Repro is with Zui commit 57e11a5 and newer.

While debugging a CI failure, I went to check the version of the compiled zed binary and found it's now returning the string (devel) instead of the commit hash it did in the past. I can see this started happening as of Zui commit 57e11a5. Here's the repro.

$ for COMMIT in f546ccf 57e11a5; do   git clone https://github.com/brimdata/zui.git zui-${COMMIT} && pushd zui-${COMMIT} && git checkout ${COMMIT} && yarn && node_modules/zed/dist/zed -version; popd; done
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Note: switching to 'f546ccf'.
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Version: v1.9.0-1-g16214e20
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Note: switching to '57e11a5'.
...
Version: (devel)

https://github.com/brimdata/zed/blob/08fc271c4191593a7e1d050061b21f3db792b079/cli/version.go#L18 in the Zed repo appears to show where the string comes from, though I don't have a full enough understanding of the build process to quickly see what what made it work in the past and what change to cause the problem. Zui commit 57e11a5 was just an advance of the Zed dependency to commit b8d056a and that Zed commit doesn't include any changes to build on the Zed side. My best guess is that this is somehow a side effect to the many changes in #2818 that did touch the Zui build scripts combined with this being the first advance of the Zed pointer since those changes.

FWIW, I do see the problem showing up in recent Zui Insiders builds as well such as 1.2.1-7.