Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

danieldelaney.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 432 posts

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#71

Post by furyofantares »

yoz wrote: post #46
furyofantares wrote: post #38

In cursor I keep a specification document in .cursorrules and I have instructions that cursor should update the document whenever I add new specifications in chat.

That's a great idea. How well does it work in practice?

It works great until it stops doing anything. I use it on new projects and it makes everything go smoothly at the start and, I think, for much longer.

I haven't done it for existing projects but I have done something similar for an unfamiliar, old and challenging codebase. I worked with the cursor chat agent to produce a document I called architecture.md mapping out high level features to files/classes/functions. This was excellent because I found the document useful and it also made cursor more effective.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#72

Post by packetlost »

taeric wrote: post #52

I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…

I even think it's bad for generalized communication (ie. Slack/Teams/Discord/etc.) that isn't completely throwaway. Email is better in every single way for anything that might ever be relevant to review again or be filtered due to too much going on.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#73

Post by chinathrow »

taeric wrote: post #52

I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…

Voice messages within a chat UI is even worse. I can't search it, I can't listen to it in the same situations I can read a message.

I wish I could block them within all these chat apps.

"Sorry, you can't bother to send voice messages to this person."

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#74

Post by 9rx »

benatkin wrote: post #65
9rx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People can often be observed to be deliberately making an effort in casual, social, natural language conversation. It flows for some people more than others. Try watching Big Bang Theory and see characters at times being deliberate with their words and at other times responding automatically. An LLM can do increasingly well as a fly on the wall, but it’s common for people using an LLM to be less collaborative with an…

> at times being deliberate with their words and at other times responding automatically.

Right. On one side you have programming language and on the other natural language.

They can intermingle, if that is what you are trying to say? You can see this even in traditional computer programming. One will often switch between deliberate expression and casual, natural expression (what often get called comments in that context).

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#75

Post by karaterobot »

I don't know about this. He admits you can write prototype code with chat-based LLMs, but then says this doesn't matter, because you can't write extremely complex applications with them.

First of all, most people can't write extremely complex applications, period. Most programmers included. If your baseline for real programming is something of equivalent complexity as the U.S. tax code, you're clearly such a great programmer that you're an outlier, and should recognize that.

Second of all, I think it's a straw man argument to say that you can either write prototype-level code with a chat UI, or complex code with documents. You can use both. I think the proposition being put forward is that more people can write complex code by supplementing their document-based thinking with chat-based thinking. Or, that people can write slightly better-than-prototype level code with the help of a chat assistant. In other words, that it's better to have access to AI to help you code small sections of a larger application that you are still responsible for.

I'd be more interested in reading a good argument against the value of using chat-based AI as another tool in your belt, rather than a straight-up replacement for traditional coding. If you could make that argument, then you could say chat is a bad UI pattern for dev tools.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#76

Post by dapperdrake »

taeric wrote: post #52

I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…

Email threads seem better for documenting and searching correspondence.

The last counter argument I read got buried on Discord or Slack somewhere.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#77

Post by xena »

My nuclear fire hot take is that the chat pattern is actively hampering AI tools because we have to square peg -> round hole things either into the chat UI (because that's what people expect), or that as developers you have to square peg -> round hole into the chat API patterns.

Last night I wrote an implementation of an AI paper and it was so much easier to just discard the automatic chat formatting and do it "by hand": https://github.com/Xe/structured-reasoning/blob/main/index.j...

I wonder if foundation models are an untapped goldmine in terms of the things they can do, but we can't surface them to developers because everyone's stuck in the chat pattern.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#78

Post by anarticle »

I agree, and I think this means there is a lot of space for trying new things. I think cursor was a small glimpse in trying to fix the split between purely GitHub copilot line revision (this interrupts my thoughts too much) and calling in for help via a chat window that you're copying and pasting from.

I think this post shows there could be a couple levels of indirection, some kind of combination of the "overarching design doc" that is injected into every prompt, and a more tactical level syntax/code/process that we have with something like a chat window that is code aware. I've definitely done some crazy stuff by just asking something really stupid like "Is there any way to speed this up?" and Claude giving me some esoteric pandas optimization that gave me a 100x speedup.

I think overall the tools have crazy variance in quality of output, but I think with some "multifacet prompting", ie, code styling, design doc, architect docs, constraints, etc you might end up with something that is much more useful.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#80

Post by taeric »

packetlost wrote: post #72
taeric wrote: post #52

I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…

I even think it's bad for generalized communication (ie. Slack/Teams/Discord/etc.) that isn't completely throwaway. Email is better in every single way for anything that might ever be relevant to review again or be filtered due to too much going on.

Anything that needs to be filtered for viewing again pretty much needs version control. Email largely fails at that, as hard as other correspondence systems. That said, we have common workflows that use email to build reviewed artifacts.

People love complaining about the email workflow of git, but it is demonstrably better than any chat program for what it is doing.

Post reply on HN