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#code#don#more#zed#git#commits#agent#every#something#around
Discussion (73 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4
The worst actor would write a new module and check nothing in until it kinda worked. I think it went along with the fragile ego that had people sneaking around fixing bugs in his code without talking to him about it first. He wrote convoluted code that exhibited Kernighan's law and he was about 10 years too senior to still be doing that shit. He bragged about how 'powerful' his code was as if that was a compliment instead of a harbinger. Many times I found bugs in code from the initial commit. Just... give me something man. Anything. Fuck.
Just because you tried random shit until you found the problem doesn't mean you have to fess up to it. You can tell any story you want that gets us from point A to point B now that you know point B is attainable. You can rearrange the commits the way you would have written it if you knew exactly what needed to be done. Drop 90% of the code you wrote and immediately deleted again, anything that doesn't support that narrative.
In law enforcement you have something called Parallel Construction. You can know a suspect is guilty by knowing facts that are not admissible in court. So you need to rediscover those same facts by the book. Grab his trash on trash day. Interview neighbors. Get enough circumstantial evidence to get a search warrant, then go find that evidence again.
In my life, I've never liked people who deliberately polish up their articulation to the level that it obfuscates how they arrived at that understanding (whether it's academics or engineers). They might not do it for attention and they might not be doing it knowingly. IMO, they are taking away the opportunity of learning from the people they are talking to. For me the conversation is one sided. I'm there to listen, but rarely can I ask questions, give feedback or grow from where they have possibly reached.
I don't need your fluff. No one cares how you arrived writing another crud line to save an object to database or sent yet another AJAX call.
If you wrote some genuine great compression algorithm that's a different take on compression, I would like to see step by step reasoning and eventual dead ends.
https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r...
you can see that every file has a code block header with a UUID and the AI that was attributed to it. With the UUID, I can tell exactly how the code came about.
What they are working on will be more useful for AI code provenance. It is only a matter of time before you are expected to show your chats with AI as part of the code review and for performance reviews.
So I don't see human collaboration being the main use case. I see tracking, studying and improving the Human-AI relationship...and seeing if somebody should be promoted or not.
An interesting take I've heard is, we will have a token/impact stat where if you spent a shitload of tokens to produce the same impact as somebody else who spent a lot less, you will be the prime candidate for layoffs and/or less pay. This is why I think AI code provenance will become a serious thing in the future.
Seems like you copied the ellipsified version, so what we get is https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r
> DeltaDB breaks your work into a stream of fine-grained deltas. Where Git captures a snapshot at each commit, DeltaDB captures every operation in between and gives each one a stable identity.
I was curious about giving Zed a try, now that it has an emacs keymap. Not anymore. This is such a horribly invasive feature, I absolutely do not want my colleagues reviewing every single intermediate edit, down to the keystroke, that went into the commits I publish for review.
Before I put a PR up for review, I'll sometimes edit my commit history a little bit in magit to make it more linear and digestible--maybe update descriptions, squash some adjacent commits together, etc. This just throws that whole aspect of the job out the window and says "hey, colleague, hoover up this firehose of deltas and enjoy it".
And what the hell does this even mean?
> What we're really after is simple: the conversation with the agent becomes the only conversation you need to have.
Lmao. No. Wrong.
https://github.com/modulecollective/moe
Unless of course you also have to explain your thinking and problem-solving process in meetings, which happens quite a lot the more senior you get.
The git backend already has a ton of "delta DB optimizations" (in git packs and other tools) and it's really just the git frontend that needs a little massaging (`--first-parent`, primarily) and the vast world of "subway-diagram-first/only" Git UIs that should have more "drill down" `--first-parent` counterparts simply because so many people find the subway diagrams ugly/confusing/distasteful.
I can’t help but feel like it is all enabling a level of developer surveillance with which I am deeply uncomfortable, though.
Why stop at zed? The trillion dollar investment AI companies have amassed was nominally for datacenters, but as those costs rise and completion timelines extend past the typical business planning horizon, it becomes more efficient to put the money to work elsewhere. You can buy whatever you want with a trillion dollars.
I personally want better read-only code tools, or maybe the return of UML?
If Gemini seems stupid nowadays, it's only because they're being stingy with compute allocation.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system)
That agents need something "beyond git" is lost on me but it keeps coming up. For one subject the tool doesn't matter -- in fact it can be obtuse like git or bash and it's fine because agents will handle it. Then for another thing the story is opposite.
AI's code writing velocity makes this even worse, there's no way I can be simultaneously working on a code base while an AI agent is running around it doing something else.
It feels like maybe there's a ghost of an idea here about how to get the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure I follow the throughline on it.
i've settled on all of this context attached to issues in a project management system and referenced from commits
it works just fine - its not like your agent cannot read your issue tracker
This benefits those who make the machines you have conversations with and those that invest in them.
One thing I would really love to see, however, is a way to better attach code review comments to the specific version of code they were left on. I find it quite difficult to do with git and github, considering that commit hashes change every time one is forced to rebase (say, for example, to handle a merge conflict).
Do you expect DeltaDB to help address this problem?
> I have never been a big fan of pull requests.
I guess this partly explains why Zed (still) lacks a PR review flow, let alone a coherent one, despite some interest [1]. Pretty much the only reason I’m still with JetBrains.
[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/34759
If previously you needed to take action 1, 2, 3 to go from state A to B, all you saw was the change from A, B. Now you see intermediates 1, 2, 3 and can train the models to skip straight to B with the added context of the intermediate states.
Not without cons of course: commit byte size, public WIP work and leaked secrets/unwanted edits.
Not convinced DeltaDB is useful for humans directly but assume new and interesting interfaces can arise from the abstractions it provides.
Agree that PRs/snapshots is an antiquated way of sharing information.
Many of the product decisions that Zed's made caused me to switch to Zed for my daily driver IDE (previously JetBrains). The recent AI agent threads and improvements around diffs really solidified the move.
Honestly all of this drives me back towards nvim or notepad sometimes.
I have had a jetbrains subscription since pycharm came out, and the killer feature was always the visual debugger. Seems nearly quaint now.
What specific things do you like about zed?
There has also been a lot of discussion about the value of the peer review process recently, in in general. But I wonder if this isn't all going into the wrong direction. Quite honestly, even with the previous review and discussion system of (squashed) commits how often did you really use git blame and opened up the original PR discussion of that changed line that caused the bug? And how often did it help you beyond learning it was done by that rockstar developer who has left long ago? And that the discussion on that PR was a point in time and the code around it has evolves beyond that and it would need looking at another 10 PR discussion to get the entire context.
What I am saying is that git (and before that Subversion and CVS) has a full history is so that it can resolve the latest state. Period. We made that commit ritual somewhat of a hallmark in putting more supposed meaning into recording ever more in that history. But we rarely stopped to check if that is all that useful. Recording even more, all the time, reminds me of these work group meetings that have minute records of every bike shedding meeting word said by everyone, that, honestly, no one ever looks at after the next meeting ever again. I don't think there is value in minute record keeping, it becomes too much noise that just makes it harder to parse. Now also adding all AI conversation and agent thinking to that tree? What's the value of that in like 3 months down the line? I don't see it.
The problem is, is that it works, if you assume "working" means the software sellers get wealthy.
There's a reason that most waitstaff wear black. They should blend into the background, and not be what the folks at the table are talking about. In rare instances, restaurants exist, where the waitstaff is the service.
In software, though, you're being served by a waiter wearing a clown suit, screaming slogans at you, and serving you lukewarm, pre-chewed goo.
The “calm technology” book has an handful of advices, but one of the best example is the xbiff program. It switches picture when you have new mail on your local spool.
I’m highly skeptical of this claim. For any complicated feature, there’s always a design doc (or an RFC, or a wireframe) and that’s what people used for discussion. Discussion in a PR are mostly about whether to accept the code, reject the feature, or provide feedback about alternate implementations. It’s not for pair programming or directing design.
Collaborating together in a research lab (brainstorm session) is not the same as asking feedback for a journal article (PR). What is described in the article is pair programming with extra steps.
1. It is fast and snappy. Nothing comes even close besides vim (and I don't mind going full time to it if I have to)
2. The ability to completely shut off and block any slop machine features from interfering with my workflow or leak code back to sloppenai, sloppus or any other self-installed-worst-security-practice-backdoor garbage.
Having said that, I hope they don't remove that ability in the future and enforce the "slop is so good man, you should try it" philosophy.
I am happy about even though I've never tried gram, because if zed goes to shit there will be an alternative, which hopefully pressures zed to stay sane
> I also object to making myself and my work depend on paying a subscription fee to anyone. I don't want an outage at Anthropic to affect my ability to do my work. I think it is a grave mistake to build anything on such shaky foundations as the sustainability and profit margins of the AI industry.
Someone actually sensible, excellent.
Edit: After further inspection, I think I'm jumping ship before it's too late. And I'll look, see if there's a way to lend a hand or two when I have time!
I also like the AI tools, the inline assistant is good and the agent is also pretty nice and well integrated into the editor without it being the focus point. I'm not against using AI but I certainly don't use it as much as a lot of people do.
That being said, I really dislike this recent push towards becoming more like a cursor wannabe. They have a new (for now) opt-in default layout that almost hides the editor panel in favour of the agent threads and agent panels. And now this. I don't want to switch editors, but if they keep pushing a different workflow from what I use it might send me back to Jetbrains...
Our human ability is not defined by our _absolute_ output, but, by the quality of the _delta_ applied to an engineering artefact
Great engineers obsess over every keystroke
With LLMs, a much smaller number of keystrokes can create a much larger and more positively impactful delta
Every delta to the codebase can tell us some informational property about the behaviour of the system and storing that information WILL prove to be useful in the future