“Everyone’s in a race to replace GitHub”: Zed launches Delta because agents made pull requests obsolete
The New Stack Paul Sawers
Zed launched Delta, a new way to review code with agents instead of pull requests. It’s a shot at GitHub, which is buckling under the volume and style of AI-made code.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Paul Sawers — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
GitHub was built for people writing code in commits, branches and pull requests. Zed thinks that model is starting to break under agentic coding, where software can be generated, revised and submitted far faster than a human review queue was ever meant to handle. Nathan Sobo, Zed’s co-founder and CEO, says the race to replace GitHub is already on.
Delta is Zed’s answer. The public beta introduces a shared workspace where developers and coding agents work in threads rather than in pull requests. The idea is simple enough: keep the conversation, the edits and the review path together instead of forcing everyone to reconstruct the logic from a finished diff.
That matters because Zed says the old workflow hides too much. A pull request shows the result, but not the back-and-forth with an agent that produced it. DeltaDB, the layer under Delta, records those smaller events as they happen, including code edits and activity in the conversation. Zed calls those records deltas. Threads can also branch off into separate copies of a project, so multiple tasks can move forward without every agent colliding in the same files.
Zed is not pretending Git is dead. Delta still works with Git repositories, and branches, commits and remotes are still there. But the company has already turned off pull requests on Delta’s own repository. Zed says 33 developers have landed 570 changes to main there without using PRs. The company also says it is only a few months away from leaving GitHub behind for internal work, though its main open-source editor repo will stay on GitHub for now because of the contributor community around it.
The bigger point is that Zed thinks the thread, not the commit, should become the basic unit of development. That’s a neat way to say the old social layer of software has become a bit ceremonial. The code still matters, obviously. But the conversation around it now does too, and GitHub looks increasingly like the place where that conversation gets filed after the interesting part has already happened.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The pull request was always a social compromise dressed up as process, and AI has made the costume look silly. Zed is betting that the real product is the conversation plus the code, not the frozen diff at the end. That feels right, which is exactly why GitHub should be worried.
Read more about this at: The New Stack