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Does anyone else hate reading AI summaries of code? Code can be pithy, but at least its terse compared to prose. When you add how verbose LLMs can be, I often end up reading a paragraph to explain a few lines. Or the opposite happens where the summary skips important edge cases or criteria. "You're right, X also does Y. I missed that in my initial analysis," is much too common of a phrase.
I like the idea of using LLMs to transform code into something more readable, and vice versa. I am not sure if meandering paragraphs and linear lists are the best targets.
Off-topic:
Sorry, my brain just fried trying to read the post.
Aside from the H1 and H2 headers, nearly everything on the page is ultra-low contrast.
Darkish gray text combined with the faded gray background, along with the (nearly) undetectable highlight makes for a terrible reading experience. I'm sorry, but somebody has to say it.
Surely it can't just be my own eyes that are squinting to see the images and the small text therein? The page design as such is fairly minimal with bold blue theme; would it hurt to add a bit more contrast to the typography?
Thanks
/offtopic
This is intriguing. The two relevant features seem to be 1) realtime collaborative multiplayer conversations and 2) conversation-as-document - basically, letting you comment inline in an agent conversation.
For (1), the main value I'd see is in mentoring junior engineers or less technical contributors on a team. If someone puts up a PR with sloppy results, you could actually jump into the thread that produced that PR and see how the results came about, or even coach that contributor on how to do better next time. Also might make it easier to hand off work from one person to another - right now most coding agent sessions are user-local.
On (2), I frequently find myself consuming agents' gigantic text responses and tediously writing 8-bullet-point responses to guide them. It's pretty exhausting. I could see inline comments providing much better ergonomics.
All that being said, Zed has largely fallen out of the conversation for "agentic coding tools", and so this feels like their attempt at creating something like the Cursor Agents Window, Codex, or Claude Code. These two features seem compelling, and I understand they're even compatible with other coding harnesses. But I don't know if there's enough there to have a defensible product; if these features are excellent, others will clone them eventually.
Regardless, would love to give this a shot!
I'm sure this seemed like a great idea a year ago (they first mentioned it with their Series B).
But a lot has changed in those 12 months.
Frontier models and coding agents have advanced so much that I don't really see much value in this anymore.
Not sure the DeltaDB based features really add anything significant compared to the alternatives.
I reckon the game here has to be adding a service that stores the data and runs agent sessions?
I don't quite get it - it reminds me of using Slack as the decision making places, sure it works for hashing out the details, but it's not great for being the decision record store. I'm not sure what is the value of preserving hundreds of lines of conversations about how code came to be if the code keeps changing? What happens in 5 years? Do I have to read the whole transcript just to understand what's going on? AI will summarize it for me?
This feels like engaging with a prog lang community for the first time, and answer to a basic question is "this has been covered before, read the IRC chat history"
It's not like Pull Requests are perfect, and with discipline they do the job well - but this looks like a step in the wrong direction.
> 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?
This does look legitimately exciting. A surprisingly large pain point when doing agentic work has been commenting on something in a larger plan document. I always find myself summarizing the surrounding text to contextualize a comment when all I really want to do is highlight and click "add comment".
Unrelatedly, I have been looking at Zed to centralize my agentic work at $job, where we use different API keys per project to better attribute spend and control model availability based on per-project data protection controls. All of the standard UIs I've tried for this don't really work, but the CLIs mostly do. Using ACP in Zed I was able to bridge that into the UI world and I'm quite happy with it.
I signed up for the beta and I look forward to trying it.
Huh. The idea is interesting, but I don't understand the decision of keeping it chat-like: it looks like the mix of the worst parts of Google Docs and Slack, I struggle to see how this will help people track decisions.
This can be improved though - I think that simply a separate collaborative doc and a chat linked to that doc would work way better.
So, DeltaDB is not for Zed, but for an entirely new product? At least it won't bloat the editor...
Nevertheless another Zed post, another plea to focus on basics https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 [how can developers work with agents in zed when developers cannot see files agents create] best luck to Delta but please do not neglect the text editor!
Nathan is on today’s Syntax episode talking about Rust and Zed and Delta:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-devel...
I was hoping Zed will do a really good built-in diff editor with AI notes and comments, like https://github.com/modem-dev/hunk Perhaps this is going into this direction?
I kind of like the Hunk workflow for reviews (of both AI and human-generated code), you basically tell the agent "walk me through the diff by annotating and controlling this diff viewer". If it could control Zed diff views it would be even better.
Have been following this for a while, but honestly still not exactly clear to me who/what this tool is meant for
After all, we already have safe conccurent edits, etc via regular git tooling
To me it this seems a bit backwards looking. Increasingly code review is more on verifying the functional requirements, and less about reading every line an agent has written (or watching it write those lines live)
I feel like for a little bit I was worried about Zed's ability to stay up to date in the cli coding agent-focused market, but it seems like every time they publish a new product release, it's always very compelling. I feel like they're one of the more promising companies innovating in the space of human-AI interaction, and I'm very excited to see where they go from here. I hope they launch a web-accessible or mobile-accessible app one day. I've been enjoying being able to code from Termux on my phone over SSH or using any of the browser-native orchestration systems.
As an indie dev, I'm not really in a position to judge Delta's potential for large-scale collaboration. Maybe Delta will end up being great for teams of all sizes. But I really wish they'd put more care into Zed's core editing experience. In my opinion, Zed has so many bugs and rough edges that it's hard to consider it software that deserves a 1.0 version number. Also, there's still no timeline in sight for GPUI to become a standalone project...
I have been testing the alpha for the last few weeks. It's very good, especially compared to tools like Conductor. Very bullish on where Zed will take Delta!
I feel like this fails to explain the benefits over something like git worktrees, like whats the benefit?
Would be nice for Zed to announce something that was immediately available for use.
Honest question, do any of you actually use this type of multiplayer feature in editors? I have worked on small, medium, large and FAANG(Google and Amazon) companies. Never have I seen anyone, even talking about coding with somebody else in the same editor.
Edit: grammar
maybe I am old. has anyone else really tired to collaboratively chat with an agent like this? in my experience, people on my team tend to work more in isolation with agents. Ive never seen them collaborate ON the chat. they do collaborate on the PR...
Zed in Identity crisis.
Doesn't appear to be opensource (and neither is DeltaDB, it seems), unlike Zed. Any plans to change that?
Seems like "multiplayer AI" is the buzz word for next year, just starting to ramp up now.
Would be cool to have a single-user ADE tool like that from the Zed folks - because Kepler focuses a bit too much on the ticketing integration and Paseo sometimes has issues with sub-agents.
i'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.
I can imagine this being useful, but unlike Zed, this looks like it'll come with some fairly significant lock-in. Great for the investors, but it makes me hesitant...
You know it’s ironic that the first featured post showing up on the bottom is one where Zed proudly proclaims to not be doing AI just for the money that’s in it, and all posts that follow it are about AI too…
Does Zed even remember it is a code editor? Or are these guys just interested in building more AI slop to add to the never-ending pile? What even is Zed supposed to be at this point?
Nice my company will instantly block this if I use it.
wouldve been nice to see a video of what theyre talking about. words are so ambiguous in what the product is
I see Zed abandoned their principles regarding AI. Shame, I really do like the editor. Any decent alternatives that aren't VSCode or a Jetbrains product?
The name is terrible. Maybe this is vanity, but theres too many conflicting names. Delta airlines, delta dental, delta faucets, etc
I hate to be that guy who complains about style over substance, but man, is that font they use for body text ugly. Not just the glyphs themselves, but the spacing is way off, too.
I 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
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I think Zed is an excellent editor (fast!) with a pretty good AI agent built-in, but I have no desire to do multi-player development in my editor. Never have had any such desire. Coding is a single-player game and I can't think of a single thing that would be improved by having someone else in the same editor.
So, this seems like a lot of work on really cool tech for no useful purpose at all?
Are there people crying out for a multi-user code editor? I mean, we have to have code reviews, sure. That involves other people or other agents. But, I don't need to stand over someone's shoulder while they work. That seems like the worst thing in the world for everyone involved. I don't want an audience for my dumb looking experiments because I forgot how to do something.