Git is old! Delta is the new version controlling mechanism

Why Git is Old suddenly?

You might be reading this blog, thinking git is really old. Yeah, it was originally made for Linux code changes working with mailing lists. (If you don’t know what mailing lists are, Linux kernel maintainers came up with a solution for collaboration with emails.)

Since the whole computer industry is rapidly changing with the agentic AI boom, the Zed team came up with a radical solution to mitigate the caveat of git. Git involves taking snapshots of the code state once a change is made (as we call a commit). The fundamental problem with this approach is that it's slow and doesn’t track most agent changes. (You can tell an agent to commit all file changes, but it is not computationally efficient.) Therefore, Delta paired up with DeltaDB is their solution

What the hell is Delta?

I believe the word “Delta” came with

The uppercase Greek letter delta “Δ” represents difference or change because it is the initial letter of diaphorá, the ancient Greek word for "difference".

And every code change is effectively a delta. This approach records every change to the codebase on a central server and maintains synchronised copies for all active collaborators. Surprisingly, Delta uses git. (Snapshots were also a part of it. lol)

From the delta interface,

The folder you open as a project must be a git repository, or a folder inside one. Delta imports the repository’s files into DeltaDB; after the import, every change made in a thread is added to DeltaDB the moment it is made. Commits stay in git. Delta moves them between machines as they are needed, so a collaborator’s machine can get your current commit without a round trip through origin.

Simply think of it as chatting with a friend or a group of friends about how you want the project to be, with an agent listening and building it in the background. And every comment, every reply, and code changes are reflected as deltas and synced with all collaborators instantly. Isn’t this great? Developing software remotely, but it feels like you all are doing it at home?

I was able to test this with their private beta invitation. They will introduce it as soon as possible, which will really accelerate software engineering in the Agent AI era.

To know more about Delta and DeltaDB, you can refer to their official documentation https://delta.dev/

And definitely read their blog statement https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-delta