I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process.
I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible.
This is why I use rebase before PRs, and despise squash. You are not going to remember why you wrote that code that way 2 years from now and all we'll have to understand bugs and identify Chesterton's Fence situations is the deltas and the commit history. If you squash them I have 400 lines of code you 'wrote' all at the same time and only have the feature request it was assigned to as context. Thanks for nothing.
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.
Don't be afraid to show your thoughts when asked to. The best developers are those that can express their thoughts clearly at any stage throughout their process. This is one of the skills that shows to me the level of experience a developer has.
Fully agree, very icky surveillance vibes. In particular:
> 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.
The more I think about it and your comment the more I wish it was local only. It could be useful to analyze your editing habits and interactions with AI but I want that for my own benefit not random coworkers
There are so many early-stage startups also competing in this space right now. I’ve been on the interview circuit the past few weeks and talked to at least two. It’s going to be stiff competition for any of these tools to get well-established enough to be successful at a large scale.
I can’t help but feel like it is all enabling a level of developer surveillance with which I am deeply uncomfortable, though.
I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good.
Ya, their coding harness is way better than Claude code, but because it’s directly using the clause api it’s way more expensive. Rolling it into the family would make it product-class-defining.
> I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good.
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 don’t see the value proposition here. I’ve seen roughly this feature proposed by multiple companies, and absolutely none of the have given a convincing reason for the technology to exist.
This seems like a great way to facilitate data gathering for improving LLMs coding performance.
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.
so i think the thing that everyone building these git alternatives is missing is a multi-repo story - unless the expectation is that everyone is going to start operating out of monorepos
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
I've built some skills to help work with multiple repos, but it's really annoying how e.g. repo-specific .claude/ configs are only read when you start the agent in the repo folder. There's a ton of low hanging fruit to improve dev experience.
A commit is useful because you cleaned it up first. The messing around in between is where you try things and delete the dead ends and most of it is meant to be thrown away. Saving every change and every agent message keeps all that junk around instead.
Just a stream of thoughts: if git commits were a list of sequential primitive changes instead of diff snapshots, conflict resolution would be trivial in most cases.
Not without cons of course: commit byte size, public WIP work and leaked secrets/unwanted edits.
Well shoot, they beat me to the punch. I’d been circling around something like this, just not collaborative and obviously more thought out than my random experiments. Minus the collab portions I’m interested to see how it compares to jujutsu
I'm glad to see this feature and looking forward to see how it evolves.
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.
I hate software tools now. I really do. A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly. If you think about your hammer it’s because something is wrong with it.
It's not just tools. Pretty much all software is like that.
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.
I use OpenBSD as a daily driver (but could use Alpine or VoidLinux too) and my setup is pretty much silent. No notifications, no rainbows of colors, no glitz. Let’s take mail. I use a combination of mutt hto directly connect via imap) and fdm/mu4e (to have them locally). I”m not interested in having counters or notifications for any of those.
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.
> Before agents, it was easier to believe that the ceremony of trading comments on snapshots was an effective way to collaborate on software,
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.
I really like Zed. It's customisable enough for me to make it look how I want, it's faster than every other editor I've tried (scrolling is silk, zero lag anywhere), it has enough features that I don't need an IDE (debugger, refactoring tools), and it generally gets out of my way.
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...
I'll probably get more hate for saying this but fine: I use Zed 50% of the time (the other 50% dedicated to vim) for two reasons:
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
Oh, that's a breath of fresh air. And they are on codeberg. Nice! Thank you!
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!
With LLMs now being responsible for the physical typing of code and mundane plumbing tasks, this is a wise direction to go into
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
I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process.
I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4
This is why I use rebase before PRs, and despise squash. You are not going to remember why you wrote that code that way 2 years from now and all we'll have to understand bugs and identify Chesterton's Fence situations is the deltas and the commit history. If you squash them I have 400 lines of code you 'wrote' all at the same time and only have the feature request it was assigned to as context. Thanks for nothing.
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.
The collaboration part I’m skeptical of but I get it, as it sounds like a feature made for business consumers
Don't be afraid to show your thoughts when asked to. The best developers are those that can express their thoughts clearly at any stage throughout their process. This is one of the skills that shows to me the level of experience a developer has.
Fully agree, very icky surveillance vibes. In particular:
> 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.
The more I think about it and your comment the more I wish it was local only. It could be useful to analyze your editing habits and interactions with AI but I want that for my own benefit not random coworkers
Aren't you paid to think?
A woodworker is paid to work with wood. But the finished product is the worked wood, not a detailed summary of how the wood was worked with.
No I'm paid to write code.
No, you are paid to provide solutions for your customers.
Does that... Not imply thinking avout what you are writing???
and you can do that without thinking?
There are so many early-stage startups also competing in this space right now. I’ve been on the interview circuit the past few weeks and talked to at least two. It’s going to be stiff competition for any of these tools to get well-established enough to be successful at a large scale.
I can’t help but feel like it is all enabling a level of developer surveillance with which I am deeply uncomfortable, though.
I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good.
Ya, their coding harness is way better than Claude code, but because it’s directly using the clause api it’s way more expensive. Rolling it into the family would make it product-class-defining.
They drove up to my house with a dump truck full of money... Im not made of stone!
> I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good.
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.
Seems like where anthropic or openai want to go, there are no editors anymore.
I personally want better read-only code tools, or maybe the return of UML?
I think it's the other way around. OpenAI is definitely recreating the IDE from scratch with codex app.
I don’t see the value proposition here. I’ve seen roughly this feature proposed by multiple companies, and absolutely none of the have given a convincing reason for the technology to exist.
Sad to see zed going the same route everybody is screaming them not to. Altough, I never expected otherwise.
What route is that, and why is everyone screaming at them, for someone out of the loop?
I swear a lot in my chats with Claude..
This seems like a great way to facilitate data gathering for improving LLMs coding performance.
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.
so i think the thing that everyone building these git alternatives is missing is a multi-repo story - unless the expectation is that everyone is going to start operating out of monorepos
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
I came across the conclusion here since a change sometimes spans several repos, per-repo history optimizes the wrong target.
I've built some skills to help work with multiple repos, but it's really annoying how e.g. repo-specific .claude/ configs are only read when you start the agent in the repo folder. There's a ton of low hanging fruit to improve dev experience.
A commit is useful because you cleaned it up first. The messing around in between is where you try things and delete the dead ends and most of it is meant to be thrown away. Saving every change and every agent message keeps all that junk around instead.
Just a stream of thoughts: if git commits were a list of sequential primitive changes instead of diff snapshots, conflict resolution would be trivial in most cases.
Not without cons of course: commit byte size, public WIP work and leaked secrets/unwanted edits.
Well shoot, they beat me to the punch. I’d been circling around something like this, just not collaborative and obviously more thought out than my random experiments. Minus the collab portions I’m interested to see how it compares to jujutsu
Music is the silence between notes
I'm glad to see this feature and looking forward to see how it evolves.
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.
JetBrains’ AI offering peaked last year when Junie was briefly better than Codex. Now it’s a wash.
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?
I hate software tools now. I really do. A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly. If you think about your hammer it’s because something is wrong with it.
It's not just tools. Pretty much all software is like that.
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.
Ah, McDonald’s isn’t that bad.
I use OpenBSD as a daily driver (but could use Alpine or VoidLinux too) and my setup is pretty much silent. No notifications, no rainbows of colors, no glitz. Let’s take mail. I use a combination of mutt hto directly connect via imap) and fdm/mu4e (to have them locally). I”m not interested in having counters or notifications for any of those.
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.
From a Casey m podcast I think of agentic driven software dev as code extrusion. I guide and massage the steady output of content
Just what we need, a new kind of version control %]
The work product is not the work.
> Before agents, it was easier to believe that the ceremony of trading comments on snapshots was an effective way to collaborate on software,
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.
I really like Zed. It's customisable enough for me to make it look how I want, it's faster than every other editor I've tried (scrolling is silk, zero lag anywhere), it has enough features that I don't need an IDE (debugger, refactoring tools), and it generally gets out of my way.
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...
I'll probably get more hate for saying this but fine: I use Zed 50% of the time (the other 50% dedicated to vim) for two reasons:
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.
there is a fork of zed against ai: https://gram-editor.com/
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
Oh, that's a breath of fresh air. And they are on codeberg. Nice! Thank you!
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!
Thank you for that link! Looks like it fixes all of my annoyances with Zed; I'll have to try it out.
With LLMs now being responsible for the physical typing of code and mundane plumbing tasks, this is a wise direction to go into
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