Voices
Nathan Sobo argues Ted Nelson's Xanadu was always a spec for agents, not humans
Zed's co-founder published 'Xanadu was waiting for agents' on September 1, and it hit the HN front page at 128 points. His claim is that Nelson's 1965 design failed because humans will not follow every link, while agents 'can patiently follow every link, every time,' so xanalogical storage becomes practical rather than utopian now. Zed's DeltaDB and Delta threads implement it: files are 'fragments with stable identities' whose anchors 'can still be resolved after surrounding code changes,' the conversation and the worktree are versioned as one object, and Delta threads present as ordinary Git branches to anyone not using Delta. The operating rule is 'Never copy, always reference. Never overwrite, always version.'
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