Zed launches Delta, a multiplayer coding environment with agents

Does anyone else hate reading AI summaries of code? Code can be pithy, but at least its terse compared to prose. When you add how verbose LLMs can be, I often end up reading a paragraph to explain a few lines. Or the opposite happens where the summary skips important edge cases or criteria. "You're right, X also does Y. I missed that in my initial analysis," is much too common of a phrase.

I like the idea of using LLMs to transform code into something more readable, and vice versa. I am not sure if meandering paragraphs and linear lists are the best targets.

This is intriguing. The two relevant features seem to be 1) realtime collaborative multiplayer conversations and 2) conversation-as-document - basically, letting you comment inline in an agent conversation.

For (1), the main value I'd see is in mentoring junior engineers or less technical contributors on a team. If someone puts up a PR with sloppy results, you could actually jump into the thread that produced that PR and see how the results came about, or even coach that contributor on how to do better next time. Also might make it easier to hand off work from one person to another - right now most coding agent sessions are user-local.

On (2), I frequently find myself consuming agents' gigantic text responses and tediously writing 8-bullet-point responses to guide them. It's pretty exhausting. I could see inline comments providing much better ergonomics.

All that being said, Zed has largely fallen out of the conversation for "agentic coding tools", and so this feels like their attempt at creating something like the Cursor Agents Window, Codex, or Claude Code. These two features seem compelling, and I understand they're even compatible with other coding harnesses. But I don't know if there's enough there to have a defensible product; if these features are excellent, others will clone them eventually.

Regardless, would love to give this a shot!

Off-topic:

Sorry, my brain just fried trying to read the post.

Aside from the H1 and H2 headers, nearly everything on the page is ultra-low contrast.

Darkish gray text combined with the faded gray background, along with the (nearly) undetectable highlight makes for a terrible reading experience. I'm sorry, but somebody has to say it.

Surely it can't just be my own eyes that are squinting to see the images and the small text therein? The page design as such is fairly minimal with bold blue theme; would it hurt to add a bit more contrast to the typography?

Thanks

/offtopic

I'm sure this seemed like a great idea a year ago (they first mentioned it with their Series B).

But a lot has changed in those 12 months.

Frontier models and coding agents have advanced so much that I don't really see much value in this anymore.

Not sure the DeltaDB based features really add anything significant compared to the alternatives.

I reckon the game here has to be adding a service that stores the data and runs agent sessions?

This does look legitimately exciting. A surprisingly large pain point when doing agentic work has been commenting on something in a larger plan document. I always find myself summarizing the surrounding text to contextualize a comment when all I really want to do is highlight and click "add comment".

Unrelatedly, I have been looking at Zed to centralize my agentic work at $job, where we use different API keys per project to better attribute spend and control model availability based on per-project data protection controls. All of the standard UIs I've tried for this don't really work, but the CLIs mostly do. Using ACP in Zed I was able to bridge that into the UI world and I'm quite happy with it.

I signed up for the beta and I look forward to trying it.

I don't quite get it - it reminds me of using Slack as the decision making places, sure it works for hashing out the details, but it's not great for being the decision record store. I'm not sure what is the value of preserving hundreds of lines of conversations about how code came to be if the code keeps changing? What happens in 5 years? Do I have to read the whole transcript just to understand what's going on? AI will summarize it for me?

This feels like engaging with a prog lang community for the first time, and answer to a basic question is "this has been covered before, read the IRC chat history"

It's not like Pull Requests are perfect, and with discipline they do the job well - but this looks like a step in the wrong direction.

> We could have added DeltaDB to Zed, and eventually we will. But the best possible experience required an entirely new kind of application

The following demo is a version of a text editor - a chat window and a diff. How would building a new limited text editor be the best possible experience? Like you've setup your Zed schemes/keybinds to your liking, why would jumping to a totally different app improve your experience?