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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

#241

Post by rafaelmn »

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…

This only works for small self-contained problems with narrow scope/context.

Chat sucks for pulling in context, and the only worse thing I've tried is the IDE integrations that supposedly pull the relevant context for you (and I've tried quite a few recently).

I don't know if naive fine-tuning with codebase would work, I suspect there are going to be tools that let you train the AI on code in the sense that it can have some references in model, and it knows how you want your project code/structure to look like (which is often quite different from what it looks in most areas)

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#242

Post by godelski »

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 focus on the high-level code, and let the model focus on the lower level code.
Tbh the reason I don't use LLM assistants is because they suck at the "low level". They are okay at mid level and better at high level. I find it's actual coding very mediocre and fraught with errors.

I've yet to see any model understand nuance or detail.

This is especially apparent in image models. Sure, it can do hands but they still don't get 3D space nor temporal movements. It's great for scrolling through Twitter but the longer you look the more surreal they get. This even includes the new ByteDance model also on the front page. But with coding models they ignore context of the codebase and the results feel more like patchwork. They feel like what you'd be annoyed at with a junior dev for writing because not only do you have to go through 10 PRs to make it pass the test cases but the lack of context just builds a lot of tech debt. How they'll build unit tests that technically work but don't capture the actual issues and usually can be highly condensed while having greater coverage. It feels very gluey, like copy pasting from stack overflow when hyper focused on the immediate outcome instead of understanding the goal. It is too "solution" oriented, not understanding the underlying heuristics and is more frustrating than dealing with the human equivalent who says something "works" as evidenced by the output. This is like trying to say a math proof is correct by looking at just the last line.

Ironically, I think in part this is why chat interface sucks too. A lot of our job is to do a lot of inference in figuring out what our managers are even asking us to make. And you can't even know the answer until you're part way in.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#243

Post by sprucevoid »

I find web chat interfaces very useful for programming, but it also feels like early days. Speedups will smooth out a lot of pain points. But other UI changes, some even quite small, could enhance use a lot. A few of various size top of mind with regard to Claude web chat UI specifically:

- intellisense in the inputbox based on words in this or all previous chats and a user customizable word list

- user customizable buttons and keyboard shortcuts for common quick replies, like "explain more".

- when claude replies with a numbered list of alternatives let me ctrl+click a number to fork the chat with continued focus on that alternative in a new tab.

- a custom right click menu with action for selection (or if no selection claude can guess the context e.g. the clicked paragraph) such as "new chat with selection", "explain" and some user customizable quick replies

- make the default download filenames follow a predicable pattern, claude currently varies it too much e.g. "cloud-script.py" jumps to "cloud-script-errorcheck.py". I've tried prompting a format but claude seems to forget that.

- the stop button should always instantly stop claude in its tracks. Currently it sometimes takes time to get claude to stop thinking.

- when a claude reply first generates code in the right sidebar followed by detailed explanation text in the chat, let some keyboard shortcut instantly stop the explanation in its tracks. Let the same shortcut preempt that explanation while the sidebar code is still generating.

- chat history search is very basic. Add andvanced search features, like filter by date first/last message and OR search operator

- batch jobs and tagging for chat history. E.g. batch apply a prompt to generate a summary in each selected chat and then add the tag "summary" to them. Let us then browse by tag(s).

- tools to delete parts of a chat history thread, that in hindsight were detours

- more generally, maybe a "chat history chat" to have Claude apply changes to the chat histories

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#244

Post by reustle »

fragmede wrote: post #157
lolinder wrote: post #109

Earlier 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.

Depends on the company. Most of the time, you get paid to add features and fix bugs, while maintaining reliability.

End users don’t care where the code came from.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#245

Post by xboxnolifes »

9rx wrote: post #41
benatkin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being careful in your prompting doesn’t imply that. That can also be thought of as just using natural language well.

What separates natural language from programming language is that natural language doesn't have to be careful. Once you have to be careful, you are programming.

Does this mean that good communication skills is equivalent to programming?

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#246

Post by ic4l »

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…

For me the o models consistently make more mistakes for me than Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#248

Post by gamedever »

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…

What did you create? In my field, so far, I've found the chat bots not doing so well. My guess is the more likely you're making something other people make often, the more likely the bot will help.

Even then though, I asked o1-cursor to start a react app. It failed, mostly because it's out of date. It's instructions were for react 2 versions ago.

This seems like an issue. If the statistically most likley answer is old, that's not helpful.

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