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Replacing Pull Requests with Delta

117 pointsby 2d agozed.dev
72 comments
2d agoHN ↗

Look interesting, though admittedly I am mostly interested in the open-source release of DeltaDB.

8h agoHN ↗

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.

6h agoHN ↗

Yes I like where Zed is going with this.

I find pair programming very productive with agentic coding.

Two people (plus one or more agents) have the full context of the plan, execution, written code, automated and manual testing. Both can help drive to the point where it feels safe to sign off on the change right then and there and merge it.

Compare that to traditional PR / code review, where so much of that context is lost. At best the coder needs to spend a lot more time rewriting up a great PR description to bring the reviewer up to speed. At worst the reviewer needs to read lots of AI slop PRs, docs, transcripts, and code to try to make sense of things.

Doing it together then merging the thread and moving on can be efficient.

8h agoHN ↗

Certainly looks interesting and a new way of working which would take some time to get adjusted.

7h agoHN ↗

Would have loved to have tried this, but it still bizarrely lacks Apple Intel support.

4h agoHN ↗

Intel Macs haven't been sold for over three years now. I don't think that's bizzare.

35m agoHN ↗

They haven't been sold for three years so they suddenly don't exist? Really?

7h agoHN ↗

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.

7h agoHN ↗

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.

7h agoHN ↗

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?

6h agoHN ↗

Oh, yeah. I gave Claude sudo on my AI dev machine: it commits, pushes, checks the results of pre-push tests, sudos to another user, deploys, checks the results of smoke tests, and then checks the end result.

It also has MCP access to Cloudflare. Front-end deploys on every push to main but Claude can adjust the pipeline, add environmental variables, etc.

6h agoHN ↗

That sounds like a problem waiting to happen.

6h agoHN ↗

All IT infrastructure is a problem waiting to happen. I have backups and a rollback mechanism.

5h agoHN ↗

That's like not putting protective guardrail on a staircase, and instead having first aid kits and emergency phone number on hand. In other words, dumb and irresponsible. Possibly illegal, depending on the case.

3h agoHN ↗

Why? It sounds like a pretty typical workflow to me.

It just depends on what you are building. Some things are more more forgiving to muck-ups than others and if the LLM screws the pooch, oh well! Roll forward.

2h agoHN ↗

I hope you never handle other people's data.

7h agoHN ↗

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.

7h agoHN ↗

For more see:

https://delta.dev/docs/concepts/core-concepts

It reminds me a bit of jujutsu 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?

6h agoHN ↗

Apparently downloading this requires "signing in and accepting beta terms".

6h agoHN ↗

Seems interesting! I have found my main bottleneck right now is having too primitive tools for code review. A tighter loop around that might be a solution.

6h agoHN ↗

Primitive in what way? There are already tools that categorize changes so that they are easier to follow during a review.

6h agoHN ↗

This would force you to utilize agentic AI just to make small code changes.

4h agoHN ↗

Hmm, looks to me you can also just go and modify the code in the editor?

2h agoHN ↗

I'll admit that "force" was the wrong word here but Delta is still a what a vibe coder who doesn't understand version control would utilize.

6h agoHN ↗

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.

3h agoHN ↗

cause we all know Claude will use 1000 words when 10 will do

Further, the agents are incentivised (if that's the appropriate term here) to do this, since more tokens equals more cost.

5h agoHN ↗

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.

5h agoHN ↗

But what if your PR was created as half chat, then an agent, then some more chat planning, possibly in a new chat to clear the context? I think my teammates would find my inner monologue rather confusing at times.

The sequence of commits I present a purely optimized for reviewing, and not an actual record of what happened. I’m not going to read another person’s 100 turn slop factory, because they couldn’t express their change in one paragraph.

3h agoHN ↗

Yeah, my solution to this problem has been to get Claude to use jj to create a clean commit history. Each commit serves a single purpose and includes what drove the decisions we made. You lose the noise and still have the meaning.

So I'm a little unclear as to benefit of this. It sounds...wasteful?

5h agoHN ↗

for a lot of teams that do pair programming etc and pairing with agents - this makes sense.

hell dare I say better than the pull-request model - since you don't have to wait on people to review the code and deal with the nonsense of merge-trains.

5h agoHN ↗

Has anyone compared this with Cursor's Origin?

4h agoHN ↗

Origin is a platform, this is about storing context in your repository directly.

4h agoHN ↗

Lexfina looks very cool. I need self-hosting to adopt at my business.

5h agoHN ↗

I'd use some "DeltaDB"-like version control tool if it was lightweight and unopinionated about how it integrated into my workflow, since I think revisiting how some change came about at a more granular level could be enlightening. But I'm not interested in this agentic chat multiplayer stuff at all.

4h agoHN ↗

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 ?

3h agoHN ↗

Software Engineers avoid coding more than any other type of people I have ever met. It's clearly not better but much easier for the Engineers who just want the results without knowing anything about the solution.

1h agoHN ↗

At least traditionally, software engineers avoided everything except coding for a long time, but now i guess that's changed

11m agoHN ↗

Yes, but compared to seeing 3k lines of code in a PR with no history with vibes in the description, what is better? This definitely "feels" like something worth exploring.

4h agoHN ↗

Obviously I don't get it because, for me, it's like PRs with some agentic generated description and a way to involve in a chat another guys.

4h agoHN ↗

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?"

4h agoHN ↗

Do you have a link to an issue, so I can know if I should be worried about this?

4h agoHN ↗

Ah, yeah, I get this issue too but I've been so conditioned to close and reopen files that I've stopped thinking it was an issue. Appreciate the link.

4h agoHN ↗

Woah. I’ve been meaning to check out zed but that’s a huge problem. I’ve fixed this problem before in rust, there’s just a library you can use to update file trees with a combination of batching fs notifications and a periodic rescan. Wtf guys! Maybe I’ll submit a PR… oh wait! I mean delta. :(

2h agoHN ↗

What is that library name? Sounds helpful.

3h agoHN ↗

Similarly, I had to stop using Zed because the main thread would beachball for > 30s when trying to work in large repos on macOS. This behavior was clearly reported to them in a GitHub issue that they also closed without fixing (because they believed a partial fix was sufficient, and have ignored subsequent comments to the contrary): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/55746

1h agoHN ↗

Closing this as I expect many of the remaining problems described in this issues comments to be fixed by #51208. > > Once that PR makes it to stable (expected March 25th 2026), please create new issues if you are still experiencing problems.

Did you open a new issue?

1h agoHN ↗

No, but I posted on the existing one. Sounds worth trying.

edit: Done

3h agoHN ↗

Jetbrains (PyCharm and RustRover) for projects; Sublime for one-off files.

3h agoHN ↗

The last time I checked out Jetbrains' IDEs, they felt heavy as hell to use. Has that changed?

3h agoHN ↗

No. Still heavy as hell. (AKA uses loads of ram and CPU, slow, sometimes unresponsive). It is the price we pay - the tradeoff is IMO the unmatched editing and introspection/refactoring capabilities. I'm surprised there hasn't been a real competitor in this space.

2h agoHN ↗

Yeah, JetBrains IDEs are Java-based, so rather heavyweight. Then again, VS Code (and Cursor) have a browser engine running in the background, so not really better in my book. Sublime and Zed are more efficient of course. OTOH, JetBrains IDEs might be memory intensive, but don't actually feel sluggish on my 5 year old Core i7 laptop with 16 GB RAM.

1h agoHN ↗

Visual studio (at least its "core") is written in C++, yet is very heavy weight, so it's not the programming language at play here.

2h agoHN ↗

I've been running a latest-1 version of a few of their products on silicon Macs since M1 w/ 8GB RAM without issue. I use minimal plugins and work on medium-sized codebases and their IDEs are some of the most reliable software I use.

2h agoHN ↗

Yikes. I had to stop using JetBrains software for similar reason (their autosave effectively conflicted with external git usage). This is inexcusable to me but to each their own.

2h agoHN ↗

Don't they have an auto-save setting that you can turn off?

2h agoHN ↗

I _think_ they fixed the file sync issue; I haven’t had desynced files in a few weeks.

Still a bad bug that lingered entirely too long.

when a file is changed asynchronously, which for me, most happens due to a pull or LLM edits!

If you’re using Pi (I am), that’s partially because Pi doesn’t have “real” ACP and violates the spec as a result. File read/writes are supposed to happen via ACP RPC calls from the agent to the client, so Zed would see them and know to refresh. Pi wasn’t built for ACP so it embeds its own read/write tools and ignores the ACP ones, and Zed never gets the “refresh this file” signal it expects.

54m agoHN ↗

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.

But isn’t Zed written in Rust?

4h agoHN ↗

I haven't tested this yet, but after reading the post, the issue and the proposed fix make complete sense. I've been relying on markdown files to keep track track of threads. My repository has a mess of files because of it. Look forward to giving this a shot.

4h agoHN ↗

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.

4h agoHN ↗

Wow that entire workflow looks absolutely hellish

2h agoHN ↗

This is exactly the kind of issue that makes me skeptical of LLM-focused tooling. Source control should make the human/LLM distinction less important, not build the workflow around it.

2h agoHN ↗

I applaud Zed for innovating.

I like the workflow presented in the video, although I don’t care much about the collaborative part of it. I want to see a polished result from my coworkers, not the messy in-betweens. However, what’s clearly super useful is that if you do have the thread as a reviewer, it can shorten the feedback loop - instead of asking “why did you do it this way?” from a coworker, then waiting for them to proxy that to their AI, you can just do it yourself and only leave the comments that truly matter. Some will claim that this removes learning opportunities, and while it’s true to some extent, it just means that we need to start training juniors differently. Instead of training them through PR comments, maybe the training moves toward short calls or office chats. That would be kind of nice, actually.

There’s some negative comments, but the truth is that this industry is changing, and Zed as a company must capitalize on that. They will need to make money and it would be suicide to expect that a regular code editor will make money in the future.

The innovation they bring is exciting and new, even if I am not sure how it will all pan out.

2h agoHN ↗

I think the humble PR is definitely not made for this era of software.

It used to be a finished piece of work that meant „this is the way I solved this engineering challenge.“

The team member could generally answer questions about that PR and why they chose to do it this way, not some other way, explain discarded approaches, etc.

Now a lot of that reasoning happens in AI coding agents. So even if a choice on approach was made, the human presenting the PR rarely has the same depth of understanding of each tradeoff and line of code.

That (in combination with the ease of producing tons of code instantly) makes each PR less meaningful.

I’m not sure I want my coworker’s AI chat history (who has time to read all that?), but it’s good that innovation is happening.

2h agoHN ↗

I am not sold on this for 2 reasons:

-I was hoping deltadb would be agnostic about who writes/reads to it, but it actually forces you to use their editor/agent harness which is a no go for me.

-I am not sold on the value of reading other people agent threads and jumping into them half baked. Let me review the piece of code when you, person who made it with or without AI, think its ready to be reviewed with nice summary of the change. I don't need to read X threads with XX messages on the process how it was made with all the little "continue", "fix that" in between.