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Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

danieldelaney.net

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Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#31

Post by cube2222 »

Klaster_1 wrote: post #21
croes wrote: post #5

Natural 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.

A lot of extra text usually means prior requirements, meeting transcripts, screen share recordings, chat history, Jira tickets and so on - the same information developers use to produce a result that satisfies the stakeholders and does the job. This seems like a straightforward direction solvable with more compute and more efficient memory. I think this will be the way it pans outs. Real projects don't require an inf…

We are kind of actually there already.

With a 200k token window like Claude has you can already dump a lot of design docs / transcripts / etc. at it.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#32

Post by josefrichter »

m3kw9 wrote: post #7

There 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 some editors, like Windsurf, you will get git-like diff and you have to approve each change (or accept all in bulk, of course).

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#33

Post by oxfordmale »

empath75 wrote: post #14
croes wrote: post #5

Natural 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.

AIs actually are very good at this. They wouldn't be able to write code at all otherwise. If you're careful in your prompting, they'll make fewer assumptions and ask clarifying questions before going ahead and writing code.

AI is very good at this. Unfortunately, humans tend to be super bad at providing detailed verbal instructions.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#34

Post by pjc50 »

croes wrote: post #5

Natural 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.

There was a wave of this previously in programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

All the same buzzwords, including "AI"! In 1981!

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#36

Post by joshstrange »

m3kw9 wrote: post #7

There 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

Aider + git makes this a non-issue. You can revert anything it does easily (even 5-10 steps down the line) and it shows you the code blocks it's changing in the chat UI as well.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#37

Post by throwaway290 »

Klaster_1 wrote: post #21
croes wrote: post #5

Natural 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.

A lot of extra text usually means prior requirements, meeting transcripts, screen share recordings, chat history, Jira tickets and so on - the same information developers use to produce a result that satisfies the stakeholders and does the job. This seems like a straightforward direction solvable with more compute and more efficient memory. I think this will be the way it pans outs. Real projects don't require an inf…

idk if you think all those jira tickets and meetings are precise enough (IMO sometimes the opposite)

By the way, remind me why you need design meetings in that ideal world?:)

> Real projects don't require an infinitely detailed specification either, you usually stop where it no longer meaningfully moves you towards the goal.

The point was that specification is not detailed enough in practice. Precise enough specification IS code. And the point is literally that natural language is just not made to be precise enough. So you are back where you started

So you waste time explaining in detail and rehashing requirements in this imprecise language until you see what code you want to see. Which was faster to just... idk.. type.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#39

Post by benatkin »

9rx wrote: post #27
empath75 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIs actually are very good at this. They wouldn't be able to write code at all otherwise. If you're careful in your prompting, they'll make fewer assumptions and ask clarifying questions before going ahead and writing code.

> If you're careful in your prompting In other words, if you replace natural language with a programming language then the computer will do a good job of interpreting your intent. But that's always been true, so...

Being careful in your prompting doesn’t imply that. That can also be thought of as just using natural language well.
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