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Software is made between commits

zed.dev

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Re: Software is made between commits

#91

Post by bison_fan »

Like others, I really like Zed as a text editor. I was a Sublime user before but I switched to Zed because it was even faster and cleaner than Sublime. The multi-buffer editing is a nice step up of multi-cursor editing. I just want a fast text editor with a few conveniences for development.

I don't care about any of the collaboration or AI tools that they are working on and I hope that these efforts don't detract from the text editor. At the very least I hope I can hide these features in the UI and continue to ignore them. I also hope that these features don't lead to a bloated, sluggish text editor like VSCode and IntelliJ.

Re: Software is made between commits

#92

Post by subygan »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #20

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 was my problem with JJ as well. I don't want everything in between to be versioned. I'm not even sure, every intermediary state between a commit is relevant or useful.

but feels like, I'm in the minority.

Re: Software is made between commits

#93

Post by InfinityByTen »

ozim wrote: post #76
InfinityByTen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me. In my life, I've n…

Ugh, let's take a step back and make a distinction: I don't need your fluff. No one cares how you arrived writing another crud line to save an object to database or sent yet another AJAX call. If you wrote some genuine great compression algorithm that's a different take on compression, I would like to see step by step reasoning and eventual dead ends.

I shared my thoughts in the context of someone saying that one should be able to share your line of thinking when asked to. Whether "when one asked to" applies to keystroke by keystroke blockhained versioning isn't my point of discussion.

I get it, that the overall discussion is about DeltaDB. I'd say interesting concept to toy with. I'd pay more attention to "micro commits" as the idea more than the keylogger.

Re: Software is made between commits

#94

Post by amichayg »

This seems like such a weird article. Software is made at build time, which is usually due to a cicd process in place, which is dependent on committing code. It works. There’s no magical way of avoiding the idea that code usually exists in a commit someplace without proper justification.

Re: Software is made between commits

#95

Post by hinkley »

gmueckl wrote: post #49
tomjakubowski wrote: post #20

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

Don't be afraid to show your thoughts when asked to. The best developers are those that can express their thoughts clearly at any stage throughout their process. This is one of the skills that shows to me the level of experience a developer has.

Nobody needs to know quite how messy the process of making the sausage is though. There are steps that provide information, even about how the bugs got in there. But not every thought needs to be expressed.

Re: Software is made between commits

#96

Post by jcgrillo »

fridder wrote: post #54
jcgrillo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would probably only use these data if I had some script I could run in it for analysis, and even then optimizing my AI chats is probably pretty low value.. certainly not enough to justify the cost of analysis, unless there's something that provides actionable insights with almost zero time investment.

Producing code edits itself is such a small fraction of the job I'm really not convinced these are valuable data. Mostly the effort and time goes into reading and understanding code, not producing or transforming it.

Re: Software is made between commits

#97

Post by hinkley »

InfinityByTen wrote: post #67
gmueckl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be afraid to show your thoughts when asked to. The best developers are those that can express their thoughts clearly at any stage throughout their process. This is one of the skills that shows to me the level of experience a developer has.

One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me. In my life, I've n…

"So I was thinking about #####'s Law this morning, and I realized that #######'s Theorem might apply if we do this and ignore that. Then I went up a blind alley and stopped for coffee and realized I was overcomplicating it, we don't care about negative or imaginary solutions."

They don't need to know I was brushing my teeth and thinking of bacon and an argument I had with my spouse right before I thought that though. Or how rude the customer in front of me was to the new barista who was just trying her best.

Re: Software is made between commits

#98

Post by hinkley »

ozim wrote: post #76
InfinityByTen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me. In my life, I've n…

Ugh, let's take a step back and make a distinction: I don't need your fluff. No one cares how you arrived writing another crud line to save an object to database or sent yet another AJAX call. If you wrote some genuine great compression algorithm that's a different take on compression, I would like to see step by step reasoning and eventual dead ends.

I think a good argument ad absurdum for this is to look at how some recipe sites give the entire genealogical history of the author and an anecdote about how their gammy met Theodore Roosevelt and he stole her pen. Three pages later I discover I need to go to the grocery store because the recipe requires sour cream. And the store is closed so I need a different recipe.

Don't fucking do that. Do something way less than halfway to that line.

Re: Software is made between commits

#99

Post by aeonik »

hinkley wrote: post #95
gmueckl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be afraid to show your thoughts when asked to. The best developers are those that can express their thoughts clearly at any stage throughout their process. This is one of the skills that shows to me the level of experience a developer has.

Nobody needs to know quite how messy the process of making the sausage is though. There are steps that provide information, even about how the bugs got in there. But not every thought needs to be expressed.

Disagree. This how people best learn from each other. It's also nice to audit your own thought process objectively.

It makes one vulnerable though, that's for sure. Psychologically I mean.

Re: Software is made between commits

#100

Post by hinkley »

sharts wrote: post #74
hinkley wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Squash smaller commits?

If it's part of the rebase. If commit 3 in the chain doesn't compile and half the tests fail, that's not very useful for someone trying to figure out how an ancient bug nobody noticed for a year got into the code. If commit 4 fixes it, then 3+4 -> 3.

But if you add a function in commit 2, then realize three hours later than you just need to call another function, I don't need to see the function arrive, get used, half the tests written, the whole thing be deleted, and then a couple commits that do it the easy way and only needs 3 tests added.

That fakeout will be in the code tree forever and each new dev who is trying to grok the code will see that the line of whitespace on line 35 came along with a function that doesn't exist anymore and only really ever did on David's machine.

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