This current post is a good rebuttal to the killed post this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933031 "Programmers are modern-day computers", https://jtlicardo.com/writing/modern-day-computers
Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
181–190 of 432 posts
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#182Yep. 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. Th…
> The whole “chat as UX” metaphor is a cul-de-sac that I’m sure we’ll back out of sooner or later.
Only when someone discovers another paradigm that matches or exceeds the effectiveness of LLMs without being a language model.
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#183This current post is a good rebuttal to the killed post this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933031 "Programmers are modern-day computers", https://jtlicardo.com/writing/modern-day-computers
Why on earth was that post flagged/killed??
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#184chat=repl?
doc=programming in a DSL? / (what was that one language which was functional & represented in circles in a canvas?)
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#185I'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…
Talk to AI chat as if you would talk to junior developer at your company and tell it to do something that you need.
I think it is brilliant. On another hand I caught myself many times writing prompts to colleagues. Although it made requirements of what I need so much clearer for them.
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#186I'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 like the idea of having a chat program, the issue is that it's horrible to have a bunch of chat programs all integrated into every application you use that are separate and incompatible with each other. I really don't like the idea of chatting with an AI though. There are better ways to interface with AIs and the focus on chat is making people forget that.
We need an LSP like protocol for AI, so that we can amortize the configuration over every place we want such an integration. AISP?
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is exactly what GP was pointing out, and why they said they do not prod it for it the last 20%.
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#188I'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…
Yes, agree. Chatting with a computer has all the worst attributes of talking to a person, without any of the intuitive understanding, nonverbal cues, even tone of voice, that all add meaning when two human beings talk to each other.
That comment made sense 3 years ago. LLMs already solved "intuitive understanding", and the realtime multimodal variants (e.g. the thing behind "Advanced Voice" in ChatGPT app) handle tone of voice in both directions. As for nonverbal cues, I don't know yet - I got live video enabled in ChatGPT only few days ago and didn't have time to test it, but I would be surprised if it couldn't read the basics of body language at this point.
Talking to a computer still sucks as an user interface - not because a computer can't communicate on multiple channels the way people do, as it can do it now too. It sucks for the same reason talking to people sucks as an user interface - because the kind of tasks we use computers for (and that aren't just talking with/to/at other people via electronic means) are better handle by doing than by talking about them. We need an interface to operate a tool, not an interface to an agent that operates a tool for us.
As an example, consider driving (as in, realtime control - not just "getting from point A to B"): a chat interface to driving would suck just as badly as being a backseat driver sucks for both people in the car. In contrast, a steering wheel, instead of being a bandwidth-limiting indirection, is an anti-indirection - not only it lets you control the machine with your body, the control is direct enough that over time your brain learns to abstract it away, and the car becomes an extension of your body. We need more of tangible interfaces like that with computers.
The steering wheel case, of course, would fail with "AI-level smarts" - but that still doesn't mean we should embrace talking to computers. A good analogy is dance - it's an interaction between two independently smart agents exploring an activity together, and as they do it enough, it becomes fluid.
So dance, IMO, is the steering wheel analogy for AI-powered interfaces, and that is the space we need to explore more.
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#189Chat seems flawed but I don’t see how a document is better.
I don’t buy that a document could capture what is needed here. Imagine describing navigating through multiple levels of menus in document form. That sounds straight up painful even for trivial apps. And for a full blown app…nope
There is a whole new paradigm missing there imo
Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
#190I'm going to take a contrarian view and say it's actually a good UI, but it's all about how you approach it.
I just finished a small project where I used o3-mini and o3-mini-high to generate most of the code. I averaged around 200 lines of code an hour, including the business logic and unit tests. Total was around 2200 lines. So, not a big project, but not a throw away script. The code was perfectly fine for what we needed. This is the third time I've done this, and each time I get faster and better at it.
1. I find a "pair programming" mentality is key. I focus on the high-level code, and let the model focus on the lower level code. I code review all the code, and provide feedback. Blindly accepting the code is a terrible approach.
2. Generating unit tests is critical. After I like the gist of some code, I ask for some smoke tests. Again, peer review the code and adjust as needed.
3. Be liberal with starting a new chat: the models can get easily confused with longer context windows. If you start to see things go sideways, start over.
4. Give it code examples. Don't prompt with English only.
FWIW, o3-mini was the best model I've seen so far; Sonnet 3.5 New is a close second.