Overview of 1029: The Workflow of the Future With Zed
Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski speak with Nathan Sobo, co-founder and CEO of Zed, about the evolution of software development tools—from Atom and Electron to Zed’s Rust-based editor—and the launch of Delta, Zed’s new agent-first collaboration platform. The conversation centers on how AI is changing not just how code is written, but how teams collaborate, review, and preserve context around code. Nathan’s core thesis is that the future isn’t just “chat about code,” but conversation as the source of code, with code becoming a downstream artifact.
Main Themes and Takeaways
From text editor to collaboration platform
- Nathan explains that Zed started as his long-running attempt to build the “ultimate” software development tool.
- His experience at Pivotal Labs—where pair programming was the norm—shaped his desire for a tool that could recreate that kind of real-time collaboration over the internet.
- Zed began as a high-performance text editor, but the vision has expanded into a UI for interacting with software.
Why Zed was built in Rust
- Nathan’s earlier work on Atom and Electron taught him the tradeoffs of building on web tech:
- cross-platform convenience
- but performance and UX limitations
- Zed moved “closer to the metal” by using Rust and building its own UI framework, GPUI.
- He says Rust’s safety and control are essential for a complex, open-source codebase with external contributors.
GPUI and the performance mindset
- Nathan describes GPUI as the result of deciding to own the full stack of the app’s rendering and interaction model.
- The goal was extreme responsiveness: a keystroke should produce visible pixels by the next V-sync.
- GPUI is now available under a permissive license, and people have already started building apps with it.
AI has changed the workflow
- The Zed team uses AI heavily, especially for:
- writing code
- understanding diffs
- reviewing pull requests
- Nathan emphasizes that their use of AI is highly engaged, not hands-off:
- he reads and interprets most of the output
- the team is not aiming for fully autonomous “dark factory” coding
- External contributions have increased, and AI makes it easier for outside contributors to fix bugs in a complex codebase.
Delta and DeltaDB: the big new idea
What Delta is
- Zed is launching a new product called Delta, built around DeltaDB.
- Delta is an agentic development environment designed for collaboration with both humans and AI.
- It is not just another chat-based coding interface; it is built around a richer model of code, conversation, and history.
What DeltaDB does
- DeltaDB records work at a much finer granularity than Git commits.
- It treats every delta/change as part of a continuous history:
- conversations
- prompts
- edits
- agent actions
- code changes
- Nathan’s idea: instead of snapshots of code plus comments around them, the future is conversations linked directly to the code.
Conflict-free replicated work trees
- DeltaDB virtualizes the work tree using copy-on-write and persistent data structures.
- This makes it cheap to spin up branches, clone environments, and sync work across collaborators.
- The system supports:
- synchronous and asynchronous collaboration
- real-time shared threads
- conflict-free syncing of edits
- Every change can be traced back to the agent/model that made it.
Desktop + web, same codebase
- Delta is both:
- a desktop app
- a web experience
- The UI is built in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly/WebGL for the browser.
- This lets users collaborate via a URL, without downloads, while still preserving Zed’s performance-oriented architecture.
Long-term vision
- Delta is not meant to replace Git overnight, but it could eventually rival GitHub as a collaboration layer.
- In the short term, it complements Git hosting by making the conversation around code first-class.
- Nathan’s larger argument: code review, debugging, and design decisions are increasingly about ongoing dialogue, not just diffs.
Future of UI and software interaction
Natural language is becoming the main interface
- Nathan believes the future will have less UI overall because language is becoming the dominant way people interact with software.
- He thinks the old gestural interface model is being replaced by tools where users can ask for what they want rather than navigate through layers of controls.
But graphics still matter
- He does not think the future is purely terminal-based or text-only.
- Visual affordances like:
- diagrams
- progress indicators
- inline structured output
- rich text annotations still have a role.
- Delta supports markdown-like, structured interactions and even things like Mermaid diagrams.
Notable insights
- “Conversations are becoming the source of our code.”
- The old Git model was built around snapshots, but modern collaboration needs something closer to continuous context.
- AI makes code generation easier, but it also increases the need for tools that help humans understand, review, and coordinate.
- Nathan sees the smallest meaningful unit of collaboration not as a commit, but as a delta.
Sick Picks
Nathan’s technical pick
- Keychron Q11 split keyboard
- split, mechanical, but still “normal-looking”
- programmable firmware
- helps with ergonomics without forcing a weird layout
Nathan’s cultural pick
- Jazz, especially:
- Grant Green – Idle Moments
- He credits AI with helping him explore jazz history and find a deeper appreciation for the Blue Note era and mid-1950s to mid-1960s jazz.
Shameless Plug
- Delta.dev
- early access for Delta
- a new way to collaborate with agents and teammates
- built on the same tech stack as Zed
- designed for the future of code, context, and conversation