Today, most of my time is spent building the fundamentals of DeltaDB. We had some painful false starts: too much agentic coding led to code that smelled correct, but fell apart as soon as you started to build on it.

But I still use an agent heavily. It’s astonishing how many things LLMs can now do. They make excellent rubber-ducks, they’re good at pushing through refactorings, and they can write tests and identify edge cases about as well as I can. I still edit the code manually to ensure the narrative is clear, to keep my mental model of the problem up to date, and to ensure that the code actually does what it purports to do. But, in terms of lines of code written, I suspect it’s now less than half.

I share this because I think a lot of developers are where I was a year ago. If you’re skeptical, I understand; I was too, for good technical reasons. But the tools have gotten meaningfully better, and it’s worth considering how you can evolve your workflow. Please don’t use an LLM to avoid having to understand the problem you’re solving, or how to solve it; but use it as a sparring partner to clarify your understanding, and to fill in the gaps, and to make yourself more productive.

Source: We’re Not Building AI Features for the Money

Similar to Conrad, I started incredibly skeptical about how AI could help me and it’s in the clanker sparring partner and sometimes clanker-worker-ant model where LLMs, agents and chatbots seem useful to my workflow.

We’re building towards our vision with DeltaDB, a synchronization engine that tracks every operation at character-level granularity, designed to let humans and agents share a single, consistent view of the codebase as it evolves. It’s how we plan to make conversations about code stay connected to the code itself, whether you’re working together in real time or asynchronously, and it’s how we plan to make Zed a generationally successful company in the long term.

Source: We’re Not Building AI Features for the Money — Zed’s Blog

I do admire hard technology companies that leverage it to build great products. Zed is one of my favorite tools in my workflow alongside pi and obsidian.