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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

#191

Post by goosejuice »

packetlost wrote: post #176
goosejuice wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the opposite experience. I have never had any issue finding information in slack with history going back nearly a decade. The only issue I have with Slack is a people problem where most communication is siloed in private channels and DMs. Email threads are incredibly hard to follow though. The UX is rough and it shows.

I hard disagree. Don't have a conversation? Ask someone who does to forward it. Email lets the user control how to organize conversations. Want to stuff a conversation in a folder? Sure. Use tags religiously? Go for it. Have one big pile and rely on full-text search and metadata queries? You bet. Only the last of these is possible with the vast majority of IM platforms because the medium just doesn't allow for any ot…

That's fine.

Email is really powerful but people simply aren't good at taking advantage of it and it varies by email client. Doing some IT work at a startup made this pretty clear to me. I found Slack was much more intuitive for people.

Both systems rely on the savviness of the users for the best experience and I just think email is losing the UX war. Given how terrible people seem to be at communicating I think it's a pretty important factor to consider.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#192

Post by disqard »

xena wrote: post #106
disqard wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa! You broke my brain a bit there (but your posts often do, in a Good way!) Would you be so kind as to ELI5 what you did in that index.js? I've used ollama to run models locally, but I'm still stuck in chat-land. Of course, if a blog post is in the works, I'll just wait for that :)

The file explains it a bit, but my blogpost https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/s1-simple-test-time-scaling/ could probably be better explained. I'll write out more but just for you I'll summarize what I'm gonna end up writing up. AI models fundamentally work on the basis of "given what's before, what comes next?" When you pass messages to an API like: [ { "role": "system", content": "You are an expert in selling propane a…

Thank You so much for making time to write that up! Deeply appreciated.

It's fascinating how this "turn-taking protocol" has emerged in this space -- as a (possibly weird) analogy, different countries don't always use the same electrical voltage or plug/socket form-factor.

Yet, the `role` and `content` attrib in json appears to be pretty much a de facto standard now.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#193

Post by sangnoir »

dartos wrote: post #105
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 think the wildly different experiences we all seem to have with AI code tools speaks to the inconsistency of the tools and our own lack of understanding of what goes into programming. I’ve only been slowed down with AI tools. I tried for a few months to really use them and they made the easy tasks hard and the hard tasks opaque. But obviously some people find them helpful. Makes me wonder if programming approaches…

> But since LLMs don’t really act deterministically, I feel the need to double check their output.

I feel the same

> That’s very painful for me. At that point I’d rather just write the code once, correctly.

I use AI tools augmentatively, and it's not painful for me, perhaps slightly inconvenient. But for boiler-plate-heavy code like unit tests or easily verifiable refactors[1], adjusting AI-authored code on a per-commit basis is still faster than me writing all the code.

1. Like switching between unit-test frameworks

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#194

Post by ikety »

wiremine wrote: post #190

I'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…

do you use pair programming tools like aider?

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#195

Post by mlsu »

I can't wait for someone to invent a new language, maybe a subset of English, that is structured enough to half-well describe computer programs. Then train a model with RLHF to generate source code based on prompts in this new language.

It will slowly grow in complexity, strictness, and features, until it becomes a brand-new programming language, just with a language model and a SaaS sitting in the middle of it.

A startup will come and disrupt the whole thing by simply writing code in a regular programming language.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#196

Post by packetlost »

goosejuice wrote: post #191
packetlost wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hard disagree. Don't have a conversation? Ask someone who does to forward it. Email lets the user control how to organize conversations. Want to stuff a conversation in a folder? Sure. Use tags religiously? Go for it. Have one big pile and rely on full-text search and metadata queries? You bet. Only the last of these is possible with the vast majority of IM platforms because the medium just doesn't allow for any ot…

That's fine. Email is really powerful but people simply aren't good at taking advantage of it and it varies by email client. Doing some IT work at a startup made this pretty clear to me. I found Slack was much more intuitive for people. Both systems rely on the savviness of the users for the best experience and I just think email is losing the UX war. Given how terrible people seem to be at communicating I think it's…

I think this could reasonably be addressed, and several startups have. The trouble is that the default email clients (gmail, outlook, etc.) don't really try to make it any better.

I've also generally had the opposite experience, a huge amount of business offices live and breath in email (mostly Outlook, but I'm sure it varies). Startups tend to run fast and lean, but as soon as you have some threshold of people, email is king.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#197

Post by grumbel »

Plenty of software has been developed on the command line, chat is just a more powerful and flexible version of that. The missing part with current AI systems is a persistent workspace/filesystem that allows you to store things you want to keep, discard things you want to get rid off and highlight things you want to focus on.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#199

Post by lytedev »

tux1968 wrote: post #186
Suppafly wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think they're working on it? MCP: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#200

Post by ryandrake »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #188
SoftTalker wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We need an interface to operate a tool, not an interface to an agent that operates a tool for us.

Excellent comment and it gets to the heart of something I've had trouble clearly articulating: We've slowly lost the concept that a computer is a tool that the user wields and commands to do things. Now, a computer has its own mind and agency, and we "request" it to do things and "communicate" with it, and ask it to run this and don't run that.

Now, we're negotiating and pleading with the man inside of the computer, Mr. Computer, who has its own goals and ambitions that don't necessarily align with your own as a user. It runs what it wants to run, and if that upsets you, user, well tough shit! Instead of waiting for a command and then faithfully executing it, Mr. Computer is off doing whatever the hell he wants, running system applications in the background, updating this and that, sending you notifications, and occasionally asking you for permission to do even more. And here you are as the user, hobbled and increasingly forced to "chat" with it to get it to do what you want.

Even turning your computer off! You used to throw a hardware switch that interrupts the power to the main board, and _sayonara_ Mr. Computer! Now, the switch does nothing but send an impassioned plea to the operating system to pretty please, with sugar on top, when you're not busy could you possibly power off the computer (or mostly power it off, because off doesn't even mean off anymore).

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