It reminds me a bit of jujitsu in that there is a database with your code changes that is automatically kept in sync with your working directory. The agent edits the database copy directly. I guess the sync must be two-way?
I have not gone so far as to allow agents to operate my version control, so excuse my ignorance, but by abandoning PRs for thread deltas, are we also abandoning human-written code entirely? Will every micro-change, fix, or refactor have to be prompted to be tracked in this paradigm?
Looks interesting for a small team that's working on a single project. I am curious to understand how this would work out for a large org that has multiple projects under the belt.
PRs may look old fashioned, but they're a very clear way of tracking an issue that may need multiple reviews. With Delta, things can get confusing after more than two reviews + RBAC is another challenge if the agent has similar context for every category.
It sounds like it's not conceptually different from a MR, the main difference is preserving the rationale for all the changes by bolting the "threads" (a log of agent interactions) on top. I can see how the discussion logs are quite useful if you have an agent that is there to parse them.
This stuff reminds me of people who are full into XP and pair programming, where you end up agreeing to pull in more or less any work done by two people together. Not the worst model in the world.
I am disappointed by the "agent chat"-centric design for the future. There is important value in highlighting what's important, and jettisoning the unimportant. Written artifacts are good when they're nice and cut down. And it's not really about the sequence of events (well, most of the time)
Instead of "agent chat", I feel like a written page (that could be interacted with through agents) is a much more interesting way of working through a problem. Capture the final idea, and minimize the fluff around it.
And if nobody is going to read it anyways, why have the chat in the first place?
And of course the glib comment that I can't help but make:
> Teammates can ask the same agent why you chose a Mutex instead of an RwLock.
you know in this hypothetical neither human involved has much of any idea what is going on. Skill atrophy is real, folks! Be careful.
I never liked it myself, but this looks like an extension of Zed's own systems of collaborative coding (remotely), which in turn is built on top of the ideas of Extreme Programming, and / or intensive pair or mob programming.
It's interesting enough and I'd like to try it sometime, but probably only for hackathons - my main line of work is more planning than actual coding.
https://delta.dev/docs/concepts/core-concepts
It reminds me a bit of jujitsu in that there is a database with your code changes that is automatically kept in sync with your working directory. The agent edits the database copy directly. I guess the sync must be two-way?
PRs may look old fashioned, but they're a very clear way of tracking an issue that may need multiple reviews. With Delta, things can get confusing after more than two reviews + RBAC is another challenge if the agent has similar context for every category.
I am disappointed by the "agent chat"-centric design for the future. There is important value in highlighting what's important, and jettisoning the unimportant. Written artifacts are good when they're nice and cut down. And it's not really about the sequence of events (well, most of the time)
Instead of "agent chat", I feel like a written page (that could be interacted with through agents) is a much more interesting way of working through a problem. Capture the final idea, and minimize the fluff around it.
And if nobody is going to read it anyways, why have the chat in the first place?
And of course the glib comment that I can't help but make:
> Teammates can ask the same agent why you chose a Mutex instead of an RwLock.
you know in this hypothetical neither human involved has much of any idea what is going on. Skill atrophy is real, folks! Be careful.
It's interesting enough and I'd like to try it sometime, but probably only for hackathons - my main line of work is more planning than actual coding.