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- Hacker News
- 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.by quux0r
- Delta.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)
by morgankrey - > 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?
by eviks - Presumably 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).by pennomi
- Nathan is on today’s Syntax episode talking about Rust and Zed and Delta:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-devel...
by imagetic - I expected a release today because they didn't want to date the podcast episode recording date lmao
- Also here, it's a really cool conversation https://syntax.fm/show/1029/the-workflow-of-the-future-with-...by hooch
- 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!
- It'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.by zcaceres
- I 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.by JonGretarB
- My 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...)
by NateEag - > 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
by eviks - 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.
- If 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.by vehemenz
- > Do I have to read the whole transcript just to understand what's going on?
No but you will want all of the transcripts anyway.
> AI will summarize it for me?
Not exactly. You will have some question later that you would never have entertained during your thousands of conversations about code.
You’ll ask your AI something fairly abstract but it will be deep in the context of some other idea.
And the AI will find among all your conversations those turns that are relevant to solving your problem or explaining why.
I know this is the case because I’ve built this and use it every day.
Here are some examples:
I shared these and more in my post in the August “what are you working on?” thread. [0]1. Resume unfinished work → "where did we leave off on that?" 2. Recover the intent/scope → "what was the actual goal of this whole effort?" 3. Verify it got done → "did we ever finish that, and which session proves it?" 4. Recall a fix → "how did we fix this the last time it broke?"You would be amazed how good the agent can be at assembling queries against a corpus of transcripts and assembling the results.
My product is called Contextify: https://contextify.sh
by bredren - 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.
by Cu3PO42 - Directly 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.by zcaceres
- The 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.
by inickt - Precision feedback for CLI-based coding agents is terrible. We built and open sourced PlanBridge (https://plan.contextbridge.ai) to fix this. It is a CLI that lets your coding agent open a local browser with a rendered plan/spec (or just the last agent message) so you can select and comment directly on the text and iterate with precision.by floodfx
- 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?
by the_duke - When cli agents and the models behind them advanced sufficiently, I basically ditched the IDEs/editors with ai built in, and went back to plain fast sublime & vim. Though I'm playing a bit with helix these days. But back to more focused tools instead of a mishmash soup of ui and interactionsby dv_dt
- The product is not an IDE, it is exactly the agent-native experience you're saying is required for current gen models.by zcaceres
- To 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.
by markstos - 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
by aanet - It mostly looks good on Mac!
- It 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.
- Yeah it just feels like the whole post is unimportant.by maipen
- I wouldn't say the contrast is ultralow but it definitely could be improvedby youtubeuser
- This 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)
by OsrsNeedsf2P - 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!
by vipshek