Delta

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kkhy about 3 hours ago 83 commentsRead Article on zed.dev

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Discussion (83 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dexwiz•about 3 hours ago

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.

derefr•about 2 hours ago

I wonder if a productive avenue might be "doing aspect-oriented programming in reverse": asking the LLM not to "summarize" the code per se, but rather to "clarify" it by transforming it into what a programming blog post would call a "toy example" of what the code is doing, by stripping out all the (non-semantic) error-handling, logging, metrics incrementing, etc — all the things that you might treat as their own "aspects" under AOP.

cmoski•about 2 hours ago

AI summaries are great for learning which parts of the codebase are load bearing.

r_lee•15 minutes ago

One thing worth flagging: summaries can provide context that is important, but you should always remember to thoroughly comb through the information in case there are caveats in the text that may act as a heads up, which is important.

SJMG•about 2 hours ago

Yes, and that's a finding worth making explicit.

jnpnj•about 1 hour ago

The "language model" aspect shows IMO, at least for someone who grew up with the material of 90s and 2000s where we describe things more in mechanical, engineering terms. When gpt4 landed it was somehow amazing to see the output, but yeah nowadays I keep skimming through the explanation. It's like an intermediate dev who has nothing else to do but create long sentences to describe what could be simpler.

jvuygbbkuurx•about 3 hours ago

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.

o_m•about 1 hour ago

There is a reason Caveman (https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman) is as popular as it is

zahlman•about 3 hours ago

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.

jbdamask•about 1 hour ago

I use AI explainers a lot in my own projects and have skills that give outputs I like. I'll even pipe the output into NotebookLM to make a video sometimes. This is actually a decent way to grok complex subsystems (YMMV).

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.

lucascdotnet•about 2 hours ago

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.

jake_and_fatman•about 2 hours ago

"Bob can be blunt but at least he's honest." Words can have positive or negative connotations for the same notion.

superturkey650•about 2 hours ago

I think he’s saying that’s it’s dense and _too_ full of meaning. So, while terse, it can also hide extra meaning in its density.

Garlef•about 1 hour ago

Ask for a walkthrough of the highlights (with '...' omissions so that the most important parts are quickly visible) instead of a verbal summary.

markstos•about 3 hours ago

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.

cadamsdotcom•about 1 hour ago

Your AI summary is raw output, like uncooked mince meat.

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?

armchairhacker•about 2 hours ago

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…)

findjashua•about 1 hour ago

You're absolutely right!

ModernMech•29 minutes ago

Yes this is why I ask the agent to summarize the code as a comic of a lizard explaining it to a cat.

bmurphy1976•about 2 hours ago

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.

vipshek•about 3 hours ago

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!

ramoz•about 3 hours ago

> 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

maherbeg•about 3 hours ago

The Codex desktop app lets you highlight anything in the transcript and add it to the chat as an annotation.

quinncom•about 2 hours ago

You can also add comments directly in the diff view and they submit in the next message you send.

zcaceres•about 2 hours ago

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.

halfmatthalfcat•about 2 hours ago

Paseo and other agent harnesses can let you work across model providers as well.

the_duke•about 3 hours ago

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?

markstos•about 3 hours ago

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.

alerighi•about 2 hours ago

For me it's probably time to learn to use vim or something similar. I'm the only one that likes coding manually, without all this AI shit? I'm faster writing code myself than trying to explain to artificial stupidity what I intend to do and correct its output. And if I write it myself the code just works, if it's written by the AI it has a ton of bugs. I don't see any value in AI generated code that is not mere code for doing experiments that you don't care about.

pimeys•about 1 hour ago

Hey me too. This is my morning Zen moment refactoring and cleaning some code before I go back to the agent to earn money. One of the only things that helps me to relax is to do some manual coding...

bakugo•about 3 hours ago

The obvious next step is to remove the code editor entirely.

apsurd•about 1 hour ago

It seems reasonable that a professional-tier of software developers will have tools distinct from everyone else. No matter what the percentage looks like, experts will still be a thing that needs different things.

zcaceres•about 2 hours ago

The product is not an IDE, it is exactly the agent-native experience you're saying is required for current gen models.

the_duke•about 2 hours ago

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.

lukaszkorecki•about 2 hours ago

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.

vehemenz•about 2 hours ago

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.

lukaszkorecki•about 1 hour ago

I understand the point, but shouldn't the code be documented and well structured so that the intent is clear without looking at the discussion around changes?

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.

anthonypasq•20 minutes ago

surely you could imagine that being able to sit in on a meeting that was had when they were designing the system would be useful for you?

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.

Cu3PO42•about 2 hours ago

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.

inickt•about 2 hours ago

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.

Cu3PO42•about 1 hour ago

Thanks for pointing that out. I tried the Codex App before but didn't see that.

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.

zcaceres•about 2 hours ago

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.

karma_daemon•about 1 hour ago

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)

shimman•29 minutes ago

Sure, they're backed by a VC company that is all in on LLM hysteria so everything they backed will have to back that narrative so they can dump their wares for a profit.

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.

NoDodgeQuestion•about 3 hours ago

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!

JonGretarB•about 1 hour ago

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.

zcaceres•about 2 hours ago

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.

imagetic•about 3 hours ago

Nathan is on today’s Syntax episode talking about Rust and Zed and Delta:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/syntax-tasty-web-devel...

hooch•39 minutes ago

Also here, it's a really cool conversation https://syntax.fm/show/1029/the-workflow-of-the-future-with-...

radicalriddler•15 minutes ago

I expected a release today because they didn't want to date the podcast episode recording date lmao

Sha1rholder•about 2 hours ago

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...

j_rosenberg•about 1 hour ago

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

ale•25 minutes ago

Because nobody's actually implemented it properly. VSCode's live share came close but was buggy and unusable.

TheEnder8•3 minutes ago

The name is terrible. Maybe this is vanity, but theres too many conflicting names. Delta airlines, delta dental, delta faucets, etc

quux0r•about 2 hours ago

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.

morgankrey•about 2 hours ago

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)

quux0r•5 minutes ago

Awesome! I'll for sure look into that.

radicalriddler•16 minutes ago

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.

handfuloflight•about 3 hours ago

Would be nice for Zed to announce something that was immediately available for use.

isjejfjjwj•about 2 hours ago

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 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.

dewey•about 1 hour ago

Just because they started out as a code editor doesn't mean it has to stay that way. I was looking forward to a more modern Sublime Text in Zed but I also know that nobody is going to make money off a simple code editor.

> 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.

zcaceres•about 2 hours ago

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!

v3ss0n•about 1 hour ago

Zed in Identity crisis.

bearjaws•about 2 hours ago

Seems like "multiplayer AI" is the buzz word for next year, just starting to ramp up now.

alberth•about 1 hour ago