoning of the agent and the decision process of the builder. This way everyone's on the same page instead of re-prompting same CLAUDE.md but with different results, and/or going through similar work over and over again.
- lukaszkorecki 2mo agoI understand the point, but shouldn't the code be documented and well structured so that the intent is clear without looking at the discussion around changes? I'm working on a legacy system right now - I'd commit several felonies just to have well documented code, I don't really care about all the conversations that the original team had to decide what they eventually did. Maybe I'm just too old and don't get it.
- anthonypasq 2mo agosurely you could imagine that being able to sit in on a meeting that was had when they were designing the system would be useful for you? theres a lot of context and decision making that is useful but not documented in the code. The code tells you how the system works, not how its supposed to work.
- Palmik 2mo agoDoesn't appear to be opensource (and neither is DeltaDB, it seems), unlike Zed. Any plans to change that?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- gandhiandy69 2mo agoNice my company will instantly block this if I use it.
- alberth 2mo agoRelated HN post. Last week, 300+ comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187256
- v3ss0n 2mo agoZed in Identity crisis.
- j_rosenberg 2mo agoHonest question, do any of you actually use this type of multiplayer feature in editors? I have worked on small, medium, large and FAANG(Google and Amazon) companies. Never have I seen anyone, even talking about coding with somebody else in the same editor. Edit: grammar
- ale 2mo agoBecause nobody's actually implemented it properly. VSCode's live share came close but was buggy and unusable.
- karma_daemon 2mo agoHave been following this for a while, but honestly still not exactly clear to me who/what this tool is meant for After all, we already have safe conccurent edits, etc via regular git tooling To me it this seems a bit backwards looking. Increasingly code review is more on verifying the functional requirements, and less about reading every line an agent has written (or watching it write those lines live)
- shimman 2mo agoSure, they're backed by a VC company that is all in on LLM hysteria so everything they backed will have to back that narrative so they can dump their wares for a profit. It will cause the community to fail because VC dev tooling is unsustainable as the community needs will never take priority over what their VC benefactors want. So if you want the slop that helps you pump out slop they got you covered. It sounds counter intuitive but you have to remember nearly every business of the planet operates as a centrally planned economy with either a monarch at the helm or an aristocracy. These are some of the least efficient ways to collaborate as humans, at least if history is anything to go by. I suggest you focus on real open source solutions like neovim, emacs, or helix.
- iluvcommunism 2mo ago[dead]
- radicalriddler 2mo agoi've had a similar idea for a while. Creating almost a multiplayer grill-me interface so teams can collaborate on spec definitions. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
- TheEnder8 2mo agoThe name is terrible. Maybe this is vanity, but theres too many conflicting names. Delta airlines, delta dental, delta faucets, etc
- eviks 2mo ago> We could have added DeltaDB to Zed, and eventually we will. But the best possible experience required an entirely new kind of application The following demo is a version of a text editor - a chat window and a diff. How would building a new limited text editor be the best possible experience? Like you've setup your Zed schemes/keybinds to your liking, why would jumping to a totally different app improve your experience?
- pennomi 2mo agoPresumably it’s easier to iterate upon and judge solely on its own merits when it’s a standalone application. Maybe this isn’t optimized for user comfort, but for efficient product exploration (for now).
- eviks 2mo agoIf it's not optimized for user comfort, don't say it is? Also don’t understand the presumption, what makes it easier?
- aanet 2mo agoOff-topic: Sorry, my brain just fried trying to read the post. Aside from the H1 and H2 headers, nearly everything on the page is ultra-low contrast. Darkish gray text combined with the faded gray background, along with the (nearly) undetectable highlight makes for a terrible reading experience. I'm sorry, but somebody has to say it. Surely it can't just be my own eyes that are squinting to see the images and the small text therein? The page design as such is fairly minimal with bold blue theme; would it hurt to add a bit more contrast to the typography? Thanks /offtopic
- maipen 2mo agoYeah it just feels like the whole post is unimportant.
- thefourthchime 2mo agoIt also seemed mostly AI, which made me think, okay, I'll copy and paste this and have a model summarize it for me, but it seemed, I don't know, low effort, not interesting. I didn't even bother. There seems to be this push towards more agents, more better. Me no write code, me just yell at box. But recently I've actually gone the other way. I stopped using the frontier models and just started using cursor auto. Mostly because it's just insanely fast, like 20 times faster than the frontier stuff. And it really isn't that bad. If it screws up, it's fine, I can fix it quickly. If the frontier models screw up, I just burned two hours. The last thing I want to do is burn $20,000 worth of tokens overnight, to realize they made a complete mess.
- skydhash 2mo agoWhen it was the policy to use AI tooling, that’s all I ever used. And it was mostly one or two prompts in most conversations to get things done. Get a first version generated by the AI and fix the issues manually.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2mo agoThis was my experience with the editor as well. For about 2 seconds, I admired how clean it was. I then struggled to read anything at all and haven't reopened it since. (Edit to get ahead of the comments: I'm sure I can change it. Customization is important. Almost as important as good defaults)
- vadepaysa 2mo agomaybe I am old. has anyone else really tired to collaboratively chat with an agent like this? in my experience, people on my team tend to work more in isolation with agents. Ive never seen them collaborate ON the chat. they do collaborate on the PR...
- tudorg 2mo agoI was hoping Zed will do a really good built-in diff editor with AI notes and comments, like https://github.com/modem-dev/hunk https://github.com/modem-dev/hunk Perhaps this is going into this direction? I kind of like the Hunk workflow for reviews (of both AI and human-generated code), you basically tell the agent "walk me through the diff by annotating and controlling this diff viewer". If it could control Zed diff views it would be even better.
- SwellJoe 2mo agoI think Zed is an excellent editor (fast!) with a pretty good AI agent built-in, but I have no desire to do multi-player development in my editor. Never have had any such desire. Coding is a single-player game and I can't think of a single thing that would be improved by having someone else in the same editor. So, this seems like a lot of work on really cool tech for no useful purpose at all? Are there people crying out for a multi-user code editor? I mean, we have to have code reviews, sure. That involves other people or other agents. But, I don't need to stand over someone's shoulder while they work. That seems like the worst thing in the world for everyone involved. I don't want an audience for my dumb looking experiments because I forgot how to do something.
- gpm 2mo agoYeah, I think there's a lot of fans of "pair programming", including the zed people...
- SwellJoe 2mo agoI remember the fad. I was around for the Extreme Programming era. But, I've never worked anywhere that pair programming was the norm, nor have I known any developers that wanted to pair program, in the general case. My personal experience is, of course, not representative of an entire industry, but I just have a hard time imagining it being a common thing. I like working with other people and helping juniors sort out their problems, but I'd quit my job if I had to take turns writing code while someone else watched and just sitting and watching someone else writing code. Both of those things seem horrible, to me.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2mo agoI happened to "pair program" for the first time in years today! My coworker asked me to come over and help him with a problem. 'course we only did it for like 5 min to get him over the hump. I think that's the only use case. It sucks having someone hover over you otherwise.
- 2mo ago
- rarisma 2mo agoI feel like this fails to explain the benefits over something like git worktrees, like whats the benefit?
- beannt 2mo ago[flagged]
- xyst 2mo agoI don’t understand the point of this. Now we need 2 or more humans to micromanage LLM(s)? What happened to using "adversarial LLM"? Too expensive for plebs? So this is the middle ground? I think zed has lost the plot. When will this ai slop era end? Hopefully soon because I am tired of reviewing junk PRs
- mifydev 2mo agoHuh. The idea is interesting, but I don't understand the decision of keeping it chat-like: it looks like the mix of the worst parts of Google Docs and Slack, I struggle to see how this will help people track decisions. This can be improved though - I think that simply a separate collaborative doc and a chat linked to that doc would work way better.
- NateEag 2mo agoMy personal hatred of LLMs aside, an I the only one who thinks "saving the conversation" is an incredibly naive and useless approach? The conversation may have been long and meandering, for legitimate reasons, but what matters is the decision you reached at the end and the reasons for the choice. If your project cares about those things, they should be captured in your specifications / docs / ADRs, in a concise form that respects the reader's time. If you don't care about why the choices were made, then why save the discussion in a fancy database at all? I guess everyone's just too cool to actually write good docs now? (I've had some runins with the auto-generate specs based on LLM chats tools lately, like OpenSpec and an internal equivalent, and boy do I have some choice words about them. So much verbosity for so little clarity...)
- eviks 2mo ago> they should be captured in your specifications / docs / ADRs, in a concise form that respects the reader's time. And if'n they don't? What should the disrespected reader of the future do, not use the non-concise form? > I guess everyone's just too cool to actually write good docs now? They've always been cool like that, good docs have always been rare and precious
- NateEag 2mo ago> And if'n they don't? What should the disrespected reader of the future do, not use the non-concise form? Sure, the reader should still use what's there. I thought we were discussing the best ways for a team to structure its codebases and processes for comprehension, not how to survive in the face of bad techniques. > They've always been cool like that, good docs have always been rare and precious Yeah, that's certainly true. I feel like it's gotten worse since the grand LLM invasion, but maybe I'm off-base.
- oefrha 2mo agoIs anyone who’s not a control freak employer/manager actually excited about storing every single agent conversation alongside code in an easy to reference manner? It’s like attaching all office chat recordings and screencasts of your working hours to code for eternity. Just suffocating, and easily abused by nosy people. Plus a substantial percentage of people in the industry probably never used git blame ffs.
- ghost-of-dmr 2mo agoI'm sorry, but this so-called "minimal code editor" jumped the shark a long time ago.
- waterTanuki 2mo agoSo the Zed team essentially sidelined numerous requests for a UI extension API to make something that will only ever be used in demos. Good thing I can just fork the editor. This is how you lose the trust and goodwill of your users.
- kurtis_reed 2mo agoMultiplayer? It's a game?
- ambicapter 2mo ago"Collaborative Agentic Editing" "Why you'd do that code like that?" "Dunno, that's what Cursor did" "Cool"
- chrysoprace 2mo agoI'll have to give it a go to fully understand the use case, but I can't see the value in keeping the work-in-progress artifacts. The sharing aspect is niche, and I could see some use depending on team workflow. I guess it's one step better than "Claude said".
- redmoonx 2mo agoWait, do Canadians say "Gen Zed"????
- cawksuwcka 2mo ago[dead]
- aetherspawn 2mo agoHas anyone figured out how to get agents to reliably rewrite an entire spec to not be a list of historical findings? Ie convert a history roll into an actual spec? I find my agents can’t figure this out. And they always do stuff like append 2026-05-10: BIG LOAD BEARING UPDATE blah blah to the end of documentation, which ultimately confuses the thinking trace of future agents. I would expect the same thing to happen here if the thread gets too large.
- vednig 2mo agoI see this link from zed and immediately know it must be something agentic to be on the front page of HN HN used to be the best tech source in the world, to discuss new ideas and non main stream unconventional tech, but now everything seems like AI this AI that Even though Zed has done a lot of good work on improving the IDE experience, the only way I see it coming on HN top page is if they showed the AI, and that's too sad
- Uptrenda 2mo agoIt looks interesting. Maybe this is an ignorant question though but doesn't claude basically force you to use all their software to use agents though? So if you were to use claude with delta you would pay insane fees because it would force API pricing? Or is this system more for local agents?
- polynomial 2mo ago"talking about code is how software gets written." This is a good sound bite for our times but I'm not convinced it's not carrying a big secret.
- radium3d 2mo agoThis sounds a lot like Grok [4.6] CLI. It already pings multiplayer style between multiple agents, and you can even request that it split large tasks into small chunks across agents to reduce context overload and it seems to do that very well.
- yellow_lead 2mo agoThis is a cool party trick but I'm afraid Zed lost the plot by pivoting completely to AI. Like so many companies
- riwsky 2mo agoAt the current pace of innovation, the 2020s might even see us catch up to where Google Wave was in 2009. Exciting times.
- marcalc 2mo agoZed is looking more and more prone to a fork by the day. :-/ Not to say no to innovation and experimentation in the age of LLMs, but meanwhile these get shipped, community contributions to sort basic filesystem events to ensure all files are monitored get sidelined without PR reviews and approvals for weeks/months.
- wraptile 2mo agoI feel like I have to call out Zed for still having completely broken LLM support in almost entire continent of Asia for over a year now with no official response¹ just because they can't route http requests. Bad look for their LLM workflow push. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/29962 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/29962
- NetOpWibby 2mo agoMight be time to fire up Sublime Text again.
- localhoster 2mo agoI assume they gonna have pull us a "arc" rag pull. Zed is going to die 'cause they cant capitalize on it, delta is going to be sold to investors, and then zed is gonnabe closed sourced 'cause now they need it as the engine for this hot mess. Perfect! Luckily I sticked with Vim!
- jillesvangurp 2mo agoInteresting, I've been looking at this space with a realization that there's a big piece of UX missing to enable groups of people to collaborate with AI support. Basically most companies and teams spend a lot of time talking to each other. It's why I like small teams. It just leaves a lot more quality time for getting stuff done. But even in a small team, you need to communicate. So, multiplayer AI coding actually makes a lot of sense. Instead of handing off via traditional tools (issue trackers, version control), why not invite a colleague to some ongoing coding session. The AI has full context there. It could actually decide by itself to invite your colleague. So instead of throwing a PR at a colleague, you transfer the full context of the work and your colleague maybe does some fine tuning and checking before creating the PR. Or you could pair prompt on a more difficult chunk of work. Or you could create sub threads with different people involved. It's all about having a shared context. And actually knowing what was asked or how the system was prompted is as important as what was generated. Prompting is now a big part of how software development process. So why only review the output as a team? Prompting is where the big mistakes get made. Prompting effectively is what you need to teach junior developers now. Doing it in the context of a team chat tool, makes it easier to mentor, supervise, pair, etc. Interesting in this context is that Anthropic hired all the leadership behind Zulip (an OSS team chat tool) a few months ago. That suggests they might be working on this exact topic.
- shikck200 2mo agoGod i hate this non stop AI slopfest
- woadwarrior01 2mo agoThis is so reminiscent of Cider (Google's internal cloud IDE) which had the best multiplayer support that I've ever seen. It was such a joy to pair program with a colleague on a different continent.
- hnea3ekp5i 2mo agoInstant bookmark
- markusw 2mo agoI really liked Zed for a couple of months, when AI tab code completion was the frontier. But now I don’t hand-edit files anymore, so Zed is mostly a fast file reader for me. I understand why a team focused on an editor would do this, because they have to figure out where to fit into this new world. I guess I’m mostly looking for a product now that lets me review large amounts of code easily, add comments, and interact with many agents working on the same codebase in worktrees (or similar) at once. I’m unsure whether this would be something like that?
- hl11jp 2mo agoI have no use for this but it's actually a cool feature. Might use it on the job.
- theappsecguy 2mo agoI love zed but i wish they'd focus on the IDE for those of us that still love, write and read a ton of code for serious work. Webstorm continues to be better for TS, Goland better for Go and so on; Zed lacks too much of core functionality at the moment to be the main interface of choice
- chriddyp 2mo agoThis is a really cool idea. So much context is lost within agent conversations these days, and it requires far too much discipline to have the conversation between you and your agent in a shared place like GitHub (plus, thee conversation isn't always just a comment and response - it's... an actual conversation). I'm very glad to see folks innovating in this space.
- redwood 2mo agoSounds like they're trying to get ahead of Superlogical