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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

#321

Post by ionwake »

yarekt wrote: post #277
ryandrake wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's such a mechanical way of describing pair programming. I'm guessing you don't do it often (understandable if its not working for you). For me pair programming accelerates development to much more than 2x. Over time the two of you figure out how to use each other's strengths, and as both of you immerse yourself in the same context you begin to understand what's needed without speaking every bit of syntax between…

this is so far removed from anything I have ever heard or experienced. But I know not everyone is the same and it is refreshing to view this comment.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#322

Post by lukeschlather »

skydhash wrote: post #271
kenjackson wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your script example is a good one, but the nice thing about scripting is when you learn the semantic of it. Like the general pattern of find -> filter/transform -> select -> action. It’s very easy to come up with a one liner that can be trivially modified to adapt it to another context. More often than not, I find LLMs generate overly complicated scripts.

It's astounding how often I ask an LLM to generate some thing, do a little more research, come back and I'm ready to use the code it generated and I realize, no, it's selected the wrong flags entirely.

Although most recently I caught it because I fed it into both gpt-4o and o1 and o1 had the correct flags. Then I asked 4o to expand the flags from the short form to the long form and explain them so I could double-check my reasoning as to why o1 was correct.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#323

Post by RugnirViking »

gnatolf wrote: post #222
shmoogy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't tried cursor yet, but how is this different from the copilot plugin in vscode? Sounds pretty similar.

ya know what, after a couple times hearing this comment, I downloaded it literally yesterday. It does feel pretty different, at least the composer module and stuff. A bit improvement in ai tooling imo

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#324

Post by AutistiCoder »

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…

ChatGPT itself is great for coding.

GitHub Copilot is...not. It doesn't seem to understand how to help me as well as ChatGPT does.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#325

Post by nick238 »

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…

Someone else (future you being a distinct person) will also need to grok what's going on when they maintain the code later. By living purely in a high-dimensional trans-enlightenment state and coding that way, means you may as well be building a half-assed organic neural network to do your task, rather than something better "designed".

Neural networks and evolved structures and pathways (e.g. humans make do with ~20k genes and about that many more in regulatory sequences) are absolutely more efficient, but good luck debugging them.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#326

Post by troupo »

lucasmullens wrote: post #261
godelski wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But with coding models they ignore context of the codebase and the results feel more like patchwork. Have you tried Cursor? It has a great feature that grabs context from the codebase, I use it all the time.

> It has a great feature that grabs context from the codebase, I use it all the time.

If only this feature worked consistently, or reliably even half of the time.

It will casually forget or ignore any and all context and any and all files in your codebase at random times, and you never know what set of files and docs it's working with at any point in time

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#327

Post by michaelfeathers »

Chat in English? Sure. But there is a better way. Make it a game to see how little you can specify to get what you want.

I used this single line to generate a 5 line Java unit test a while back.

test: grip o -> assert state.grip o

LLMs have wide "understanding" of various syntaxes and associated semantics. Most LLMs have instruct tuning that helps. Simplifications that are close to code work.

Re precision, yes, we need precision but if you work in small steps, the precision comes in the review.

Make your own private pidgin language in conversation.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#329

Post by troupo »

ijk wrote: post #85
freedomben wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Midjourney is an interesting case study in this I think, building their product UI as a discord bot. It was interesting to be sure, but I always felt like I was fighting the "interface" to get things done. It certainly wasn't all bad, and I think if I used it more it might even be great, but as someone who doesn't use Discord other than that and only rarely generated images, I had to read the docs every time I wanted…

I'm curious if you find their new website interface more tractable--there's some inherent friction to the prompting in either case, but I'd like to know if the Discord chat interface can be overcome by using a different interface or if the issue is more intrinsic.

Their website UI is great. Discord is nigh unusable
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