Delta(zed.dev) |
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?
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.
It's when that text gets copied and pasted into a blog, or a PR, etc. that it really galls.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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)
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?
Here they've moved the AI chat to the center and code editor has been pushed to the side.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-devel...
Edit: grammar
(i worked on this)
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.
> 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.
Last week, 300+ comments
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.