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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

#151

Post by zamfi »

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…

With apologies to Bill Buxton: "Every interface is best at something and worst at something else."

Chat is a great UI pattern for ephemeral conversation. It's why we get on the phone or on DM to talk with people while collaborating on documents, and don't just sit there making isolated edits to some Google Doc.

It's great because it can go all over the place and the humans get to decide which part of that conversation is meaningful and which isn't, and then put that in the document.

It's also obviously not enough: you still need documents!

But this isn't an "either-or" case. It's a "both" case.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#152

Post by martinsnow »

6h6j65j76k wrote: post #141

"Current AI tools pretend writing software is like having a conversation. " But that is true? Devs spend more time in meetings than writing code. Having conversations about the code they are going to write.

I agree. But in that context we're talking about specifications.

When we're trying to wrangle a piece of code to do something we want but aren't quite sure of how to interact with the api, it's a different matter.

What i found is that by the time copilot/gpt/deepseek has enough knowledge about the problem and my codebase, I've run out of tokens. Because my head can contain a much larger problem area than these models allow me to feed them in a budget friendly manner.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#153

Post by matthewsinclair »

Yep. 100% agree. The whole “chat as UX” metaphor is a cul-de-sac that I’m sure we’ll back out of sooner or later.

I think about this like SQL in the late 80s. At the time, SQL was the “next big thing” that was going to mean we didn’t need programmers, and that management could “write code”. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course, as we all know.

I see chat-based interfaces to LLMs going exactly the same way. The LLM will move down the stack (rather than up) and much more appropriate task-based UX/UI will be put on top of the LLM, coordinated thru a UX/UI layer that is much sympathetic to the way users actually want to interact with a machine.

In the same way that no end-users ever touch SQL these days (mostly), we won’t expose the chat-based UX of an LLM to users either.

There will be a place for an ad-hoc natural language interface to a machine, but I suspect it’ll be the exception rather than the rule.

I really don’t think there are too many end users who want to be forced to seduce a mercurial LLM using natural language to do their day-to-day tech tasks.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#154

Post by proc0 »

biscuit1v9 wrote: post #91
proc0 wrote: post #87

This is lowkey cope. AI should be like talking to another human, at least that is the promise. Instead we're getting glorified autocomplete with padded language to sound like a human. In its current form LLMs are pretty much at their limit, barring optimization and chaining them together for more productivity once we have better hardware. Still, it will just be useful for repetitive low level tasks and mediocre art.…

>In its current form LLMs are pretty much at their limit How do you know that?

I don't know that, mostly speculating based on how mixture of experts is outperforming decoder-only architectures, which means we're already composing transformers to squeeze the most out of it, and still it seems to fall short. They have already been trained with incredible amounts of data, and it still needs to be composed into multiple instances and needs even better hardware and it seems it has reached diminishing returns. The question is will the little that is left to optimize be enough to have it be truly agentic and create full apps on its own, or will it still require expert supervision for anything useful.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#155

Post by mrweasel »

jayd16 wrote: post #88
dapperdrake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email threads seem better for documenting and searching correspondence. The last counter argument I read got buried on Discord or Slack somewhere.

Isn't this entirely an implementation detail of slack and discord search? What about email makes it more searchable fundamentally? The meta data if both platforms is essentially the same, no?

No, it has to do with context. In an email you will frequently have to provide more context for your answers to make sense. Chat is a conversation, which search drops you straight into, may with AI you could get placed at an appropriate starting point, but you're still reading a conversation. It's much easier to get dropped into a correspondence. To me the difference is like reading someones letter, vs. overhearing a conversation in a bus.

This obvious assumes that who ever wrote the email isn't a madman, who insist on using emails like it was a chat.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#156

Post by taeric »

t_mann wrote: post #131
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…

Ok, but what is a good pattern to leverage AI tools for coding (assuming that they have some value there, which I think most people would agree with now)? I could see two distinct approaches: - "App builders" that use some combination of drag&drop UI builders, and design docs for architecture, workflows,... and let the UI guess what needs to be built "under the hood" (a little bit in the spirit of where UML class dia…

I'd challenge if this is specific to coding? If you want to get a result that is largely like a repertoire of examples used in a training set, chat is probably workable? This is true for music. Visual art. Buildings. Anything, really?

But, if you want to start doing "domain specific" edits to the artifacts that are made, you are almost certainly going to want something like the app builders idea. Down thread, I mention how this is a lot like procedural generative techniques for game levels and such. Such that I think I am in agreement with your first bullet?

Similarly, if you want to make music with an instrument, it will be hard to ignore playing with said instrument more directly. I suspect some people can create things using chat as an interface. I just also suspect directly touching the artifacts at play is going to be more powerful.

I think I agree with the point on formal requirements. Not sure how that really applies to chat as an interface? I think it is hoping for a "laws of robotics" style that can have a test to confirm them? Reality could surprise me, but I always viewed that as largely a fiction item.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#157

Post by fragmede »

lolinder wrote: post #109
themanmaran wrote: post #99

I'm surprised that the article (and comments) haven't mentioned Cursor. Agreed that copy pasting context in and out of ChatGPT isn't the fastest workflow. But Cursor has been a major speed up in the way I write code. And it's primarily through a chat interface, but with a few QOL hacks that make it way faster: 1. Output gets applied to your file in a git-diff style. So you can approve/deny changes. 2. It (kinda) has…

I like Cursor, but I find the chat to be less useful than the super advanced auto complete. The chat interface is... fine. Certainly better integrated into the editor than GitHub Copilot's, but I've never really seen the need to use it as chat —I ask for a change and then it makes the change. Then I fixed what it did wrong and ask for another change. The chat history aspect is meaningless and usually counterproductiv…

> while prodding it the last 20% of the way.

hint: you don't get paid to get the LLM to output perfect code, you get paid by PRs submitted and landed. Generate the first 80% or whatever with the LLM, and then finish the last 20% that you can write faster than the LLM yourself, by hand.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#158

Post by mrweasel »

taeric wrote: post #82
dapperdrake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email threads seem better for documenting and searching correspondence. The last counter argument I read got buried on Discord or Slack somewhere.

Discord and slack baffle me. I liked them specifically because they were more ephemeral than other options. Which, seems at odds with how people want them to be? Why?

I really don't get why people are so happy about Slack (never used Discord). The interface is awful, it barely functions as a chat client, yet people adds bots, automation and use it as a repository for documentation. Honestly it would be better if history was deleted weekly or something, just to prevent people from storing things in Slack.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#159

Post by fhd2 »

I've mainly used gptel in Emacs (primarily with Claude), and I kind of already use the chat buffer like a document. You can freely edit the history, and I make very generous use of that, to steer where the model is going.

It has features to add context from your current project pretty easily, but personally I prefer to constantly edit the chat buffer to put in just the relevant stuff. If I add too much, Claude seems to get confused and chases down irrelevant stuff.

Fully controlling the context like that seems pretty powerful compared to other approaches I've tried. I also fully control what goes into the project - for the most part I don't copy paste anything, but rather type a version of the suggestion out quickly.

If you're fast at typing and use an editor with powerful text wrangling capabilities, this is feasible. And to me, it seems relatively optimal.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#160

Post by taeric »

marcosdumay wrote: post #140
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…

> It can be a great way to communicate them It's usually not. Narrative is a famously flawed way to communicate or record the real world. It's great for generating engagement, though.

I think fictional narratives that aim to capture inner monologue are famously flawed. I think narrative tours of things can be good. I'm not clear if "narrated tours" are a specific genre, sadly. :(
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