Zed launches Delta public beta, betting agent threads can replace GitHub pull requests. Zed released a public beta of Delta, a collaboration tool built around AI-agent "threads" and a new DeltaDB versioning layer meant to replace GitHub pull requests. Verified pipeline | Sources: 4 | Publisher: signed | Contributor: signed | Hash: 01e8873cff | View Overview. Zed, the company behind the open-source Zed code editor, released the public beta of Delta on September 16, a collaboration tool built around AI coding agents that replaces GitHub's pull-request review model with shared, persistent "threads," according to Zed's announcement and The New Stack. Delta had been running in a private beta since August, when Zed first revealed the product, per The New Stack. What The Machine Herald know. * Threads instead of pull requests. In Delta, a developer hands a coding task to an agent, keeps discussing and refining the work in an ongoing conversation, and can invite teammates directly into that same thread rather than packaging the result into a pull request, according to Zed's blog post. Reviewers can join the original thread or create a dedicated review subthread that gets "its own isolated copy of the parent thread's worktrees," letting them test changes without disturbing the original work, per Zed. * DeltaDB underpins the system. Delta is built on DeltaDB, which "extends Git's content-based versioning with incremental versions based on deltas," recording edits and conversation messages between commits instead of waiting for work to be packaged into a single change, according to Zed. Delta still works with existing Git repositories, and developers can keep using branches, commits and remotes as before, as reported by The New Stack. * Zed has already gone all-in internally. The company disabled pull requests on Delta's own repository and now develops the product "entirely within Delta," according to Zed. Since making that switch, 33 Zed developers have landed 570 changes to their main branch without a single pull request, per Zed and The New Stack. Zed's public, open-source editor repository will "remain on GitHub for now," the company said, because it's where its outside contributor community reports issues and submits changes, according to Zed. "We're moving more thoughtfully with Zed's public repo because we have hundreds of monthly contributors who depend on that workflow," Zed co-founder and CEO Nathan Sobo told The New Stack. "GitHub has an established social component that will take longer to replace, and we're not going to strand contributors to prove a point," according to The New Stack. * Availability and pricing. Delta is available as a desktop app for macOS, Linux and Windows, plus a browser version, and remains free during the public beta, with paid individual and team plans "to follow," per The New Stack. "There will always be a free version of Delta," the company said in its announcement, according to Zed. * Company background. Zed was founded in 2021 by veterans of GitHub's Atom editor team, including Sobo, who spent nine years there, building a high-performance, multiplayer code editor in Rust, according to The New Stack. Zed raised a $32 million round led by Sequoia Capital in August 2025, when it first teased DeltaDB, per The New Stack. * The reasoning behind Delta. Sobo argues the pull request has been strained by the sheer volume of code agents now generate. "Since GitHub introduced pull requests over 15 years ago, they've become the standard way to ask teammates to review changes to your codebase," Sobo wrote in Zed's announcement. "But with agents generating so much code, the diffs we're asking each other to review have mushroomed," according to Zed. He argues threads preserve the reasoning behind a change instead of leaving reviewers to reconstruct it after the fact: "I believe the thread will replace the commit or branch as the fundamental unit of software development," Sobo said, per The New Stack. * GitHub's growing strain. Delta arrives as GitHub grapples with rapid growth in coding-agent activity. GitHub's monthly commit volume rose from roughly 1 billion across all of 2025 to 1.4 billion a month by April, then to 2.9 billion commits a month by August, according to The New Stack. GitHub also suffered a nearly eight-hour outage on August 17 that disrupted Actions, pull requests, APIs, Git operations, Webhooks and Copilot, with error rates reaching "about 20% across its web experience and API traffic" at the height of the incident, according to InfoWorld. * Not the only contender. Zed is one of several companies rethinking Git-era collaboration tools for AI agents. Cursor, now owned by SpaceX, launched its own code-hosting platform, Origin, in August, combining Git hosting, pull requests and coding agents while still treating existing GitHub repositories as the source of truth, as previously reported by The Machine Herald and per The New Stack. GitLab is separately developing a "next-generation source-code management" project called Project Switch, currently in private beta, according to The New Stack. What The Machine Herald don't know. * Sobo said Zed is "a few months away" from leaving GitHub behind for its own internal use, but gave no firm date, according to The New Stack. Zed's public, open-source repository will keep using GitHub and pull requests, with no announced timeline for when or whether that changes. * Zed has not said when Git storage will move fully into DeltaDB or when CI and release workflows will migrate away from GitHub, per Zed's blog post. * Pricing for Delta's paid individual and team plans, promised to follow the free public beta, has not been disclosed.

Tool Radar: local-first tools and the export test. August 31, 2026 · Last updated 2026-08-31 · By Drift Catch Drafted with AI assistance, reviewed before publishing. Welcome back to Tool Radar, its running note on the adjacent tools worth a freelancer's attention - the AI you draft with, the editor you ship from, the design app you mock up in. Not other freelance-management apps; the rest of your stack. Nobody pays to be here, and this is not a review site. It is the kind of message Drift Catch would send a freelancer friend who asked "what should I be paying attention to right now?" The filter this week: can you get your data out? Every tool below passes one unglamorous test: if its maker disappeared tomorrow, you could still open your files and take them with you. That is the second question Drift Catch bring to every tool, and it earns its own edition this week because the tools that changed recently happen to be the ones that answer it well. The first question is the one Drift Catch ask about everything: does it remove a decision, or does it just add a tab? A good tool folds a recurring choice into a default. A bad one demos well and then sits open in a browser tab you forget about by Thursday. A tool you can walk away from is working for you, not the other way around. Hold both questions against every tool below - and against anything anyone recommends to you. Ollama: drafting with AI that stays on your laptop. Ollama shipped v0.32.15 on August 19, adding a first-launch onboarding flow to its desktop app and caching that makes a model start responding noticeably faster on repeat runs. The freelancer angle is not the speed bump - it is where the drafting happens. Ollama runs language models locally, on your own machine, so the client names, rates, and project details you paste into a draft never leave your laptop. If you have ever hesitated before pasting a client's brief into a cloud tool, that hesitation is the whole point. New cloud models keep landing at a pace that is hard to keep up with, and most of them are genuinely capable. But the question a freelancer can actually act on is not "which model is best this month" - it is "where does my client's information go when I use it." A local runner is one clean answer. This is also the shape Drift Catch trust for AI inside its own product: its AI-Assisted Drafting on templates produces a draft that a human reviews before anything goes out. Draft, then review - whether the model runs in the cloud or on your desk. Zed: a code editor that now reads your spreadsheets. Zed's v1.17.2 release on August 26 added built-in previews for CSV, TSV, and similar delimited files - sortable and resizable columns, row filtering by value, and right-click copying - alongside new Git blame and stashing actions. For a freelance developer, this quietly removes a decision. A client sends a data export; instead of opening a separate spreadsheet app to eyeball it, you read it where you already are. And Git blame is underrated as a record: it answers "when did this change, and in which commit" without you writing a paragraph from memory. When a project starts to drift, that history is evidence of what you actually did and when. Zed is developed in the open on GitHub, which is the export test passing in the background - the thing you write is a plain file in a repo you control, not a document trapped in someone's cloud. Penpot: design files developed in the open. Penpot's current 2.17 line moved the prototype viewer to a WASM (Skia) rendering engine in 2.17.0 (July 22), and the most recent release, 2.17.2 (August 27), is a maintenance and security update rather than a headline feature. So there is no shiny new thing to chase this week - and that is fine. The durable reason a visual freelancer might keep Penpot on the radar is the same export test: it is built in the open on GitHub, and your design files stay yours to move. A slow-news week for a tool you can walk away from is a good problem to have. The freelancer reading here mirrors the developer one above: the tool that keeps a clear, portable history of what you delivered and when is doing double duty. It speeds up the work, and it quietly documents it - which matters the moment a client says "go back to the version from last week." The gap none of these tools touch. The agreement around the work - what was promised, what counts as extra, and when you get paid - is the one thing none of the tools above manage, no matter how portable your files are. Your editor, your AI runner, and your design app all help you do the work. They stay silent on the deal. That silence is the entire reason Drift Catch exists. Drift Catch is glad for the rest of your stack to be the best it can be, and Drift Catch do not connect to any of it - Drift Catch just want the business side to stop leaking. If "small extra requests that were never agreed to" sounds familiar, that pattern has a name - scope creep - and there is a calmer way to handle it: writing it down. Its guide on how to write a change order is the practical version of that. And if keeping your own data close is a running theme for you, its note on privacy-first freelance software explains how Drift Catch think about it on its side of the fence. This is general information, not legal or financial advice. Drift Catch run Tool Radar regularly. If there is an adjacent tool you think every freelancer should know about, tell Drift Catch at [email protected] - Drift Catch read every message, and good suggestions tend to show up in a future edition.

Zed editor v1.14: default sandboxing for agent panel tools enhances security. Zed version 1.14 introduces default sandboxing for agent panel tools, enhancing security and stability for developers. Learn about this crucial update and its implications. Zed, a popular code editor, has rolled out version 1.14, introducing a significant security upgrade: default sandboxing for its agent panel tools. This feature aims to isolate potentially untrusted code, thereby improving the overall security and stability of the development environment. Why it matters. Sandboxing creates a secure, isolated environment for running code, preventing it from affecting the main application or your operating system. This is particularly crucial for agent panel tools, which might process external data or user-generated code. The new default sandboxing in Zed ensures enhanced security against malicious code, improves application stability by containing errors, and builds greater trust for developers integrating various tools. This update is a significant step forward for developer tools, ensuring a safer experience. Potential drawbacks. While sandboxing offers substantial security benefits, it can sometimes introduce performance overhead. Developers utilizing custom agent panel tools might also need to adapt their code to function correctly within the new sandboxed environment. Zed's official documentation should provide guidance on any necessary adjustments for developers. Explore more about code editors to see how Zed compares. Final thoughts. The introduction of default sandboxing in Zed version 1.14 is a commendable step towards a more secure development experience. This update reinforces Zed's commitment to user safety and system integrity. Developers looking for secure coding environments might find Zed's approach appealing, especially when integrating various third-party or custom tools, similar to how secure browsers protect user data.