Live data from Hacker News

Software is made between commits

zed.dev

51–60 of 230 posts

Re: Software is made between commits

#51

I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process. I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4

Fully agree, very icky surveillance vibes. In particular:

> DeltaDB breaks your work into a stream of fine-grained deltas. Where Git captures a snapshot at each commit, DeltaDB captures every operation in between and gives each one a stable identity.

I was curious about giving Zed a try, now that it has an emacs keymap. Not anymore. This is such a horribly invasive feature, I absolutely do not want my colleagues reviewing every single intermediate edit, down to the keystroke, that went into the commits I publish for review.

Before I put a PR up for review, I'll sometimes edit my commit history a little bit in magit to make it more linear and digestible--maybe update descriptions, squash some adjacent commits together, etc. This just throws that whole aspect of the job out the window and says "hey, colleague, hoover up this firehose of deltas and enjoy it".

And what the hell does this even mean?

> What we're really after is simple: the conversation with the agent becomes the only conversation you need to have.

Lmao. No. Wrong.

Re: Software is made between commits

#53

I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process. I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4

This is why I use rebase before PRs, and despise squash. You are not going to remember why you wrote that code that way 2 years from now and all we'll have to understand bugs and identify Chesterton's Fence situations is the deltas and the commit history. If you squash them I have 400 lines of code you 'wrote' all at the same time and only have the feature request it was assigned to as context. Thanks for nothing.

The worst actor would write a new module and check nothing in until it kinda worked. I think it went along with the fragile ego that had people sneaking around fixing bugs in his code without talking to him about it first. He wrote convoluted code that exhibited Kernighan's law and he was about 10 years too senior to still be doing that shit. He bragged about how 'powerful' his code was as if that was a compliment instead of a harbinger. Many times I found bugs in code from the initial commit. Just... give me something man. Anything. Fuck.

Just because you tried random shit until you found the problem doesn't mean you have to fess up to it. You can tell any story you want that gets us from point A to point B now that you know point B is attainable. You can rearrange the commits the way you would have written it if you knew exactly what needed to be done. Drop 90% of the code you wrote and immediately deleted again, anything that doesn't support that narrative.

In law enforcement you have something called Parallel Construction. You can know a suspect is guilty by knowing facts that are not admissible in court. So you need to rediscover those same facts by the book. Grab his trash on trash day. Interview neighbors. Get enough circumstantial evidence to get a search warrant, then go find that evidence again.

Re: Software is made between commits

#54

I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process. I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4

Fully agree, very icky surveillance vibes. In particular: > DeltaDB breaks your work into a stream of fine-grained deltas. Where Git captures a snapshot at each commit, DeltaDB captures every operation in between and gives each one a stable identity. I was curious about giving Zed a try, now that it has an emacs keymap. Not anymore. This is such a horribly invasive feature, I absolutely do not want my colleagues revi…

The more I think about it and your comment the more I wish it was local only. It could be useful to analyze your editing habits and interactions with AI but I want that for my own benefit not random coworkers

Re: Software is made between commits

#56
Google has been doing this for maybe a decade now with citc [0]. I don't know when Gemini is actually going to be taking advantage of this, but I do know that google has essentially a full history at "Ctrl-S" granularity, from ~every developer that works there, for at least 10 years now.

If Gemini seems stupid nowadays, it's only because they're being stingy with compute allocation.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system)

Re: Software is made between commits

#57
A bit O/T but:

> I have never been a big fan of pull requests.

I guess this partly explains why Zed (still) lacks a PR review flow, let alone a coherent one, despite some interest [1]. Pretty much the only reason I’m still with JetBrains.

[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/34759

Re: Software is made between commits

#58
post #8
post #5

I'll probably get more hate for saying this but fine: I use Zed 50% of the time (the other 50% dedicated to vim) for two reasons: 1. It is fast and snappy. Nothing comes even close besides vim (and I don't mind going full time to it if I have to) 2. The ability to completely shut off and block any slop machine features from interfering with my workflow or leak code back to sloppenai, sloppus or any other self-install…

there is a fork of zed against ai: https://gram-editor.com/ I am happy about even though I've never tried gram, because if zed goes to shit there will be an alternative, which hopefully pressures zed to stay sane

From their mission statement:

> I also object to making myself and my work depend on paying a subscription fee to anyone. I don't want an outage at Anthropic to affect my ability to do my work. I think it is a grave mistake to build anything on such shaky foundations as the sustainability and profit margins of the AI industry.

Someone actually sensible, excellent.

Re: Software is made between commits

#59
post #34

I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process. I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4

The collaboration part I’m skeptical of but I get it, as it sounds like a feature made for business consumers

This sounds like it is more aligned with what I have created which is "We need to capture your conversations with AI". If you look at

https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli/blob/main/internal/cli/r...

you can see that every file has a code block header with a UUID and the AI that was attributed to it. With the UUID, I can tell exactly how the code came about.

What they are working on will be more useful for AI code provenance. It is only a matter of time before you are expected to show your chats with AI as part of the code review and for performance reviews.

So I don't see human collaboration being the main use case. I see tracking, studying and improving the Human-AI relationship...and seeing if somebody should be promoted or not.

An interesting take I've heard is, we will have a token/impact stat where if you spent a shitload of tokens to produce the same impact as somebody else who spent a lot less, you will be the prime candidate for layoffs and/or less pay. This is why I think AI code provenance will become a serious thing in the future.

Re: Software is made between commits

#60
I would be interested in a clear statement about how this scales. I've not used this workflow myself, but I've seen teams that did it. Whether they got huge benefits out of it I don't know, but I do know that watching them, I was not jealous of what I saw. If I make a change, and I run some tests that were passing a moment ago, and they fail, and the reason why they failed is that Bob hit "save" on his editor (or his editor autosaves) and he made a syntax error in a shared library, and this happened often... I would go insane. I cause enough problems for myself without other people's problems actively intruding at uncontrolled times into my tests.

AI's code writing velocity makes this even worse, there's no way I can be simultaneously working on a code base while an AI agent is running around it doing something else.

It feels like maybe there's a ghost of an idea here about how to get the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure I follow the throughline on it.

Post reply on HN