A version control system that tracks every change connected to the conversation that shaped it enables continuous, real-time collaboration with agents and teammates.
Nathan Sobo introduces Delta DB, a version control system that records work as it unfolds, keeping every change connected to the conversation, enabling conflict-free work trees and a new way to collaborate with agents and teams in real-time. ✦ AI generated
Nathan Sobo · Syntax · 2026-08-12 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 24:23
“Nathan, I'm going to give the floor to you to maybe tell us and describe to Wes a little bit about Delta.”
And so DeltaDB has been our vision for yeah, giving basically every version of the software as it evolves an address uh that you can recall it, talk about it, and you can drape over that level of tracking the ability to comment on any part of the code at any time, and thus be able to have a conversation sort of in the code base as you're working on it.
verbatim transcript · starts at 24:23
24:23this tool for like helping people email patches to one another on the kernel mailing list and everything was sort of designed around snapshots and ran at the pace of email. And it always just felt like a higher fidelity conversation would be possible if we could drop below that floor of commits. And so DeltaDB has been our vision for yeah, giving basically every version of the software as it evolves an address uh
24:54that you can recall it, talk about it, and you can drape over that level of tracking the ability to comment on any part of the code at any time, and thus be able to have a conversation sort of in the code base as you're working on it. Over the past year, um the vision of Delta DB, you know, as we built it, as we started building it, of course we weren't going
25:21to shove it into our million-line plus IDE with hundreds of thousands of users on day one. >> We built this little reference client for it. Um and yeah, over the past year, that little reference client has become essentially a a brand new product. So, we're going to become a two-product company. Uh and yeah, so we have Delta DB and the we named the the new agentic agent-focused editor
25:53that we built around it, Delta. Um and so, in some ways Delta looks at first glance like a lot of the other agentic development environments that you see out there, but when you peek below the surface a bit and start using it, um I think you're going to discover a lot of the power that is enabled by the it being built around this more sophisticated version control system
26:19that drapes on top of Git. It's still designed to interoperate with Git, and it you really don't think about Delta DB as you're using Delta, uh but what it enables is a new way to collaborate. And yeah, our our vision is really it was always conversations in the code linked to the code rather than snapshots of the code. Um but what's changed in the past two, three years,
26:49and really accelerate acceleratingly like since last fall, at least for people that write Rust because before then agents couldn't really write Rust is that now conversations are becoming sort of the source of our code. Like we were thinking we'd write all the code and have conversations in it. Now conversations are the beginning and code comes out of that. It's a downstream artifact. >> Yeah. So you're you're sharing like the
27:13entire agentic conversation. Like that is stored in your history of of Delta? >> Yeah, we have a delta level so every single token that flows in, every prompt >> Yeah. >> everything that happens is sort of captured continuously as it's flowing in. And what it enables is you can start this conversation attach uh clones of your repository to the conversation share a link with a a member of your team or you know, if
- ·Every software version gets an address to recall and discuss
- ·Comment on any code at any time during development
- ·Conversations happen directly within the codebase as you work
- ·Changes tracked live, connected to the conversation that shaped them
- ·Conflict-free work trees enable parallel editing
- ·New way to collaborate with agents and teams