Zed Revives Ted Nelson's Xanadu Vision for the Age of AI Agents
Xanadu was waiting for agents
In a blog post, Zed's team explains how their new DeltaDB system finally realizes the 'docuverse' vision of hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson. Nelson's Xanadu project, which aimed to create a system of permanent, interconnected documents, was long considered vaporware because the necessary technology didn't exist. But with the rise of AI agents, which can follow every link and read every version, the need for such a system has returned. DeltaDB, built on modern technologies like CRDTs and Merkle trees, provides the 'xanalogical' foundation—never copy, always reference; never overwrite, always version—that agents need to work effectively with code.
Sixty years is a long time for an idea to wait for its users. They're here now.
- ameliaquining
This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too far ahead of its time, and the market not caring about quality (with this post in particular focusing mostly on the second thing).
In my view, Gwern makes a compelling counterargument: Xanadu was a fundamentally bad idea. The parts of it that weren't incorporated into the World Wide Web either solved problems no one actually had, or couldn't have constituted a stable equilibrium between users and publishers (i.e., even if it'd been magically willed into existence, it'd have quickly fallen apart). https://gwern.net/xanadu
- e12e
Interesting. This and the other posts I've seen about Delta seems to exist in that liminal space, were it's difficult to tell if the author has had a brilliant insight, that they struggle to convey to anyone who's not yet had the same insight; or if they've simply gone slightly mad.
It's a similar sense I get with reading Nelson (after being able to think about his ideas for a while, I'm quite certain it was mostly genius and only a little bit of lunacy).
It remains to see how Delta will turn out.
On a side-note; my initial reaction to the headline was; no. Xanadu wasn't missing agents.
I do think I see where the author is going, though; and I think I agree that agents might be a new tool that might facilitate some hypertext ideas. Not Xanadu perhaps. But some other, more pragmatic and less magic place - but a place that is a little more magical than where we are now.
And it intersects a bit with an experiment we started at work; migrating our modest web site from WordPress to a static site combining 11ty (https://11ty.dev) (we already lean heavily on typescript for our application development) and visual studio code with frontmatter cms (https://frontmatter.codes) - and AI/LLMs.
AI helps with making a static page version of our site, and adopting to 11ty.
The idea is that with trivial push-to-deploy setup, our business people, with the help of AI in vs code, will be able to work directly with 11ty and git to make changes, do reviews and publish changes.
A hill that would pro […]
- ThinkBeat
This sounds like one agent at each junction point, that may or may not be running the same model and architecture as the previous one, and they need to constantly crawl each other or just a protocol to call each other.
But then you have a million of then constructing a docuverse web all having an agent who all need to know each other and its all connections and each a database repository.
Well you only need links that exist, and those that are created.
In a paragraph it may exist in one node that is referenced and that node may be a collection of other nodes, or each sentence or even each word points to other nodes, how much does each model know and what does it keep in its database.
A point to the next node is not necessarily durable or versioned, and that goes for each node is connects to.
A single paragraph could have thousands or more sources, references, and each source would need versioning and depending on version it may well point to different nodes in prior or future versions.
A proper version of a paragraph would then need to know this, or expect that all nodes with an agent will be durable and rational and interoperable
but if you build on that premise it will not work in the real world.
All unless you keep the docuverse limited in scope to a few data stores and agents who comprehend that spatial universe, and it is a form of an intranet
- pocksuppet
Ummet Ozcan - Xanadu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMtnH7cABg
I don't think he's waiting for agents.
- tolerance
One of my favorite LLM-smells to train myself to sniff out is how well the author can tie two seemingly disparate ideas together into something compelling or novel. The more ambitious the synthesis and the less impressed I am the more likely I am to assume it was at least partially the work of an LLM.
Previously, "Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer" <https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer>