Zed's Delta kills the pull request on its own repo
Replacing Pull Requests with Delta
Zed has launched the public beta of Delta, a multiplayer coding environment built on DeltaDB, which extends Git with incremental deltas. The company disabled pull requests on Delta's own repository, and 33 engineers have since landed 570 changes to main. Delta lets teammates join agent threads, inherit context, and review code without branches or diffs. It's free during beta, with paid plans coming.
We believe that threads will be the new fundamental unit of software development, and the best way to model their state is with deltas.
- the__alchemist
I've lost faith in their editor and GPUI - you were the one, Zed! They are full-steam AI on things like this. I expected this article to be about a general alternative to git, but it is about LLM-focused coding in a way that doesn't make sense to me, as it slices a line between human-written and LLM-written code which does not exist in a meaningful way.
Their primary product, the Zed editor, is unusable for me and others due to it mismanaging file syncs on disk - when external edits happen, the editor retains stale state unless you close and re-open the specific file (Not even an editor reopen syncs it). There is a significant risk of your changes being silently overwritten or conflicted. Amusingly, the risk of this is increased when a file is changed asynchronously, which for me, most happens due to a pull or LLM edits!
It begs questions like: "If coding has changed so that we should use an LLM-focused source control tool, why can't the LLM fix a severe bug in our software that has a closed-form solution?"
- pipes
My first thought is, does this mean that along with the burnout I'm feeling with talking to my own agents I now need to try and consume and understand my teammates conversations with agents? Why is this better than a good pr description that distills completed work and explains why it was required ?
- tyingq
Does it expose all my "Jesus Christ Claude, why on earth did you do that? Revert that now and do x instead." ?
Meaning, does it prune out some of the not meaningful path to what exists? It's hard to visualize what they actually get to review.
- kettlez
I've been using the beta of Delta for a couple weeks and using it for review is a huge improvement over reviewing directly on the PR. Being able to jump into a team mates thread and see the context of how something got created and be able to ask questions about it very nice. There's some rough edges in the product, but the direction they are going is pretty interesting.
- zndbzbz
This seems like a cool augment to current PR processes but fundamentally I don’t see anyway around still reading the code? Review should optimize for that. Agents make it very easy to create human digestible logical chunks of work that are easily understood and testable. Your job as a dev is to make it easy for your teammates (and your future self) to understand what your change is doing - cause we all know Claude will use 1000 words when 10 will do.
Other end of this is all the high performing teams I’ve worked on don’t really need PR review. Work is discussed prior to it happening so by the time PR review comes up it’s a rubber stamp. Agents changed none of that - again, unless you’re not reading the code. PR review is mostly for new devs to get brought up to speed. Trust lets you move really fast.
> but the decisions behind the code still need review. Smaller diffs don't supply that context
Maybe this is the bit that just seems wrong? Yes they do. You write out what the small change is working towards as part of optimizing your PR for your reviewers time. Might be just text, a link to a doc, link to a prototype etc.