Zed Revives Ted Nelson's Xanadu Vision for the Age of AI Agents
Xanadu was waiting for agents
In a blog post, Zed's team explains how their new DeltaDB system finally realizes the 'docuverse' vision of hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson. Nelson's Xanadu project, which aimed to create a system of permanent, interconnected documents, was long considered vaporware because the necessary technology didn't exist. But with the rise of AI agents, which can follow every link and read every version, the need for such a system has returned. DeltaDB, built on modern technologies like CRDTs and Merkle trees, provides the 'xanalogical' foundation—never copy, always reference; never overwrite, always version—that agents need to work effectively with code.
Sixty years is a long time for an idea to wait for its users. They're here now.
- e12e
Interesting. This and the other posts I've seen about Delta seems to exist in that liminal space, were it's difficult to tell if the author has had a brilliant insight, that they struggle to convey to anyone who's not yet had the same insight; or if they've simply gone slightly mad.
It's a similar sense I get with reading Nelson (after being able to think about his ideas for a while, I'm quite certain it was mostly genius and only a little bit of lunacy).
It remains to see how Delta will turn out.
On a side-note; my initial reaction to the headline was; no. Xanadu wasn't missing agents.
I do think I see where the author is going, though; and I think I agree that agents might be a new tool that might facilitate some hypertext ideas. Not Xanadu perhaps. But some other, more pragmatic and less magic place - but a place that is a little more magical than where we are now.
And it intersects a bit with an experiment we started at work; migrating our modest web site from WordPress to a static site combining 11ty (https://11ty.dev) (we already lean heavily on typescript for our application development) and visual studio code with frontmatter cms (https://frontmatter.codes) - and AI/LLMs.
AI helps with making a static page version of our site, and adopting to 11ty.
The idea is that with trivial push-to-deploy setup, our business people, with the help of AI in vs code, will be able to work directly with 11ty and git to make changes, do reviews and publish changes.
A hill that would pro […]
- bobajeff
Reading this makes me wish someone would really try to make Project Xanadu a reality. A network built on Content Addressable Storage and a Version Control System is some thing I'd really like to see invested in.
- loevborg
Nelson was a pioneer of computing? No, he is a pioneer of computing.