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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

#291

Post by yarekt »

godelski wrote: post #242
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…

> A lot of our job is to do a lot of inference in figuring out what our managers are even asking us to make

This is why I think LLMs can't really replace developers. 80% of my job is already trying to figure out what's actually needed, despite being given lots of text detail, maybe even spec, or prototype code.

Building the wrong thing fast is about as useful as not building anything at all. (And before someone says "at least you now know what not to do"? For any problem there are infinite number of wrong solutions, but only a handful of ones that yield success, why waste time trying all the wrong ones?)

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#293

Post by ingigauti »

I took the position of not liking to much the AI coding early on. This was specially when it was starting. People writing long description to generate an app, I quickly noticed that doesn't work because it's all in the details.

Then having ai generate code for my project didn't feel good either, I didn't really understand what it was doing so I would have to read it to understand, then what is the purpose, I might as well write it.

I then started playing, and out came a new type of programming language called plang (as in pseudo language). It allows you to write the details without all the boiler code.

I'm think I've stumbled on to something, and just starting to get noticed :) https://www.infoworld.com/article/3635189/11-cutting-edge-pr...

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#294

Post by wiremine »

bboygravity wrote: post #280
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…

Interesting to see the narrative on here slowly change from "LLM's will forever be useless for programming" to "I'm using it every day" over the course of the past year or so. I'm now bracing for the "oh sht, we're all out of a job next year" narrative.

> "oh sht, we're all out of a job next year"

Maybe. My sense if we'd need to see 3 to 4 orders of magnitude improvements on the current models before we can replace people outright.

I do think we'll see a huge productivity boost per developer over the next few years. Some companies will use that to increase their throughput, and some will use it to reduce overhead.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#295

Post by skydhash »

spolsky wrote: post #123

I don't think Daniel's point is that Chat is generically a clunky UI and therefore Cursor cannot possibly exist. I think he's saying that to fully specify what a given computer program should do, you have to provide all kinds of details, and human language is too compressed and too sloppy to always include those details. For example, you might say "make a logon screen" but there are an infinite number of ways this co…

Which no one argues about really. But writing code was never the issue of software project. And if you open any books about software engineering, there’s barely any mention of coding. The issue is the process of finding what code to write and where to put it in a practical and efficient way.

In your example, the issue is not with writing the logon screen (You can find several example on github and a lot of css frameworks have form snippets). The issue is making sure that it works and integrate well with the rest of the project, as well as being easy to maintain.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#296

Post by yarekt »

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…

Oh yea, point 1 for sure. I call copilot regex on steroids.

Example: - copy paste a table from a pdf datasheet into a comment (it'll be badly formatted with newlines and whatnot, doesn't matter) - show it how to do the first line - autocomplete the rest of the table - Check every row to make sure it didn't invent fields/types

For this type of workflow the tools are a real time saver. I've yet to see any results for the other workflows. They usually just frustrate me by either starting to suggest nonsense code without full understanding, or its far too easy to bias the results and make them stuck in a pattern of thinking.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#297

Post by acrophiliac »

throwup238 wrote: post #224
bongodongobob wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to that, I always add some kind of debug function wrapper so I can hand off the state of variables and program flow to the LLM when I need to debug something. Sometimes it's really hard to explain exactly what went wrong so being able to give it a chunk of the program state is more descriptive.

I do the same for my QT desktop app. I’ve got an “Inspector” singleton that allows me to select a component tree via click, similar to browser devtools. It takes a screenshot, dumps the QML source, and serializes the state of the components into the clipboard. I paste that into Claude and it is surprisingly good at fixing bugs and making visual modifications.

That sounds cool. I could use that. Care to share your Inspector code?

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#298

Post by wiremine »

gamedever wrote: post #248
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 ol…

The most recent one was a typescript project focused on zod.

I might be reading into your comment, but I agree "top-down" development sucks: "Give me a react that does X". I've had much more success going bottom-up.

And I've often seen models getting confused on versions. You need to be explicit, and even then then forget.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#299

Post by wiremine »

pc86 wrote: post #278
ls_stats wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

It's not clear to me in the lines you're quoting that the GP didn't read the article.

Just confirming I did read the article in its entirety. Not reading it is like HN sin #1.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#300

Post by skydhash »

bcherry wrote: post #175

Chat is a great UX _around_ development tools. Imagine having a pair programmer and never being allowed to speak to them. You could only communicate by taking over the keyboard and editing the code. You'd never get anything done. Chat is an awesome powerup for any serious tool you already have, so long as the entity on the other side of the chat has the agency to actually manipulate the tool alongside you as well.

The real powerup is scripting. And if the actions are precise enough, macros. Much more efficient for a lot of tasks.
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