Delta

Palantir created the role of Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), which is known internally at Palantir as Delta.

Delta is a multiplayer collaborative environment for AI coding agents that allows multiple developers to collaborate in real time or asynchronously on the same codebase through coding agents, without frequent reliance on version control systems.

Delta was built by the development team behind Zed.

The only way to log in to Delta is with a GitHub account.

After logging in to Delta, users must select an LLM provider, with options including Zed's official inference service, reusing an existing subscription (such as ChatGPT), or entering an API key.

A local folder added to a thread in Delta must be a Git project.

Delta provides an inline comment feature that lets users right-click on a segment of code, select 'comment,' and write out modification requests, enabling the AI to precisely understand the location of the change.

All operations in Delta take place in a work tree on the system, with files physically located under .delta/work-trees/ in the project directory.

In Delta, connected AI credits are only consumed by the user's own messages; others joining a session do not consume that user's tokens, and each collaborator must bind their own model for inference.

The original video is sponsored content from Delta.

Delta's work trees sync in real time across different machines, so when a file is modified locally, the corresponding file on a collaborator's machine changes immediately.

Delta collaboration requires inviting others to join a session, either by email invitation or by generating a share link, but invitees must have a Delta account and complete GitHub login before they can join.

Delta supports asynchronous collaboration: after a collaborator finishes modifying code, there is no need to push to GitHub or create a PR—a review process can be initiated directly in the chat.

Delta's underlying system, called DeltaDB, tracks all changes; users can select a historical message and execute 'revert conversation to here' to undo all operations after that node, affecting both the conversation context and the code itself.

Delta is a distributed storage system designed for high-availability and strong-consistency scenarios, whose core replication architecture adopts Chain Replication.

Storage systems based on Chain Replication are better suited for read-heavy, write-light scenarios with strict consistency requirements, such as metadata storage, configuration centers, and distributed lock services, and are not suitable for very large replica sets.