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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

#301

Post by cruffle_duffle »

fny wrote: post #142

Narrative text is a worse UI pattern. It's impractical to read. Also how exactly do you merge narrative changes if you need to write several transformations as updates? Are you expected to update the original text? How does this affect diffs in version control? I think it's more ideal to have the LLM map text to some declarative pseudocode that's easy to read which is then translated to code. The example given by Dan…

lol. I’ve tried to get my LLM to produce something like that. Prompt was like “I’m going to feed your output to another model, please don’t write a narrative write what we’ve discussed in a machine readable format”.

It decided to output something JSON and maybe YAML once.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#302

Post by cruffle_duffle »

ajmurmann wrote: post #90

I agree with this and disagree at the same time. It depends what the goal is. If the goal is to have AI write the entire codebase for you, yes chat and human language is quite bad. That's part of the reason formal languages exist. But then only experts can use it. Requirement docs are a decent middle ground. However, I'm not sure it's a good goal for AI to generate the code base. The mode that I've found most fruitfu…

> I've found llms get frequently in a loop where something doesn't work and they keep applying the same changes they've tried before and it never works.

It gets even funner when you try to get other models to fix whatever is broken and they too get caught in the same loop. I’ll be like “nope! Your buddy ChatGPT said the same thing and got stuck in such and such loop. Clearly whatever you are trying isn’t working so step back and focus on the bigger picture. Are we even doing this the right way in the first place?”

And of course it still walks down the loop. So yeah, better be ready to fix that problem yourself cause if they all do the same thing you are either way off course or they are missing something!

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#303

Post by javier2 »

pc86 wrote: post #274
javier2 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, a Chat is terrible for development. In my tears of working, i have only had the chance to start a new codebase 3-4 times. 90% of the time is spent modifying large existing systems, constantly changing them. The chat interface is terrible for this. It would be much better if it was more integrated with the codebase and editor

Cursor does all of this, and agent chats let you describe a new feature or an existing bug and it will search the entire codebase and add relevant code to its context automatically. You can optionally attach files for the context - code files that you want to add to the context up front, documentation for third-party calls, whatever you want. As a side note, "No, you're wrong" is not a great way to have a conversatio…

Yeah, that is right. I'll give Cursor a try, because I believe we can do much better than these hopeless chat windows!

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#304

Post by 9rx »

kmoser wrote: post #206
9rx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> complex applications can still be fully specified in plain English

In plain English, of course, but not in natural English. When using language naturally one will leave out details, relying on other inputs, such as shared assumptions, to fill in the gaps. Programming makes those explicit.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#305

Post by bobbiechen »

ryandrake wrote: post #210
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…

I agree, chat is only useful in scenarios that are 1) poorly defined, and 2) require a back-and-forth feedback loop. And even then, there might be better UX options.

I wrote about this here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-ideal-ai-interface-is-prob...

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#306

Post by cruffle_duffle »

hoppp wrote: post #94

Every time there is a chat interface for something I try to use it, then after 1-2 prompts I give up. So I completely agree with this. Chat is not a good UI

A lot of times it is because those things aren’t properly wired up into their systems well enough to get the right context needed to help. Lots of them are nothing more than a prompt with no ability to dig any deeper than their original training data.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#308

Post by nomel »

oxfordmale wrote: post #33
empath75 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIs actually are very good at this. They wouldn't be able to write code at all otherwise. If you're careful in your prompting, they'll make fewer assumptions and ask clarifying questions before going ahead and writing code.

AI is very good at this. Unfortunately, humans tend to be super bad at providing detailed verbal instructions.

Then those same humans won't be able to reason about code, or the problem spaces they're working in, regardless, since it's all fundamentally about precise specifics.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#309

Post by cruffle_duffle »

quantadev wrote: post #89

Just two tips/thoughts: 1) The first thing to improve chats as a genre of interface, is that they should all always be a tree/hierarchy (just like Hacker News is), so that you can go back to ANY precise prior point during a discussion/chat and branch off in a different direction, and the only context the AI sees during the conversation is the "Current Node" (your last post), and all "Parent Nodes" going back to the b…

Dude threaded chat is how it should be, right? Especially if you could reference one thread in another and have it build the proper context up to understand what said thread was as a basis for this new conversation.

Proper context is absolutely everything when it comes to LLM use

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