Zed killed pull requests on its own repo, then shipped Delta

Zed switched off pull requests on the repository where it builds Delta, and 33 developers have since landed 570 changes to main without one. On Wednesday Delta opened in public beta, a workspace where developers and coding agents work in shared threads instead, The New Stack reports.

At a glance

• Zed's pitch is that pull requests were built for humans: with agents writing more of the code the diffs have mushroomed, and the reasoning behind a change sits in a conversation elsewhere.
• Underneath Delta sits DeltaDB, which records individual edits and conversation events as they happen, records Zed calls deltas, adding a layer of history between the commits Git keeps.
• Zed still runs on GitHub: CEO Nathan Sobo says the team is a few months away from leaving, Git storage and CI have to move first, and the public repo keeps pull requests.

If you have not followed Zed: it was founded in 2021 by veterans of GitHub's Atom editor team, Sobo among them after nine years there. The product started as a fast multiplayer editor in Rust; by 2025 AI editing and agentic features had moved to its centre. Sequoia led a 32 million dollar round in August 2025, and Zed teased DeltaDB, version control that records changes at edit-level granularity. Delta went into private beta in August.

GitHub went from about 1 billion commits in all of 2025 to 2.9 billion a month

Monthly commit volume tells most of the story. Across the whole of 2025 GitHub logged around 1 billion commits; by April it was running at 1.4 billion a month, and by August GitHub put the figure at 2.9 billion a month.

Over the twelve months leading into June, the platform recorded hundreds of incidents. August brought a near-eight-hour disruption, with web and API error rates around 20% at the height of it. According to GitHub's engineering blog, the 17 August incident ran 7 hours and 47 minutes and hit authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues and Copilot.

The same post said Azure was by then serving roughly 58% of GitHub's platform load and half of all Git operations, up from 12% of platform load in May.

Sobo expects the thread to replace the commit or branch

A thread is a running record of an agent-assisted task in which the conversation and the files being changed stay attached to each other. You hand an agent a job, keep discussing and refining it, and later pass the whole body of work to somebody else.

Each thread can work against its own copy of a project, so several pieces of work run independently instead of every agent editing the same checked-out files. A teammate can join an existing thread, or open a separate review thread to inspect a change, question the agent that produced it and try revisions before the accepted result goes back into the original work.

I believe the thread will replace the commit or branch as the fundamental unit of software development.

DeltaDB records edits as they happen, not when you commit

Instead of waiting for a developer to package work into a commit, DeltaDB captures individual events as they occur, code edits and activity inside the conversation alike, and uses that history to keep everyone in the thread synchronized.

Think of a shared document that keeps every keystroke rather than only the versions someone chose to save. Git stores the snapshots; DeltaDB stores the movement between them, the intermediate human and agent activity a commit throws away.

Git has not gone anywhere. Delta works with Git repositories, and branches, commits and remotes keep working as before. Sobo's argument is that commits remain useful checkpoints but preserve none of the discussion or the decisions along the way, which is what a later collaborator needs to pick up the work where it was left and keep talking to the same agent.

Cursor's Origin and GitLab's Project Switch are chasing the same gap

Cursor, owned by SpaceX, formally launched Origin in August, putting Git repository hosting, pull requests and its coding agents under one roof while letting existing GitHub repositories stay the source of truth. GitLab has a next-generation source-code management project, Project Switch, in private beta.

Sobo expects this era to rhyme with the Git era: Git became the common foundation because it was open, GitHub won the layer above on network effects, and he expects many viable products to compete on the agent experience over shared infrastructure.

Delta is a desktop app for macOS, Linux and Windows, with a browser version for viewing, sharing and reviewing threads. It is free for the duration of the public beta, with paid individual and team plans to come; Zed says a free version will always exist.

What Zed has not put numbers on is price: the paid plans arrive after the beta, and no figures are attached to them. The roadmap also keeps a foot in GitHub, with repository-based access set to use a GitHub repo's existing permissions to decide who can open a shared thread; oddly for a product pitched as the end of the pull request, its access control starts at the thing it wants to replace.

When Git storage moves Zed's next dependency is Git storage itself, which it intends to pull into DeltaDB, along with CI and releases. Sobo treats CI as largely solved and says Zed will integrate with existing options rather than build a replacement for its own sake. He puts the exit from GitHub a few months out, without naming a date, and says the community layer of the public repo moves only when Zed can offer contributors something better.