Lots of negativity here, but this is interesting to me and moves Zed towards something that is more than 'just' an IDE in a future where IDE users may be in the minority of people creating software.
Zed DeltaDB
261–270 of 326 posts
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be a concept called "engineering privilege". I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to…
I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when…
Well, some of these exact people are who built Zed.
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#263When I saw the blog post about DeltaDB I thought oh okay cool but so what I don't really know what this is for me and how it helps me or what it does for me. Then again today I saw this link and looked at it and I can't help thing what is this to me? How does this help me, why would I want to request early access cause I have no idea what it does?
I'd much prefer some more time spent building a solid editor which is why I switched to Zed early on in it's development cause I was frustrated and tired of VSCode. But saying that ever since Zed AI I've felt more and more frustrated with Zed and it's quality is starting to lack?
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what's trouble: git is reaching the end of its useful life. It's 25 years old, and the patch files that make up the core of the decentralized collaboration system are fully 50 years old. Have the design requirements and constraints perhaps changed over the last 50 years?
> git is reaching the end of its useful life Based on what exactly? I think that git is more useful than ever in this new "age of ai [slop]". Thankfully, something being old doesn't automatically make it not useful anymore.
Two big things:
1. Git breaks down if files are too large or lines within files are too large.
2. Add/Rename conflicts will always burn you because git does not protect the intent behind changes.
And really the third is that IDE's are shit because there's no document object model (like the browser has). You have to make an error recovering parser to try to deal with the fact that an IDE is editing code half the time and text half the time. You're stuck playing a game you can't possibly win. Can you imagine if the HTML DOM kept blinking into and out of existence? It'd be a nightmare...
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what people would have said 3 years ago about going against google (and search engines in general), yet here we are. Revolution is in the air.
Google is doing great... Record profits this year, not sure I'd call that a "revolution".
Google of Thesseus.
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be a concept called "engineering privilege". I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to…
I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when…
> But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode
You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects.
That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the cherry on the cake: you get paid to work on your engineering project, get traction around it as opensource and if there is enough traction, leave the company and spin-off a new one to sell the same product to other companies! It's surely a lot of work but you get basically the discovery phase til market fit with your ass covered. Kudos to the engineers that pull that out, I really mean it!
That’s why nowadays every company will require that they legally own projects you work on during work hours unless explicitly asked. And many ask you to sign non compete clauses so you don’t take all the knowledge you acquired on the job to the competition, including your own projects, through this is quite hard to really enforce.
As long as you convince them to MIT license it doesn't really matter though right?
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't proposing to replace git though. They are just attempting to make it simpler for developers to follow changes applied by an LLM in an ergonomic fashion. Not saying it will work well but I'm happy to see someone trying a new approach here.
I don't want someone "to make it simpler for developers to follow changes applied by an LLM in an ergonomic fashion". I want a text editor. I want "VScode without the bullshit". That's what I thought they were building.
Then go get a text editor? They’ve been around for decades. Use sublime text for all eternity. Why even complain here when what you want is a solved problem?
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're too kind. It's obviously AI copy, and a huge negative signal (to me, anyway).
I'm always hesitant to assert something is definitely AI copy because everyone's tone of voice is different. I'm also starting to wonder how much real, human-made copy is mimicking AI-created copy that has been filling marketing pages as of late. When people make marketing websites, they often riff and rip off other websites' (à la "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[0]) design ideas and language -- I wouldn't b…
It's exactly because everyone's tone is different that I'm confident it's AI.
Granted, a bit of AI-influencing phrasing in human writing is common, but the idea that someone sat down, worked hard, and came back with an entire page of a pitch-perfect AI slop is simply incredible.
Re: Zed DeltaDB
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when…
> But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects. That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.
They're projects where there's not a payment page to buy a copy sure, but VSCode especially has I'm sure indirectly led to a ton a of profit - its the natural home of Copilot, integrated with Github (including in their paid product Codespaces), and has I'm sure led to a ton of standardisation and productivity increases across the company.