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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

Multiplayer agent thingy is a VC keyword these days.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.