Zed says software is made between commits, and built a version control system to prove it

Commits as the wrong unit

DeltaDB, under the banner Software is made between commits, argues that Git's snapshot-and-commit model fits humans poorly and human-plus-agent collaboration worse. Instead of snapshots it records deltas — individual operations, each with a stable identifier — so a reference to a piece of code survives later edits via "delta anchors" rather than line numbers. It supports conflict-free replicated worktrees across machines and agents, and it permanently pairs each conversation message with the change it produced. Nathan Sobo's claim is that pull requests and review comments only exist because discussion and code lived apart; unify them and "the ceremony disappears." His line: "the conversation with the agent becomes the only conversation you need to have."

The thread didn't want one more thinking tool

The most-felt reaction wasn't about version control at all. A commenter wrote the line the thread kept quoting:

"A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly. If you think about your hammer it's because something is wrong with it."

A New York Apple-platform developer extended it into a verdict on modern software:

"You're being served by a waiter wearing a clown suit, screaming slogans at you, and serving you lukewarm, pre-chewed goo."

Zed's own users are the wary ones

The irony is that Zed's base loves it for the opposite of an AI-first pitch. A developer who splits time between Zed and vim was explicit about why:

"The ability to completely shut off and block any slop machine features from interfering with my workflow… Having said that, I hope they don't remove that ability in the future."

That fear already has a hedge: a commenter pointed to gram-editor.com, an anti-AI Zed fork, as insurance "if zed goes to shit." The mood among long-time users was summed up as "sad to see zed going the same route everybody is screaming them not to."

The technical hole: it assumes you live in one repo

Underneath the vibes was a concrete design critique. A commenter flagged the missing piece every Git-replacement trips over:

"The thing that everyone building these git alternatives is missing is a multi-repo story — unless the expectation is that everyone is going to start operating out of monorepos."

A reply sharpened it: "a change sometimes spans several repos, [so] per-repo history optimizes the wrong target." If the unit of work crosses repositories, anchoring history inside one of them rebuilds the very wall DeltaDB set out to remove.

What it's really proposing

Strip the manifesto and DeltaDB is a bet that the next IDE is also your issue tracker, your review tool and your agent log — one commenter sketched exactly that: "issue tracking, Slack conversations, PR reviewing, agent harness, and collaborative editing in a single tool." It's a coherent vision. The catch is that Zed's most loyal users signed up for an editor that gets out of the way, and a tool whose pitch is "think about me constantly" is a different product than the one they came for.