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.
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.
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.
I'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.
I 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.
I'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.
We 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…)
Right, 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.
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.
> 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)
It's a solid experience so far (have been testing the alpha). Being able to work across model providers in parallel is my preference, rather than being stuck in Codex desktop, for example.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Would 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 that road.
This thing is now just a white-label version of Visual Code. Nothing more. Nothing less. Same software, different case.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'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.
I 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.
I'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.
We 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…)
AI summaries are great for learning which parts of the codebase are load bearing.
Yes, and that's a finding worth making explicit.
I 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.
Right, 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.
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!
> 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
It's a solid experience so far (have been testing the alpha). Being able to work across model providers in parallel is my preference, rather than being stuck in Codex desktop, for example.
Paseo and other agent harnesses can let you work across model providers as well.
The Codex desktop app lets you highlight anything in the transcript and add it to the chat as an annotation.
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 here compared to the alternatives.
I reckon the game here has to be adding a service that stores the data and runs agent sessions?
The product is not an IDE, it is exactly the agent-native experience you're saying is required for current gen models.
I guess my main point is that the additional features on top of DeltaDB don't seem terribly important to me anymore, compared to the alternatives.
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.
The obvious next step is to remove the code editor entirely.
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.
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.
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.
Nathan is on today’s Syntax episode talking about Rust and Zed and Delta:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-devel...
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...
Would be nice for Zed to announce something that was immediately available for use.
Would 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 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.
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 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?
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.