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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

#41

Post by 9rx »

benatkin wrote: post #39
9rx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What separates natural language from programming language is that natural language doesn't have to be careful. Once you have to be careful, you are programming.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#42

Post by falcor84 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #37
Klaster_1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specifica…

Even if you have superhuman AI designers, you still need buy-in.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#43

Post by benatkin »

9rx wrote: post #41
benatkin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What separates natural language from programming language is that natural language doesn't have to be careful. Once you have to be careful, you are programming.

It does have to be careful at times if you’re going to be effective with natural language.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#44

Post by jfkrrorj »

No, it is pretty much dialog, I would compare it to pair programming.

AI in many levels is more capable than human programmer, in some it is not. It is not supersmart. It can not hold entire program in its head, you have to feed it small relevant section of program.

》 That’s why we use documents—they let us organize complexity, reference specific points, and track changes systematically.

Extra steps. Something like waterfall...

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#45

Post by 9rx »

benatkin wrote: post #43
9rx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What separates natural language from programming language is that natural language doesn't have to be careful. Once you have to be careful, you are programming.

It does have to be careful at times if you’re going to be effective with natural language.

Certainly there is a need for care outside of computers too, like in law, but legal documents are a prime example of programs. That's programming, written using a programming language, not natural language. It is decidedly not the same language you would use for casual conversation and generally requires technical expertise to understand.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#47

Post by uoaei »

falcor84 wrote: post #42
throwaway290 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specifica…

Even if you have superhuman AI designers, you still need buy-in.

There's a nice thought, that anyone with that kind of power would share it.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#48

Post by indymike »

oxfordmale wrote: post #33
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.

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

Languages used for day to day communication between humans do not have the specificity needed for detailed instructions... even to other humans. We out of band context (body language, social norms, tradition, knowledge of a person) quite a bit more than you would think.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#50

Post by rightisleft »

cube2222 wrote: post #31
Klaster_1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its all about the context window. Even the new Mistral Codestral-2501 256K CW does a great job.

If you use cline with any large context model the results can be pretty amazing. It's not close to self guiding, You still need to break down and analyze the problem and provide clear and relevant instructions. IE you need to be a great architect. Once you are stable on the direction, its awe inspiring to watch it do the bulk if the implementation.

I do agree that there is space to improve over embedded chat windows in IDEs. Solutions will come in time.

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