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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I don't understand the fixation the industry has on multi-player development either

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. …

Original discussionZed: Delta259 source comments · at import
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SW

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.

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SI

It does work. Very well. The code quality, problem solving, and knowledge transfer are all insanely better when pairing properly.

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MT

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. :/

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HA

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.

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NO

GNU Screen has supported multiuser editing since 1993. "You newer models are happy scraping the shit... because you've never seen a miracle"

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