[swiftcoder]

Fully-generic character-level textual sync is an unsolved problem (and likely, always will be).

That's also not typically the best way to sync one's concrete data models, and if your data has any sort of structure, you can likely produce a merge operation that works Well Enough™ in practice

[sausagefeet]

IME, and experiences may vary, "Well Enough" merge function usually means corrupt data, confusing outputs, incoherent semantics, and frustrating debugging sessions at any kind of scale beyond playing around. YMMV.

[anonzzzies]

I find actual lock on edit or last-save-wins to work best of what I have seen for structured data. You can add nice visual tools that show who is editing (so you can wait for them) and pass the object lock to someone else etc, but this way at least there is no merge mechanism (that generally knows very little about the ins/outs of the data) which will merge two semantically incompatible fields into one record.

For offline-first, the user would be alerted that someone changed the record(s) while you changed them as well and ask what to do. In attempts to make these things for an offline first healthcare app which is mostly structured records based, I found that it is very rare for 2 (or more) to work on the same data, but I guess it really depends on the use case and with unstructured data it's not a nice way of working.

[dontlaugh]

This is what people actually do in practice when collaborating on large non-code documents.

The example I’m familiar with is assets in the video games industry. Everyone used Perforce (or maybe SVN) and artists/designers lock the 3D model or whatever they’re editing. People ask each other to give up a lock all the time.

[yencabulator]

> For offline-first, the user would be alerted that someone changed the record(s) while you changed them as well and ask what to do.

There are few sync strategies worse than "you worked hard on this, but now you have to choose to either throw away your change or everyone else's changes". May any product doing that fail miserably.

[anonzzzies]

And your great solution? As others say; there are none. Talking about structured content in an offline first context. What is your strategy that won't break anything while doing a merge?

[InsideOutSanta]

Just wait until the vibe coders use an LLM to decide which data in a merge conflict it likes better.