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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

#251

Post by ryandrake »

rpastuszak wrote: post #235
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've changed my mind on that as well. I think that, generally, chat UIs are a lazy and not very user friendly. However, when coding I keep switching between two modes: 1. I need a smart autocomplete that can work backwards and mimic my coding patterns 2. I need a pair programming buddy (of sorts, this metaphor doesn't completely work, but I don't have a better one) Pair development, even a butchered version of the so…

> I've changed my mind on that as well. I think that, generally, chat UIs are a lazy and not very user friendly. However, when coding I keep switching between two modes:

> 1. I need a smart autocomplete that can work backwards and mimic my coding patterns

> 2. I need a pair programming buddy (of sorts, this metaphor doesn't completely work, but I don't have a better one)

Thanks! This is the first time I've seen it put this clearly. When I first tried out CoPilot, I was unsure of how I was "supposed" to interact with it. Is it (as you put it) a smarter autocomplete, or a programming buddy? Is it both? What was the right input method to use?

After a while, I realized that for my personal style I would pretty much entirely use method 1, and never method 2. But, others might really need that "programming buddy" and use that interface instead.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#252

Post by oxfordmale »

dylan604 wrote: post #56
oxfordmale wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, let's devise a more precise way to give AI instructions. Let's call it pAIthon. This will allow powers that be, like Zuckerberg to save face and claim that AI has replaced mid-level developers and enable developers to rebrand themselves as pAIthon programmers. Joking aside, this is likely where we will end up, just with a slightly higher programming interface, making developers more productive.

man, pAIthon was just sitting right there for the taking

Thanks for pointing it out :-)

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#253

Post by ls_stats »

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…

>it's actually a good UI >I just finished a small project >around 2200 lines

why the top comments on HN are always people who have not read the article

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#255

Post by notShabu »

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…

chat is the best way to orchestrate and delegate. whether or not this is considered "ME writing MY code" is imo a philosophical debate

e.g. executives treat the org as a blackbox LLM and chat w it to get real results

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#257

Post by daxfohl »

matthewsinclair wrote: post #153

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. Th…

Or DSLs like cucumber for acceptance tests. Cute for simple things, but for anything realistic, it's more convoluted than convenient.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#258

Post by yapyap »

> AI was supposed to change everything. Finally, plain English could be a programming language—one everyone already knows. No syntax. No rules. Just say what you want

That’s the thing about language, you CAN’T program in human language for this exact reason, whereas programming languages are mechanical but precise, human languages flow better but they leave wiggle room. Computers can’t do jack shit with wiggle room, they’re not humans. That’ll always remain, until there’s an AI people like enough to have it’s own flair on things.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#259

Post by skydhash »

ryandrake wrote: post #237
xp84 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great observation. I've mostly thought of it, not in relation to AI, but in relation to the way Apple and to a lesser extent, Microsoft, act like they are the owners of the computers we "buy." An update will be installed now. Your silly user applications will be closed by force if necessary. System stability depends on it! The modern OS values the system's theoretical 'system health' metrics far above thing…

An example of where this is going is Apple's so-called "System Integrity Protection"[1] which is essentially an access level to system files that's even higher than root. It's Apple arrogantly protecting "their" system from the user, even from the root user: System Integrity Protection is designed to allow modification of these protected parts only by processes that are signed by Apple and have special entitlements t…

Which is why I love my freebsd installation (and before that Alpine Linux) and why I develop on a VM on macOS. I can trivially modify the system components to get the behavior that I need. I consider macOS as a step up from ChromeOS, but not a general purpose computer OS. Latest annoyance was the fact that signing out of Books.app signs you out of the App Store (I didn’t want epubs to be synced).

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#260

Post by shaan7 »

kenjackson wrote: post #203
dartos wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ext…

I think you and the parent comment are onto something. I also feel like the parent since I find it relatively difficult to read code that someone else wrote. My brain easily gets biased into thinking that the cases that the code is covering are the only possible ones. On the flip side, if I were writing the code, I am more likely to determine the corner cases. In other words, writing code helps me think, reading just biases me. This makes it extremely slow to review a LLM's code at which point I'd just write it myself.

Very good for throwaway code though, for example a PoC which won't really be going to production (hopefully xD).

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