Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
danieldelaney.net
Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
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Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#2[dead]
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#3[dead]
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#4I think he's right that there's a place for a more structured AI programming UI, but chat and autocomplete are also good for a lot of use cases.
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#5Natural language isn’t made to be precise that’s why we use a subset in programming languages.
So you either need lots of extra text to remove the ambiguity of natural language if you use AI or you need a special precise subset to communicate with AI and that’s just programming with extra steps.
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#6This is about relying on requirements type documents to drive AI based software development, I believe this will be ultimately integrated into all the AI-dev tools, if not so already. It is really just additional context.
Here is an example of our approach:
https://blog.codesolvent.com/2024/11/building-youtube-video-...
We are also using the requirements to build a checklist, the AI generates the checklist from the requirements document, which then serves as context that can be used for further instructions.
Here's a demo:
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#7There is a black box effect between when you press enter and it starts updating code in multiple places. Like wtf just happened, I have to find these changes, which code broke dependencies. It should be more step wise visually
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#8I agree with the premise but not with the conclusion. When you're building visual things, you communicate visually: rough sketches, whiteboard diagrams, mockups, notes scrawled in the margins.
Something like tldraw's "make real" [1] is a much better bet, imo (not that it's mutually exclusive). Draw a rough mockup of what you want, let AI fill in the details, then draw and write on it to communicate your changes.
We think multi-modally; why should we limit the creative process to just text?
[1] https://tldraw.substack.com/p/make-real-the-story-so-far
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#9There is a black box effect between when you press enter and it starts updating code in multiple places. Like wtf just happened, I have to find these changes, which code broke dependencies. It should be more step wise visually
In VS Code Copilot you have to approve every change manually when you apply to from the chat.
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#10For me: Chat is like writing comments, but not a the right place in the source code.
Perhaps I should comment all todos and then write "finish todos" as the always-same text prompt.