Software is made between commits

https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb

by jeremy_k • 1 month ago

319 214 1 month ago

timuthang• 1 month ago

Music is the silence between notes

hyperhello2• 1 month ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 month ago

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.

hyperhello2• 1 month ago

Ah, McDonald’s isn’t that bad.

skydhash7• 1 month ago

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.

jimbokun13• 1 month ago

My favorite new-to-me cathartic feature is Safari’s hide distracting items.

Probably easier with an ad blocker or just Reader view. But I really enjoy tapping on all the overlays and moving ads and videos and see them evaporate one by one, leaving just the text I wanted to read.

The default state of the page is much like the restaurant you describe.

darepublic2• 1 month ago

From a Casey m podcast I think of agentic driven software dev as code extrusion. I guide and massage the steady output of content

BigTTYGothGF2• 1 month ago

A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly

A table saw does tho.

pjm331• 1 month ago

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

QuercusMax• 1 month ago

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.

jackxlau• 1 month ago

I came across the conclusion here since a change sometimes spans several repos, per-repo history optimizes the wrong target.

jimbokun13• 1 month ago

Maybe there’s a case to be made for a system that combines issue tracking, Slack conversations, PR reviewing, angent harness, and collaborative editing in a single tool. And Zed could make a nice system to build that tool on top of.

axegon_2• 1 month ago

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.

dematz• 1 month ago

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

axegon_2• 1 month ago

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!

bigstrat2003• 1 month ago

Thank you for that link! Looks like it fixes all of my annoyances with Zed; I'll have to try it out.

Aerolfos• 1 month ago

From their mission statement:

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.

opem2• 1 month ago

Cool, didn't ever hear about it! Thanks for sharing.

localhoster• 1 month ago

Sad to see zed going the same route everybody is screaming them not to. Altough, I never expected otherwise.

dkdbejwi383• 1 month ago

What route is that, and why is everyone screaming at them, for someone out of the loop?

selicos3• 1 month ago

It sounds like they ship a fairly minimal and efficient set of tools or text editor. This would be unwanted bloat by those choosing them for those advantages.

slopinthebag• 1 month ago

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...

thesurlydev• 1 month ago

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.

b33j0r• 1 month ago

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?

prodigycorp2• 1 month ago

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.

darepublic2• 1 month ago

They drove up to my house with a dump truck full of money... Im not made of stone!

whazor• 1 month ago

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?

prodigycorp2• 1 month ago

I think it's the other way around. OpenAI is definitely recreating the IDE from scratch with codex app.

jimbokun13• 1 month ago

Hmm has there been much success just feeding mermaid diagrams to an agent and having it generate code to implement it?

I imagine many people have tried this but I haven’t yet. And mermaid swim lane diagrams are my go to tool for designing system architecture.

elevation• 1 month ago

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.

clickety_clack• 1 month ago

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.

tomjakubowski• 1 month ago

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

0xb0565e486• 1 month ago

Aren't you paid to think?

bauldursdev• 1 month ago

No I'm paid to write code.

NewJazz2• 1 month ago

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.

pdimitar• 1 month ago

No, you are paid to deliver. Whether you do that by thinking + hand-coding or just vibe-coding, or handing the task description to Cthulhu and waiting for him to materialize the solution on your disk, is immaterial.

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.

xboxnolifes• 1 month ago

This cannot be the counterargument to every post that basically says "The employer shouldn't be able to access, collect, serialize, and own every breath I take". It's too unserious.

aakresearch• 1 month ago

I grant we are - and also to facilitate understanding of one's thinking by other team members. But what I write "between commits" is not any more an evidence of "thinking" or conducive to "understanding" than the NSFW mouse gestures I make or rubbish I am humming to myself.

fridder3• 1 month ago

The collaboration part I’m skeptical of but I get it, as it sounds like a feature made for business consumers

sdesol2• 1 month ago

This sounds like it is more aligned with what I have created which is "We need to capture your conversations with AI". If you look at

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.

gmueckl2• 1 month ago

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.

InfinityByTen3• 1 month ago

One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me.

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.

hinkley18• 1 month ago

Nobody needs to know quite how messy the process of making the sausage is though. There are steps that provide information, even about how the bugs got in there. But not every thought needs to be expressed.

MaulingMonkey2• 1 month ago

I don't want the private API key I temporarily hardcoded in my public history. Nor do I want the drag of worrying about so much as sneezing in the general vicinity of a secret in my editor window, when I already self review before commit.

I don't want the unkind rant about a coworker's design as I attempt to figure out what they were smoking when they made the thing I'm trying to use, needlessly offending them. For starters, once it clicks, it might all make sense, and have turned out to be my mistake. For another, even if a rant is warranted, a pass for "tact", or at least limiting the blame to the blame that is warranted, is proper.

I don't want to drag a coworker through my chain of confusion until I've made an appropriate amount of effort to unconfuse myself first. To do otherwise is likely to bring us both to confusion, possibly in different ways, possibly including confusion about what we're confused about, which is just a mess and dead weight. There's a time and place to explain and teach, and a time and place to expose my own confusion and ask for help, but neither is step 1.

Even if the API is undocumented and confusing, even if you're expected to ask for help as step 1, there's value in a fresh set of eyes getting a feel for exactly how the API is confusing before that, thus informing directions for potential improvement (be that API changes or improved documentation.)

jcgrillo3• 1 month ago

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.

fridder3• 1 month ago

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

selicos3• 1 month ago

This seems like a perfect audit feature to flip back and train a model. Or ensure your human worker is working during business hours.

hinkley18• 1 month ago

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.

giraffe_lady2• 1 month ago

Probably coulda used an example that isn't itself a fourth amendment violation that essentially requires perjury to accomplish. Also less euphemistically called evidence laundering. Not really a neutral example.

sharts• 1 month ago

Squash smaller commits?

bmitc3• 1 month ago

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.

This forces people to work in a very linear fashion that doesn't match how people actually work.

A 400 line commit from a squashed PR should be very manageable when tracing a bug in the main branch, especially if the PR has a good description and review. Having a bunch of "fixed, added, deleted" commits all pushed into main seems like a disaster of noise unless you now force everyone to bundle perfectly reversable actions in every commit.

crimsonnoodle58• 1 month ago

We're the opposite. No rebasing your PR. It changes the hashes which we use for ci/cd. Keep it linear, show me the full history, show me where you merged main back into it, and then we force squash on merge.

Main then has a nice single commit with a reference to the branch it came from if you wish to see how it developed. Why would we want to litter main with your 100 commits? You own your code, and if you wish to dig into why you did something in a commit, go look in your branch history.

skydhash7• 1 month ago

Squash and merge (if that’s what you’re talking about) is only useful in a pr context. Each PR would actually be a commit if you we using the git-email model. Commits inside such PR are just snapshots.

subygan2• 1 month ago

This was my problem with JJ as well. I don't want everything in between to be versioned. I'm not even sure, every intermediary state between a commit is relevant or useful.

but feels like, I'm in the minority.

steveklabnik5• 1 month ago

To be clear, while jj does that, it's entirely local on your machine, and not shared.

soulbadguy2• 1 month ago

I felt the same for a while after switching to jj. I think using the word "commit" in jj is creating a lot of confusing. The snapshotting is closer to auto-save in your favorite editor. In does not change your ability to version and save your work. It's just a savety net for quick undo

bmitc3• 1 month ago

Yea, commits that go into a PR are generally just a sequence of logs and not necessarily a sequential stream of explicit steps.

lwyrup• 1 month ago

I think they’re mostly considering AI agents. It’s an interesting idea (that I’ve seen before). Everyone trying to reinvent for AI which is fun!

But I am skeptical because just create a text file and put a reference to the commit.

Also, why not just use Fossil? It already lets you bundle whatever in there since it’s an SQLite database. It has all kinds of things built in that can reference commits.

bronlund• 1 month ago

Just what we need, a new kind of version control %]

mplanchard• 1 month ago

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.

jimbokun13• 1 month ago

Too many managers have nowhere near enough real work to do or actual business concerns to worry about, if they are spending all their time observing every keystroke of every developer working for them.

skydhash7• 1 month ago

They do have work to do, but micromanaging the developers is easier, so that’s what they do.

fridder3• 1 month ago

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

csours• 1 month ago

The work product is not the work.

skydhash7• 1 month ago

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.

ivanjermakov• 1 month ago

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.

these• 1 month ago

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.

Xotic007• 1 month ago

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.

OtherShrezzing2• 1 month ago

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.

teach• 1 month ago

It's interesting that your experience/workflow is so much different than mine. This (claims to) solve a real problem that I deal with every day.

My company is remote-only, and my coworkers mostly don't live anywhere near me. We see each other a couple of times a day on video chat, but communicate mostly during the day via Slack.

We're also, uh, pretty far along the curve in adopting LLM agents to write good code for us. With a good model and the extremely good guardrails our of specific coding harness, LLMs are writing the majority of our code these days.

So on a typical day I'll grab a ticket off the top of the stack, point my LLM at it, and start working with it to solve the problem. We'll make architectural decisions, etc, create a plan and execute the plan. The feature I shipped most recently cost $19 in tokens and the LLM was churning without my input for like half an hour at one point in the thick of it.

MAYBE if there's a question I'm not sure which way is best I'll post a question in the team chat for my teammates to weigh in on. But a lot of my tickets are done completely autonomously.

Then I'll open a PR, and post a link to the PR in Slack, requesting their review and my teammates will see the implementation for the first time. They sometimes have questions! Often, they'll post these questions in the Slack thread rather than as PR comments, because we're having a fast real-time conversation and GitHub comments aren't a great fit for that.

These questions have answers in the chat log with the LLM that lives on my laptop, but I can't trivially show it to them.

So I end up playing telephone with the LLM -- copying my teammate's questions from Slack to the LLM chat, pasting the answers back, etc

The idea that my coworkers and the LLM and I can all be more easily a part of the same conversation appeals to me greatly

None of this means the Zed team is on the right track. Nor that my team might work better in a different way! But we're too "successful" with this approach for there to be much institutional pressure to change our ways at the moment.

Hope that helps.

jimbokun13• 1 month ago

I’ve seen Zed promoted as an alternative to Slack or Teams and you describe how that can be true for development where the collaboration revolves around text files.

Which makes more sense I think than describing it as an alternative for Git PRs.

spaqin• 1 month ago

If you're just a middle man between your coworkers and the LLM, what's the value you're bringing to the team?

OtherShrezzing2• 1 month ago

I see the value in being able to discuss features more centrally. I’m not seeing the value in a per-keystroke delta of the software as it’s built though.

It feels like this communications problem could be solved through draft PRs and a decent slack app integration.

skydhash7• 1 month ago

I think of a PR as something akin to a lab report. I put myself in the shoes of the reviewer and everything not immediately clear from the title and the diff, I would write an explanation in the description of the PR. That reduces the need for back and forth.

ukprogrammer• 1 month ago

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

lijok• 1 month ago

I swear a lot in my chats with Claude..

seanclayton• 1 month ago

What we're really after is simple: the conversation with the agent becomes the only conversation you need to have.

This benefits those who make the machines you have conversations with and those that invest in them.

jmole• 1 month ago

Google has been doing this for maybe a decade now with citc [0]. I don't know when Gemini is actually going to be taking advantage of this, but I do know that google has essentially a full history at "Ctrl-S" granularity, from ~every developer that works there, for at least 10 years now.

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)

shibel• 1 month ago

A bit O/T but:

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

jerf• 1 month ago

I would be interested in a clear statement about how this scales. I've not used this workflow myself, but I've seen teams that did it. Whether they got huge benefits out of it I don't know, but I do know that watching them, I was not jealous of what I saw. If I make a change, and I run some tests that were passing a moment ago, and they fail, and the reason why they failed is that Bob hit "save" on his editor (or his editor autosaves) and he made a syntax error in a shared library, and this happened often... I would go insane. I cause enough problems for myself without other people's problems actively intruding at uncontrolled times into my tests.

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.

_pdp_• 1 month ago

What is apparent to me is that we are moving towards dark factories if the promise of LLMs writing most of the code is fulfilled. So this means that it is less about conversations and it is more about iteration.

abahgat• 1 month ago

I can see how this is a great building block for what Zed is doing around collaboration.

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?

gnunicorn• 1 month ago

I totally see where they are coming from, jitsu, too is making every change its own artifact. And it plays hard to the "faster shipping" that especially AI-driven teams are pushing hard, and find the review process to be the next big bottleneck now (as I just saw with my last client as well).

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.

jimbokun13• 1 month ago

I often find it helpful to see the entire commit and message leading to a specific line of code getting into its current state.

That’s about it.

WorldMaker2• 1 month ago

This just sounds to me like "frequent auto-commits" with less trust in git. git can handle frequent auto-commits just fine. If you want to "rollup" frequent auto-commits into "cleaner" top-level commits but also keep all the point-in-time "conversation" of your auto-commits, then `git merge --no-ff` from time to time and use tools like `--first-parent` to focus in on "top-level" commits over "conversation" commits.

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.

tectec• 1 month ago

This is what what I do. I never see the commits from branches but they are there if I need them. Even git blame can be setup to use --first-parent

WorldMaker2• 1 month ago

git bisect also works great with --first-parent. It will never stop surprising me how many people see the two-dimensional DAG of git as a bug to be avoided rather than a very useful feature (and then spend time reinventing things that git could do natively if they just used the second dimension of the git graph a bit more intentionally).

chrishill892• 1 month ago

Many years ago I helped a friend with some draft that had to do with him finishing his doctorate. It ended up being maybe 50-60 between three of us and as fine grained as possible.

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.

softwareseko• 1 month ago

The interesting question is whether agents actually benefit from finer-grained history or whether they're better served by semantic checkpoints – "this works, this doesn't" rather than line-by-line diffs. Git wasn't designed for that, but neither is anything else yet.

chrishill892• 1 month ago

If works/doesn't are semantic checkpoints, then I use that every day for myself with Git notes.

wxw• 1 month ago

Agents can certainly use a new substrate as they can eat dense information quickly.

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.

tengbretson• 1 month ago

This is going to have so many api keys stored in it.

commentsaregood2• 1 month ago

Likewise, what happens if someone does a npm install or slap a venv or some other thing like that, before adding the equivalent of a gitignore for these things? Did you then just flood two times 200 MB worth of changes into the tracker? What if I just simply build in golang to a subfolder early on, is that v0.0.1 stuck there until someone decides to do the second layer of githistory inspection?

Perhaps not. But I'm not going to be the guy training the Team on how not to do it. They have shaky grasp of the full set of standards for PR's as is.

flerchin• 1 month ago

If that works for someone, great. I would never pay for it, and would run not walk away from any shop that asked me to use it. The mess in-between working software is not something I care to have version controlled.

Lindby• 1 month ago

All the things in between my commits is a messy soup. Looking there is not useful to anyone. I rewrite my history with git rebase so each commit is small and atomic. The story I create with my commits is what explains why things are as they are, it doesn't matter if it's the true chronological story on how it actually happened.

I agree with the author that reviewing pull requests is too late. The problem with pull request is that they make it hard to review individual commits since they are geared towards reviewing the result of an entire branch at once. But the answer is not to share all the noise, it should be to encourage small atomic commits so you can review the early work before the entire feature/fix is complete.

isityettime• 1 month ago

The problem with pull request is that they make it hard to review individual commits since they are geared towards reviewing the result of an entire branch at once. But the answer is not to share all the noise, it should be to encourage small atomic commits so you can review the early work before the entire feature/fix is complete.

Isn't that just a GitHub problem, as opposed to Phabricator, Gerrit, etc.?

danpalmer• 1 month ago

It is, but I think it's hard to explain to folks who have only used the Git/GitHub model – I know, I've been that person not really getting it.

I think what's missed is two things:

- In the Phabricator/Gerrit model you typically end up with changes that are smaller than a PR, but bigger than a commit.

- You lose some history, or track it in a different way. With a PR you might add code to address comments in a new commit on the end, but with Phabricator/Gerrit you don't. If you already aggressively rebase in Git to absorb changes into commits that they make sense to go in, this won't be much of a change, and some systems give you views on the history happening within each change. But if you expect to see everything like that in the Git history, you may not get that, but the workflow changes around it and that's ok.

I think both types of review are in a local maxima, where you lose some things to move to the other type, and it was fear of losing those from my workflow that made me resist the change a bit. When you get there though, you realise it's just not a problem.

seabass• 1 month ago

The way you use commits sounds like how I tend to use stacked PRs at work. Good commit hygiene is hard to enforce at a team level, but for whatever reason at the PR level people are happy to write good descriptions and keep the sets of changes tidy.

nightpool• 1 month ago

This is purely a function of what people expect to be looked at.... if your team started looking at each individual commit step by step, then you'd probably find that people started paying more attention to how their commit hygiene looks.

lmm• 1 month ago

Why do you want those commits though? In my experience people only look at history a) to see who wrote the code / when it was last changed, which works equally well with any approach, b) to see which feature it was part of, for which you will click through to the PR anyway, or c) to bisect for when a bug was introduced, in which case unedited/unrebased "noise" commits are more useful because you have more guarantee that each commit compiles and the original train of thought is more useful than the fictional history when you're looking for something unintentional.

jasonkester2• 1 month ago

This is the response I expected to see here.

Reading through the article, I'm reminded of my dismay reading this exact sentiment every time version control is discussed. So many people are so quick to throw away their history so that things look "tidy". It makes no sense, but somehow it fits a certain programmer-brain logic that is surprisingly common.

My style is to commit often. Like dozens of times per day. Commits are the record of what happened, and I want as much of that record to exist as possible. I've been saved so many times by a git bisect that landed pointing at a tiny commit to a single line that looks completely innocuous, yet broke something in a subtle way that only got discovered way later.

That's what source control is for, in my opinion. Finding stuff like that. So many of these things would have been really painful to find if I'd had to sift through every line of a big commit.

So to watch people intentionally balling up an entire PR's worth of commits and squashing them together to throw away the only (in my mind) thing that version control is good for, is truly baffling.

But yeah, there are plenty of people like the parent in that camp, so the author's plan to add even more granularity will be an uphill battle.

vbezhenar• 1 month ago

I've been saved so many times by a git bisect that landed pointing at a tiny commit to a single line that looks completely innocuous, yet broke something in a subtle way that only got discovered way later.

I did git bisect exactly zero times in my life.

palata2• 1 month ago

But yeah, there are plenty of people like the parent in that camp, so the author's plan to add even more granularity will be an uphill battle.

I find it sad to see it as a battle. Can't we agree on the idea that different people may have different preferences?

"Converting everyone to Linux or vim" would be an uphill battle... if it was worth fighting at all. I don't care what OS or text editor others use, as long as I can use the one that is best for me. If I am happy with commits, I don't want to fight with people who aren't... what would be the point?

foobarbecue2• 1 month ago

Github default squash commit template & merge strategy makes it easy to go from the squash commit to the feature branch. So you get best of both worlds -- clean master and granular history on the branch. Bisect on master tells you which branch broke it, and then bisect on the branch if you want to find the original commit. Same with blame.

IMO squash 4 the win. Github squash defaults work well. Gitlab squash defaults don't.

skydhash7• 1 month ago

So many people are so quick to throw away their history so that things look "tidy". It makes no sense, but somehow it fits a certain programmer-brain logic that is surprisingly common.

I want my commits to reflect the evolution of the theory of the program, not a chronological log of my reflection and attempts. In my local branches I snapshot things that only matters to my working process. And before sharing, I make sure that the commits are atomic with a proper description.

When sending a report, do you also send all the post-it, the notebook with your notes, the books with the highlights , your conversation with your colleagues, your web history? I don’t think you do. My local history have commits that reflect my working process which can be messy. Before sharing I tidy them, so that the changes are easily understood.

entire PR's worth of commits and squashing them together to throw away the only (in my mind) thing that version control is good for, is truly baffling

A PR is supposed to be atomic if you’re using squash and merge. Bundling different changes is the antipattern here, not the squash and merge.

wvh• 1 month ago

But do these intermediary commits run? I wouldn't mind making smaller commits, but usually wait until the changes result in a bunch of code that compiles and does what it should. It sounds as if you do checkpoints that don't necessarily result in working code or pass tests. Not that that is wrong, but it is a very different philosophy. I usually expect what I check out to compile and sort of work. I can't really pick up somebody else's train of thought midway.

danadam• 1 month ago

So many of these things would have been really painful to find if I'd had to sift through every line of a big commit.
So to watch people intentionally balling up an entire PR's worth of commits and squashing them together to throw away the only (in my mind) thing that version control is good for, is truly baffling.
But yeah, there are plenty of people like the parent in that camp

I'm confused. The parent doesn't want big commits but rather, as they wrote twice, commits that are small, atomic and without noise. So presumably "fix typo" would be removed during rebase but "rename function" would stay and be separate from "implement logic".

thomasfromcdnjs• 1 month ago

Regardless if it is a messy soup or not, if disk/cost is not an issue, I would have no problem with anyone (likely agents) looking at what I was doing, and forgive me, but my reasoning™.

Not overly confident in my position, but I believe agents prefer the extra information albeit noise to some.

marliechiller• 1 month ago

What I've observed both in the comments here, and in my professional network is that people tend to fall into two distinct camps:

1) Those that use git like a crude autosave who then squash on merge

2) Those that prefer neatly wrapped, fully functional atomic commits

It seems those ideas are in direct opposition to one another with 1) being more common in my experience, perhaps as github naturally supports it better plus the fact that stacked commits can solve some of the problems 2) accounts for... but if I had a choice, 1) definitely makes more sense to me.

sangeeth96• 1 month ago

This is what I’ve been thinking of ever since coming across Ramp’s agent[1] and other orgs trying to build their own remote dev envs with agents at the center. Makes so much more sense in this kind of a dev spree to not wait for a PR. Because all actors end up repeating the same thing with their own agents which can be totally avoided. Conversations and code to jump in and out of, to collaborate etc seems like the right way to go.

Excited to see what Zed team comes up with! :)

[1] https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-a...

thom2• 1 month ago

A software team’s job is to collaboratively learn an effective model for operating in a domain. They express that model and those learnings in code, tests and associated documentation. So on the one hand I wholeheartedly agree that pull requests and code reviews fatally undermine this process, but immediately recoil that we’re creating yet more secondary processes and artefacts to distract ourselves. This stuff should all be evident from your codebase. It’s not an extra thing. It’s not a bunch of commit messages or ADRs. If your codebase isn’t entirely self explanatory (both the what and the why) to both humans and AIs you’ve failed and will spend your whole life creating more and more process to manage that failure.

jimbokun13• 1 month ago

Cheap branching for features and experiments, ability to rollback specific commits quickly, reading the commit message for the last time a line of code changed, are all incredibly important and made possible by distributed version control systems.

The current state of the code is not sufficient for modern software development.

thom2• 1 month ago

At least we agree “modern software development” is the root cause.

cbovis• 1 month ago

The approach sounds interesting but perhaps still too focused on current development paradigms.

Where shared collaboration I think becomes much more interesting is when agents start behaving like a member of your team. Not someone you delegate to, but someone that actively seeks out conversations and interacts with others as though they're just another member of the team.

You shouldn't be aware that version control is happening behind the scenes, you're just interacting with a persistent persona through Slack/teams/notion/figma/linear/etc with something that's logging issues, fixing bugs, writing PRDs, designing mockups, etc. The only point at which you know there's version control is when you're asked to review something before it's integrated.

opem2• 1 month ago

DeltaDB captures every operation in between and gives each one a stable identity

Gives jj vibes, interesting!

nchmy• 1 month ago

especially when using Watchman https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/config/#watchman

messh• 1 month ago

Technically, this is true

fHr• 1 month ago

Lmao an ad

bison_fan• 1 month ago

Like others, I really like Zed as a text editor. I was a Sublime user before but I switched to Zed because it was even faster and cleaner than Sublime. The multi-buffer editing is a nice step up of multi-cursor editing. I just want a fast text editor with a few conveniences for development.

I don't care about any of the collaboration or AI tools that they are working on and I hope that these efforts don't detract from the text editor. At the very least I hope I can hide these features in the UI and continue to ignore them. I also hope that these features don't lead to a bloated, sluggish text editor like VSCode and IntelliJ.

amichayg• 1 month ago

This seems like such a weird article. Software is made at build time, which is usually due to a cicd process in place, which is dependent on committing code. It works. There’s no magical way of avoiding the idea that code usually exists in a commit someplace without proper justification.

gib444• 1 month ago

Next up: a kit to wire up a developer's brain activity direct to the AI companies, so not a single part of their thought process remains in control of the developer, in order to feed the models. You must brainsignalmaxx 8 hours a day or be fired.

Your boss will also demand that you narrate your thought process 8 hours a day. Speakmaxxing will be required to keep your job. There will be a "silence" wall of shame for the non-compliers.

overtomanu• 1 month ago

It is almost happening in a different way, for automating physical labor, some companies are collecting data by making people wear camera on their heads

The Indian workers training AI robots to take their jobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQoPoLUJWic

overgard• 1 month ago

I'd have to see the implementation in the editor to really know if I'd want it or not, but my initial impression is that I don't think it's something I would use. I've worked on a couple of products with in-editor collaboration built in (not text editors, but, content creation tools). For the most part collaboration just wasn't something users wanted that much. The problem was that the in-editor collaboration was only really useful for things that were 100% on the web, it never caught on with the more file-centric workflows. It works in something like Google Docs because it's natural that your data is in the cloud there, but for something that lives on your filesystem it feels like it takes extra steps that most people aren't going to be willing to do (especially if they have to use an editor different from their normal one)

jimbokun13• 1 month ago

I guess it would be perfect for pair programming in a remote work environment.

BigTTYGothGF2• 1 month ago

Sounds like "google docs with code formatting".

I didn't see anything in there about branching which seems like a big thing not to have.

ericyd• 1 month ago

Where are these developers who are willing to talk to you about your code and hash out ideas? Everyone I’ve ever worked with is always too busy, too many other priorities. Sounds nice though.

Unrelated: I started using Zed a few weeks ago and really love it, it is everything it promises to be.

vitally3643• 1 month ago

Like most/all engineers (I assume), I have entire notebooks that are filled front to back and in the margins with scratch. Random calculations and notes, equations running into each other, any piece of information that was too fleeting to stay in my head or overspill from an already full working memory.

Most engineers I know keep such notebooks when they're full, because it's kind of neat to open a random page and see a brain dump scrawled out. Nobody has ever looked at another engineer's scratch notes and drawn useful insight. Frankly, I wouldn't even want to other than for novelty.

coneonthefloor• 1 month ago

Zed are doing a great job at making the exact things developers don’t want. It’s clear that their focus is on raising funding rather than making a great text editor.

jumploops• 1 month ago

the conversation that generates the code is becoming the true source of our software

This is close, but not quite spot on. I've found that I'll test more ideas _with code_ using agentic tools, then before, leading to an excess of conversation history that is no longer representative of the final outcome.

A simple example I encountered recently was dealing with performance issues on an iOS application (I haven't written mobile code since before Swift..). If you viewed the chat, you'd dive down a diverging path of rabbit holes, few of which were relevant to the final outcome[0].

To solve this in my own work, I've started relying on "context hierarchy" - which is essentially live documentation that lives next to the source files (using markdown).

This approach avoids comments being removed erroneously, and helps codify the intent behind the code and how it relates to the overall architecture. As an added bonus, it also forces the LLM to edit _two_ things instead of just one (which might actually be the biggest benefit).

My workflow is currently maintained via some repo level scripts and AGENTS.md prompts, but I've tried to pull it out into a skill for others to use[1].

Candidly, I'm not sure the skill is the best approach yet, as the agent can sometimes get too focused on the "skill" as a separate tool rather than a core part of the workflow. I'm currently exploring other options here (repo bootstrap, side-loaded subagents, hooks, etc.)

[0]For more context, I was using a 3rd party library and trying to make it performant during a streaming operation, by removing the SwiftUI view layer (LazyVStack) and implementing a custom rendering path with UIViewController. The final solution ended up as a custom implementation of the 3rd party library, and moving back to LazyVStack.

[1]https://github.com/jumploops/chum

jchw• 1 month ago

Software is made between commits

Yes.

DeltaDB captures every operation in between [each commit]

No.

First of all, that feels intrusive. I would also prefer to not have a screen recorder that is running 24/7 while I work. Yes, I suppose there's nothing wrong with having my mistakes on display, but also, if I'm doing my job, all of the value I produce is captured by the commit, and it just feels significantly less intrusive that way.

Second of all, I use many different tools, and I don't really want to have to have all of them be integrated into some weird DB. What's the point of capturing everything if randomly it has to go "some external process did something"? Yes I do like that Zed can integrate so many things but that doesn't mean I will use everything integrated into Zed. Last I checked if you use Claude Code in Zed via ACP you can't even rewind and edit old messages.

Finally, personally, I think that we've already lost the plot with commits. It's clear to me that most people are just doing some arbitrary unbounded set of changes then running git commit, then the changeset is reviewed as one giant blob, and then those commits get squashed together. It isn't the end of the world, but having nice hand-crafted commits is amazing. If you've ever ran `git blame` on a project that enforces this, you will understand exactly what I am talking about. Doing stuff like DeltaDB is just going to re-enforce and solidify the practice of slopping together commits. Wonder what's going on? Now you can voyeuristically replay it and view the conversation the user had with LLMs...

And that last point is as interesting as it is frustrating. You couldn't convince someone to write documentation for their changes and the motivation behind those changes just because it's good engineering practice that helps your teammates, but everyone will happily explain it to an LLM. Sure that is in large part because it's needed for the LLM to do the work for them, but it is interesting how much work we will do to please the LLMs that we would not have done before. Suddenly a bunch of weird undocumented things are documented. In CLAUDE.md.

afzalive• 1 month ago

Could you just give me reference peeking without opening a full tab?

commentsaregood2• 1 month ago

I spent the entire article thinking

this is what comments are for
that is usually unnecessary, but if it were, a comment would fulfill it
I literally solved this problem with a comment yesterday
if the AI needs to know that, I'd explicitly ask it to put it in a skill or AGENTS.md. if a human needs it, I'd put it in a comment
this is overengineering a purpose comments already fulfill

I dont want a second set of commit changes and a freaking schema that tracks me Ctrl+Z and Shift+Ctrl+Z'ing a bunch just to accomplish what comments already do, wtf.

UndyingHorse• 1 month ago

someone with your nickname would say :)

j16sdiz• 1 month ago

That recording capture code, but not intent and thought.

The only alternative to PR review is pair programming - where you can discuss with your peer in real time, discuss the design, asking questions or clarifications.

Without real time communication, those small delta are pure noise.

alok-g• 1 month ago

This is something I have been looking for.

I agree with a lot of comments here saying that the "conversation that generates the code" is often not meaningful once the code is there. It is however important to me as development history. Commit messages, meanwhile, are not the right places to hold this conversation.

As of now:

1. I save the conversations as "Prompt ###-XX.md" files into a 'completed prompts' folder within the repository and cite "Prompt ###" in the commit message.

2. I explicitly have the coding agent explain the decisions from the conversations in the generated code/artifacts.

boomlinde• 1 month ago

So this is is intended to smooth over the poor work, bad commit hygiene and bad commit messages of "agents", presumably not meaning just any agent but LLM-based ones specifically.

I can already see the change. What I need to know is why, not how exactly. It should be clear from a commit message why a change was made. If it's not, that problem should be addressed during review. I shouldn't have to watch a recap of your conversation with a virtual idiot to understand your commit. If the tools you use to generate code can't be coaxed into producing that level of quality, or if you don't understand the output of your generative tools to the extent that you can describe for someone else why they made a particular change, you have a tooling and competency problem.

If further tooling can solve these problems, then I'm all for it, but the idea here seems to be to not solve that problem, but to burden anyone interrogating the history of a repository with also scrolling through chat histories so that virtual idiots can keep shitting out low-quality changes and so that operators can keep accepting those changes as-is without thinking too much about why.

I guess it doesn't help that tools like GitHub don't really care about commit messages. You can't even comment directly on commit messages during review.

protocolture• 1 month ago

The door is open when it isnt shut.

brainless• 1 month ago

I agree with the core idea. I am building a coding agent for non-engineers on small/local LLMs only.

Commits are great but for an agent that works for the non-engineers (what I am building), commits cannot be represent the chain of thought since that chain has happened before - in English and has lots of debate/discussion with agents.

Zed is focused on engineers. I am focused on everyone else but I came to similar conclusions since my situation is tighter. Software has to be defined by humans, then codified (in development) by agents and then tested by humans. Deployment, rollbacks, etc. also has to come into the scene.

I have been breaking down the conversation into agents playing roles like PO, PM, Architect, etc. Then taking outputs from those into structured inputs for Rust engineer, Typescript engineer and so on. It is all WIP but holding on to this chain of "chats" is key in my opinion. That is where the software is made.

https://github.com/brainless/nocodo

coldtea• 1 month ago

No, software is made in the choice of what to keep in the final commit.

Zanfa• 1 month ago

This seems exactly backwards. Most commits should not exist, because the majority of people can't already help themselves from committing "wip" "fix lint", let alone anything more granular.

hackermanai• 1 month ago

I think this is a cool approach, like a giant undo stack.

plq• 1 month ago

With Gerrit, you have the patch that lands on master and then you have the stages that that patch went through to get to that point, reviews on older versions of the patch, etc. all recorded in the web interface.

So maybe just switch to a code review tool and use its interface to converse with the bots?

uwagar• 1 month ago

i keep comitting when i make a change. who cares. im solo dev. svn. git no thanks.

bicepjai• 1 month ago

I love the title, there was another post that I thought was clever “If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort”

literallyroy• 1 month ago

I think this makes a lot of sense in the context of Zed’s multiplayer editing. Maybe that works well for a small team working on a single product, but that doesn’t seem like it’d scale super well. I loved tight collaboration long ago on online notepads despite constantly breaking stuff for each person…

Software is made between commits

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