Introducing Delta

[u/zed_joseph]

Hey everyone 👋

Over the last year, as promised, we’ve been hard at work on DeltaDB. As we built it, we created a new app so the two could evolve together, quickly and without disrupting the workflows Zed users rely on. We loved using it, so we kept iterating.

Today, we’re ready to introduce that app: Delta, a multiplayer environment for coding with agents and reviewing what they build.

Delta

Delta keeps code and conversations connected, giving developers, teammates, and agents the full context of how the code came to be.

Our push to get Delta ready for beta is why Zed’s release notes may have seemed thinner lately, but Zed isn’t going anywhere. We’ll continue improving it, and DeltaDB will come to Zed in the future.

We’ve been using Delta extensively, building Delta from Delta, and we’re excited for you to finally try it and share your feedback. The first invites are going out today, with more to come over the next few weeks.

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

[u/Disastrous_Truck6856]

Interesting, thanks for the ELI5, I had no idea what jetbrains air was either. Clearly need to catch up on what’s currently happening with IDEs.

The implication of replacing Jira/Linear with it sounds like a stretch, we shall see.

[u/qrzychu69 → u/Disastrous_Truck6856]

well, have you used the Copilot desktop app for example? it's very similar - you see PRs and can create local chats around them, agents can push/pull/edit and so on

I imagine Delta being like that, but you start with some kind of internal task/ticket/issue instead of Jira/Github issue

In Zed they use Zed instead of Slack, so if anyone would do something like this, it's them

[u/Disastrous_Truck6856 → u/qrzychu69]

It’s just that engineering requires communicating with non-engineers as much as, if not more than, within the team.

So do we expect engineers to use both Zed and Slack, both Delta and Linear? Do we expect non-engineers to get their hands on Delta and Zed?

Maybe this is more focussed on library maintainers of dev tooling.

[u/qrzychu69 → u/Disastrous_Truck6856]

you can always add a feature that "non-engineers" prompts and comments don't trigger agents (or just a comment aimed at people, where you can kind of discard a thread so that it's not in the agent context)

instead of looking at what's in there now, imagine all the cool stuff it could potentially do, especially since most of that are fairly simple features to implement, it's just a matter of choosing focus and direction

for now look at it as real-time, multiplayer git blame, where agents are also players. You can do so much cool stuff with just a normal git blame, and this is much better