Zed DeltaDB

Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL.

Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system?

Why develop this when the core editor is almost unusable? On Linux wayland, copypaste is broken, the file manager is laggy and snippets do not trigger before the heavy hint logic is done. This is just on top of my head, the list is long

Hmm, yeah before "DeltaDB" I have a big list of things I would rather they develop/fix:

- Vertical activity bar (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecommen... - rejected because it "doesn’t match our design vision for Zed")

This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.

- Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory

- Don't freeze when resuming from suspension (I suspect this is GPU-driver related on linux) forcing me to `killall zed-editor`

Sounds like a side-effect of being VC-backed. Like what the ex GitHub CEO went on to build (Entire). Unnecessary.

I really love Zed and I want them to really succeed. Unfortunately it seems that they are swamped with various things and the issue tracker is not a priority for the team, which fair enough. OSS is a gift and I take it as such. Wild proposal but if someone is willing to start a "user advocate" contributor, I'll be happy to donate monthly so user requests can be taken a look at :)

A non-existent problem that nobody asked to solve...

Looks like a great feature/product/functionality. I hope that Zed editor will make it work with LLMs/agents that run in the terminal, not just the Zen Agent itself. Is it even possible? I use OMP.sh agent running in Zed terminal.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492533 (June 11th, 225 comments)

Is it available now? Still seems to be a waitlist?

I had the great pleasure/misfortune of being forced to work with LaminDB, and I can tell you folks; data provenance isn't going away -- it will be used to train the very AI models snapping at our heels

You can simulate this by having a jj repo with file system watches.

I really don't want management critiquing when I swear at Claude, thanks.

This feels very useful for training agents but almost completely useless to humans? Do I really want to go back to every change I made? Whatuse would that be?

So is this basically Beads + Dolt? This isn’t to diminish it, it’d be great if this ends up being a less “vibe code-y” alternative to those.

i think a system that uses git and file system artifacts (txt/md/xml files whatever preference) is much better. eng teams need to define their artifacts, eg plan file, reqs etc whatever is needed and important to that team. the agent convo itself doesn’t add much value IMO and adds unnecessary bloat.

this looks like jetbrains "local changes" but globally synced. "for the agents" mights scare people who jump to think about micromanagers, but these people mostly hide or fake work. even micromanagers will eventually give you an agent to use so it won't matter what is in the change log, what matters is speed+quality. and since you can iterate from any branch you have inginite try and retry possibilities

I have fallen in love with Zed.

I start to sound like a Jujutsu fanboy but...

Jujutsu already does this. I had agent screwing up changeset over couple hour long session and it took one shell command to split on pieces with longer pause.

The only downside is that because of Jujutsu snapshots it can't be used inside sandbox (since all jj commands are mutating)

I really do like Zed, it's snappier than VS code and with pretty good vim emulation. Even through SSH, the native UI allows for no network latency, compared to something like vim+terminal. Like many other posters, I do feel like the core editor is getting worse.

Some issues I've encountered recently at work:

- Routinely encounter bugs with the python language server, it's particularly slow when compared to using VSCode. All that snappiest disappears when finding symbols after the '.' is considerably slower than my typing speed.

- I found similar issues with C++ code bases.

- It's also so hard to debug when something goes wrong. I was trying to find out why pyright keep spinning on startup, but the "LSP logs" never show anything.

- Connecting via SSH always opens the repo in restricted mode, even though I check the "Trust all projects in" checkbox. Never happened before.

- Debugger UI is a mess. Make a run, stop the run, edit the task.json, try running again, and 2 tasks show up. One for the old and one for the new.

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I stuck with it because I really do like the UI, the performance, and initially it seemed to be an improvement from VS Code for my workflows, but lately I've been moving back to code as it seems more stable. I don't really use agent features, so I don't think I'm the target customer for this or other priority Zed features.

I do see the usefulness of something like this, I'm interested to see if the new agentic style of programming will result in the "code" part of editors becoming second class (for the better) and will allow for more rapid development. Although I'm not looking forward to read my coworker's "threads" of how a feature was made, I have a feeling that it will be more difficult to read than the raw code, as from my experience, LLMs don't really employ terse and effective communication (might not be entirely fair, I found ChatGPT /study mode pretty good.)

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Anyone know of a good replacement editor that might meet my usecase? I'm really a batteries included type of developer.

This makes me uncomfortable.

Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I think this just gives micro-managers the data they need to micro-manage you. It invites people to scrutinize the process, instead of the results.

Not once have I wished to review a colleague’s conversation with an AI. I want to review finished work.

I look at this and I can only imagine layoffs being justified with “bad prompt quality”. An incident retrospective broadcasting your agent conversations to the entire company, with people speculating where you should have put the “make no mistakes”.

It’s a shame, really, because I like Zed as an editor, but I can’t bring myself to support them if this is the direction they’re choosing.

What problem does this product solve?

Basically what IntelliJ calls local history. It is a feature that has saved my bacon. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html

Is this closed source?

Snapshots have an intention behind them as a chunk that the programmer thought of. It has infinite flexibility depending on the programmer/team. IMO they are a necessary feature, but the article considers it a bug. It’s an explicit and deliberate chunking of code writing process which is what you want in a chaotic “collaborative” environment. The system doesn’t get to decide but you decide when to commit.

Rust cult stikes again.

It should work with github inbetween commits, that i may use. Right now I'm using staging as an in bewteen in a dangerous way.

This is a big unsolved dev tooling problem. Glad someone competent is working on it.

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