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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

#201

Post by shmoogy »

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…

Have you tried cursor? I really like the selecting context -> cmd+l to make a chat with it - explain requirement, hit apply, validate the diff.

Works amazingly well for a lot of what I've been working on the past month or two.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#202

Post by taeric »

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…

I think this gets to how a lot of these conversations go past each other? A chat interface for getting a ride from a car is almost certainly doable? So long as the itinerary and other details remain separate things? At large, you are basically using a chat bot to be a travel agent, no?

But, as you say, a chat interface would be a terrible way to actively drive a car. And that is a different thing, but I'm growing convinced many will focus on the first idea while staving off the complaints of the latter.

In another thread, I assert that chat is probably a fine way to order up something that fits a repertoire that trained a bot. But, I don't think sticking to the chat window is the best way to interface with what it delivers. You almost certainly want to be much more actively "hands on" in very domain specific ways with the artifacts produced.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#203

Post by kenjackson »

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…

I use LLMs several times a day, and I think for me the issue is that verification is typically much faster than learning/writing. For example, I've never spent much time getting good at scripting. Sure, probably a gap I should resolve, but I feel like LLMs do a great job at it. And what I need to script is typically easy to verify, I don't need to spend time learning how to do things like, "move the files of this extension to this folder, but rewrite them so that the name begins with a three digit number based on the date when it was created, with the oldest starting with 001" -- or stuff like that. Sometimes it'll have a little bug, but one that I can debug quickly.

Scripting assistance by itself is worth the price of admission.

The other thing I've found it good at is giving me an English description of code I didn't write... I'm sure it sometimes hallucinates, but never in a way that has been so wrong that its been apparent to me.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#205

Post by goosejuice »

packetlost wrote: post #196
goosejuice wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, emai…

We used outlook and slack. Business primarily operated via outlook as most communication was unsurprisingly external. Most but not all internal was slack.

I'm not hating on email, it has a lot of good properties and still serves a purpose. Every office appears to have some kind anti-slack vigilante. It's really not that bad.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#206

Post by kmoser »

9rx wrote: post #45
benatkin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even lawyers agree that legalese is no more accurate than plain English if used properly: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/even-lawyers-dont...

In other word, complex applications can still be fully specified in plain English, even if it might take more words.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#207

Post by darepublic »

Need interactive chat for coding. You say something high level, the model prompts you for low level decisions etc. every once in a while the code bot can send a screenshot or some test results so we stay grounded in where we are in the process. This can enable coding while I'm driving or sitting stoned on the couch.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#210

Post by ryandrake »

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…

I guess the things I don't like about Chat are the same things I don't like about pair (or team) programming. I've always thought of programming as a solitary activity. You visualize the data structures, algorithms, data paths, calling flow and stack, and so on, in your mind, with very high throughput "discussions" happening entirely in your brain. Your brain is high bandwidth, low latency. Effortlessly and instantly move things around and visualize them. Figure everything out. Finally, when it's correct, you send it to the slow output device (your fingers).

The minute you have to discuss those things with someone else, your bandwidth decreases by orders of magnitude and now you have to put words to these things and describe them, and physically type them in or vocalize them. Then your counterpart has to input them through his eyes and ears, process that, and re-output his thoughts to you. Slow, slow, slow, and prone to error and specificity problems as you translate technical concepts to English and back.

Chat as a UX interface is similarly slow and poorly specific. It has all the shortcomings of discussing your idea with a human and really no upside besides the dictionary-like recall.

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