I think Zed is an excellent editor (fast!) with a pretty good AI agent built-in, but I have no desire to do multi-player development in my editor. Never have had any such desire. Coding is a single-player game and I can't think of a single thing that would be improved by having someone else in the same editor.
So, this seems like a lot of work on really cool tech for no useful purpose at all?
Are there people crying out for a multi-user code editor? I mean, we have to have code reviews, sure. That involves other people or other agents. But, I don't need to stand over someone's shoulder while they work. That seems like the worst thing in the world for everyone involved. I don't want an audience for my dumb looking experiments because I forgot how to do something.
Pair programming is a great way to do knowledge sharing and collaborate on tricky problems. Now, I don't really want a multiplayer editor, but I'll highly contest that coding is solely a solo activity.
Sometimes I feel like people online hate all their coworkers. Thankfully, such people have not been highly represented amonst those I've worked with.
It's not hating coworkers. It's more that state of flow is not compatible with collaboration with other people. Getting to pair programming flow is basically like the neural "Drift" in Pacific Rim: it just doesn't work with two random people, or with shifting moods, energy levels or priorities.
There aren't that many good ways to mentor or share experience in a team without pairing though. Sometimes it's just better to sit down with someone and directly collab, and let the person with less experience do the driving so they get the muscle memory. This is an easy transfer of skill and knowledge and it works well because it's hands on.
AI doesn't make that very easy if you're just two people staring at an agent, but I think a lot of people who aren't already senior are going to hit a wall they can't climb when their experience limits what they are capable of doing with AI.
As with many things, usually the bad experiences with collaborative methods come from a specific implementation and those experiences become the bias.
I don’t get in flow but I do feel like it’s similarly productive though. Right where I would lull in energy or lack the motivation to think through something difficult I can unload some of that on the other person and feel like as a pair we are keeping each other accountable. Can be productive this way even without the same flow state.
You reach a different kind of flow state with two people, if you have chemistry. I think it’s a more productive flow state than the solo flow.
But, it’s not 2x. Companies are cheap, they don’t want to pay for it.
It does happen, but it's very very rare. I met maybe 2 people in my career I could do this with.
That actually makes the "Drift" analogy perfect, because you have to be "Drift compatible", you can't just grab two people off the street and throw them in a Jäger together and have it work.
It's less hating coworkers and more enjoying the perfect logic that comes from interacting with a cpu versus the fuzzy nature of human moods etc. It's likely why a lot of people (myself included) got into coding.
Ah, now I hate all my coworkers because I don't want to share a keyboard. Incredible insight.
If you're not sitting in a group of 5 watching one guy code, then you're not a team player.
Bro I can drive the car alone why do rally racers have two people in the car? Now I hate my coworkers because I don’t want to share a wheel? Smdh
I read "coding" as literally the act of being in the text editor and writing the code, not the encapsulating job of defining requirements, desigining a solution, etc. which is definitely not a solo activity.
But I agree with OP that when comes the time of sitting down and writing the code, it is a solo activity. I want to lock in and not see multiplayer cursors or avatars popping up around the editor. The part before and after that are for collaboration, but writing your piece of the code is (or at least I like it to be) solo.
pair programming is when two people collaborate on engineering decisions while one of them codes.
Yea that never made sense to me. I think and solve problems as I code, and having someone yapping while I'm trying to do that is a great way to disrupt my thinking process.
You might be working on much smaller and well constrained problems, pair programming works well when the problem is unconstrained with many complex and interconnected layees
Maybe it does for you, but everyone is different. It is annoying (and sad) to see both sides asserting their experiences as universal truths.
I cannot stand pair programming, but I don't begrudge that it might work for some.
In my limited experience, the 'pairness' part of pair programming , is best done in silence. The discussion / planning happens up front, the keyboard person does the implementation and the second person doesn't 'backseat drive', but thinks about test cases (writes it down), thinks about weaknesses (writes it down) and writes documentation while the code is written.
All of these are reviewed before commit.
The 'interrupting' while coding is the shitty part (I agree with you), not having someone working with you.
I am willing to bet there’s a strong correlation between people who post/comment on Internet forums and anti-social behavior.
There’s tons of reasons
- antisocial people
- larpers and students and shit who don’t even have a job where they write code but comment like they do
- people who don’t do shit for 3/4 of the day and don’t want to be accountable for that
- people who work with too many idiots
Probably lots of other reasons. Personally I think it’s fun and useful, but I wouldn’t want to do it exclusively. Maybe scheduled hours a couple times a week. LLM aided development can be very similar experience.
Also a great teaching tool.
Big part of my job currently is taking slop level Pinocchio prototypes and turning them into a real boy. I’ve decided that I’d much rather have all of the conversations these people have had with Claude when creating the project than the final code artifacts. Hopefully we get more tooling in that direction.
ASOCIAL people prefer solitude.
ANTISOCIAL people doesn't care about society, are harmful towards other people, break laws, etc.
If you’re trying to diagnose a personality disorder sure. If you’re just using it colloquially then no it doesn’t matter.
Of course it matters, using "antisocial" in this context is plain ignorant and wrong.
No, it’s completely correct.
Dictionary definition #1 from dictionary.com for “antisocial”
> unwilling or unable to associate in a normal or friendly way with other people.
Furthermore, were you or the original pedant actually confused by what I meant? I seriously doubt it.
> I have no desire to do multi-player development in my editor. Never have had any such desire. Coding is a single-player game and I can't think of a single thing that would be improved by having someone else in the same editor.
I've definitely used the live sharing session with VS Code in the past to help coworkers debug or give them some suggestions for how to structure things (usually giving Rust pointers to people newer to the language). I haven't done it in a while though, probably because nowadays people will just ask their agent rather than me.
I've done VSCode pair programming as well. But since roughly half a year ago, it has been permanently broken. It'll work for a few minutes, then loses sync, and then it's unusable. This seems to happen between many computers (not just mine) and many updates of VSC.
Are we the only ones with this issue? Pair programming is unusable to us with VSC because of this.
during those cases, i've just asked them to give me control over zoom and it's worked fine.
I've never desired to have two people working on the same file at the same time during a debugging/teaching session.
Even if you're not both typing at once, being able to trade off quickly without having to manually pass the ownership back and forth has had value for me in the past.
Can you elaborate? Why wouldn't you just check in your code when you're done your bit instead of working on the same commit together?
I like it because we don't have to do the this dance all the time: * Commit * Push * Say: Now it's pushed * Pull
We can just work together, talking and writing code. Works great with people you work well with and are aligned with.
Zed agent was so bad at using Ollama local models that I created my own agent to use instead. I think creating an agent is the hello-world of agentic coding, everyone is doing one.
I have zed installed, but honestly I still use SublimeText as my primary editor. Zed feels opinionated and hard to customise.
But good for them, surely some company will pay for their services.
You can try shikigami dev IDE, and let me know what do you think - if you have some time. It's my side project and gains more and more popularity as an alternative to VCBaked or paid products. Thanks!
Ever try editing like, a Google Doc, while multiple people are in it? It's not fun. I can't imagine how that would go when people could be changing functions I'm referencing, etc. Isn't this was version control is for?
Works well if you're communicating while you're making changes in code.
At my work 20 people are changing the same wiki-page when we do heavy regression tests. Works like a charm (not everyone is writing at the same place in the document since we are testing different things and writing results at different sections).
> Ever try editing like, a Google Doc, while multiple people are in it? It's not fun
Uh yeah, it works amazingly well. I've done entire uni projects with Google Docs and it went great, and was much more convenient than whatever we did before using Google Docs
Honest question: with multiple contributors or just a single individual editor? I’m building a word processor and never personally considered multi-player useful.
Multiple. Just writing down some stuff and comments at the same time you're writing the content is very powerful. For group projects it was the fastest way we found to get to a working plan as soon as possible and get to work on assigned parts of the doc. It's also nice seeing other people working at the same time as yourself
I've seen it done: group project where due to delays everyone needed to blitz through writing the report, four people hammering out stuff in a shared google doc. It works pretty damn well. You probably want to be in the same room or on a voice call with the others, though.
Don't tell me what's fun or not! Some people might not like the experience, but why yuck someone's yum? Editing a Google doc at the same time as someone else when you're both in the flow and you know what you're doing and you know the person or persons really well, is sublime. Like a shared game of Factorio.
> Like a shared game of Factorio.
Which is another thing that just does not compute in my mind as a concept, much like pair programming. Probably for the same reasons. That said, it's obviously very situational and personality-dependent.
Pair programming requires a lot from you and your relationship with your pair programming partner.
When it's working I think it's absolutely great. Together we find the best solution in the fastest time with less errors along the way. I'm also less sloppy and more focused when someone constantly sees my work and vice versa. At the end of the day you can celebrate what you've done, both feel responsible for the work and knows exactly how it works.
If you look at one of the studio sessions between Drake and 40 (look up "100gigs" on youtube), there's this flow between the two, almost like an implicit language that they invented together, that lets them collaborate at an insane speed.
The problem is you need to fully trust your collaborators, and that's really hard to find in this industry. Most people never find it. I haven't.
I've seen it though. It exists. Very rare. I know two guys who used to participate in Ludum Dare over 10 years ago who would have loved something like Zed if it existed back then.
By contrast, at your 9-5 where you don't know if your coworker is gonna stab you in the back for a promotion (which I suspect is most people in the comments here) then Zed is probably not a great tool. Git would be a better fit for that. After all it was made to develop Linux, which is one of the lowest-trust collaborative environments out there.
For me it's less about trust and more about practicality. If you are coordinating live in person while collaborating that is a bit different than trying to edit a doc multiple people are in, all remotely. When I had said it's not fun that's the case I had in mind.
Linus actually mostly deals only with trusted subsystem leads. They may choose to deal with less trusted contributors, but I wouldn't say the Linux kernel development process is low trust. Many of those folks have worked together for decades.
Funnily enough, my first impression for this project was to use it for non-code and planning first.
I agree, I don't think people are going to remotely pair-prog with this when it's existed in the past and most work on their own and let their pull requests do the talking.
But I say non-code and planning because I've definitely strategized with AI before and have scrapped a good chunk of it because I overlooked details that my team shared. Being able to get that on an active session with context shared across all members as it's debated sounds good and would've reduced turnaround time.
I remember the Opencode folks mention about gangprompting before and I guess this is one take of it, besides adding an Opencode bot on Slack and hoping that's competent enough for the work that needs doing. I've never tried it myself, so I'm not gonna criticize it, but I'm sure it's an idea people want to see if it's effective.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of fans of "pair programming", including the zed people...
I remember the fad. I was around for the Extreme Programming era. But, I've never worked anywhere that pair programming was the norm, nor have I known any developers that wanted to pair program, in the general case.
My personal experience is, of course, not representative of an entire industry, but I just have a hard time imagining it being a common thing. I like working with other people and helping juniors sort out their problems, but I'd quit my job if I had to take turns writing code while someone else watched and just sitting and watching someone else writing code. Both of those things seem horrible, to me.
I love pairing. It always results it better outcomes than not pairing and I've been saddened by the slow decay of the term to now refer to like "talk to me a bit until I'm unstuck" instead of "both work together and get it done"
I happened to "pair program" for the first time in years today! My coworker asked me to come over and help him with a problem.
'course we only did it for like 5 min to get him over the hump.
I think that's the only use case. It sucks having someone hover over you otherwise.
This sounds like ‘pair debugging’ which I’ve found to work pretty well. ‘Pair development’ isn’t something I’ve ever really found helpful, though.
I worked at Pivotal Labs, it was an amazing experience to be in an environment where everyone was onboard with a very well defined methodology. Certainly not for everyone, but everyone who was there had the same mentality. A bit like you'd expect from a cult or the military.
I consulted on an internal project where the leads literally made one dev control the keyboard and another dev control the mouse! It was the most ridiculous thing I ever saw. I fought for those poor kids, the leads were eventually fired or quit.
Multiplayer agent thingy is a VC keyword these days.
Yeah, YC also has their own "multiplayer agent", qm (https://github.com/yc-software/qm), though it doesn't seem to be focused on code, which makes a little more sense.
I think multiplayer is easier on web than doing it in the terminal
Early in 2026, Vibe Kanban tried to do a multiplayer kanban board to code on a project collaboratively where each individual task is still managed by one developer and their agent.
I find that to be a much more promising route than Delta's straight-up multiplayer development on the same task. (Vibe-kanban did fail but I don't think their idea was wrong, but rather the execution- they didn't differentiate enough from straightup Github and Jira boards when that was easily possible, just centralize the agents along with the board.)
Not that two people being able to look at the same agent at the same time is bad though, it's probably amazing for pair programming especially in a remote work setting. It just shouldn't be the main point of a product.
I also think that Delta's codebase replication approach is just flawed in general. Why would you build a remote server just to sync the codebase between multiple developer's laptops when you can just put said codebase on said server in the first place? No expensive sync is needed and all you need is to do remote multiplayer access at the UI level, and everyone gets to work happily on the same codebase and talk to the same agent at the same time.
Vibe Kanban was fun when it was only about one humans PMing many agents. But then it IIRC went in some weird directions. Haven't thought about it since, does it still exist?
I don’t think the emphasis here is on real time multiplayer, but instead on async multiplayer. The way it’s described is about an evolving code base over time. Everyone sees the conversations, comments and decisions that lead to the code in screen. Individuals directly interact with the code via agents. Other devs see all those deltas and can add to the discussion.
Looking at it from the perspective of StarCraft, doing a Blood Bath 1v1 against a bot its pretty straightforward. Adding another player to make it 2v1 has the potential to make it a lot easier, but there are moments where the bot could take out one of the players or at least pressure them enough to tax resources. Obviously, this all depends on the skill level of all the players/bots and their strategies.
Instead of the two players having their own base, they are running a shared base against a single bot. This makes it challenging as now the players are forced to communicate, or one can sandbag, but overall adds a bit of complexity. Though a shared base should allow one player to manage one aspect of the game while the other player manages the other aspect; such as building units and the base, while the other player navigates or harasses the bot.
It is possible to logically work together to get a better outcome, but the tools we have currently don't support that. I find this multiplayer approach intriguing as with the right formula could unlock a nice super power. As I would imagine having twice the mental bandwidth available such that more things are noticed or caught or imagined...
You just reminded me that 90s StarCraft did have a mode where 2 players would command a single “team”. Basically a single “player” with multiple cursors. It was rad! Haven’t seen the concept duplicated.
I would focus on the economy and my brother would do the military and fight the bots.
Are you sure you aren't off by 20 years and referring to "Archon Mode" introduced to Starcraft 2 in 2015?
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/19940901/teaming-up-...
AoE could do this too by both selecting the same colour
My assumption is that people who want multi-user code editors are the same people who are forced to work in a place that requires heavy pair programming.
I could see it being useful if you're helping someone debug something, but chances are it's easier just to screenshare.
It doesn't have to be a feature to be used all day long to be useful.
I mean, even if it is a single player game, sometimes, you may want to ask for help, or others may need your help. Think of it like screen sharing. You probably don't share your screen all day long, but it is a really helpful feature when you need it.
I liked the Zed AI agent, too. Then it casually burned through a surprising amount of money for very little progress.
Back to Claude.
I think the value come from monitoring agents work by multiple team. like architect, developers and security team together, so you dont need to have the back and forth.
I don't understand the fixation the industry has on multi-player development either. Zed isn't the first. It's been 10 or 15 years since I started seeing multi-player development (sometimes called peer programming in an earlier iteration) being championed in various ways. VS, Intellij, Eclipse, and vscode had plugins for it and all of them are from the 2015-2018 time. One can even say that the Google Wave demo from 2007 was one of the earliest demonstrations for this concept.
I even worked on a team where one engineer loved the idea and championed doing it as early as 2013. Most of these IDE extensions didn't exist back then. He ended up picking a buddy, and they moved to the same office, hooked 2 keyboards and 2 mice into the same PC and spend literally the entire day alternating who's writing code in the same IDE.
I think the concept was supposed to be about helping developers share their skills. Every developer has an experience of looking over somebody's shoulder and having an "oh shit, I didn't realize there is a shortcut/tool/command for that" moment. And the idea with multi-player programming is to get you to see that and learn from it more. But. It. Doesn't. Work.
GNU Screen has supported multiuser editing since 1993.
"You newer models are happy scraping the shit... because you've never seen a miracle"
I guess I have occasionally used screen or tmux to help someone out before, but it was a few minutes, and not a regular occurrence.
Pair programming is the extroverts answer to the solitariness of software development. They love it while everyone else is hating their existence. It works for short stints to solve specific problems but anything beyond that is just gratuitous.
Don't forget SubEthaEdit! That was the first multiplayer editor I recall.
Never found a use for this sort of thing once novelty wore off. :/
It does work. Very well. The code quality, problem solving, and knowledge transfer are all insanely better when pairing properly.
If Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are wrong, I don't want to be right.
Maybe an approach for interactive code reviews with distributed teams.
Also see: https://subethaedit.net/
I feel I’ve seen the multiplayer thing being pushed ten years ago or so, guess it’s time for another round. It’s one of those things that makes for cool product videos but I’ve never met anyone who actually uses it or has expressed any desire for the feature.