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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

#331

Post by koito17 »

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…

I'm not familiar with Cursor, but I've been using Zed with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. For side projects, I have found it extremely useful to provide the entire codebase as context and send concise prompts focusing on a single requirement. Claude handles "junior developer" tasks well when each unit of work is clearly separated.

Zed makes it trivial to attach documentation and terminal output as context. To reduce risk of hallucination, I now prefer working in static, strongly-typed languages and use libraries with detailed documentation, so that I can send documentation of the library alongside the codebase and prompt. This sounds like a lot of work, but all I do is type "/f" or "/t" in Zed. When I know a task only modifies a single file, then I use the "inline assist" feature and review the diffs generated by the LLM.

Additionally, I have found it extremely useful to actually comment a codebase. LLMs are good at unstructured human language, it's what they were originally designed for. You can use them to maintain comments across a codebase, which in turn helps LLMs since they get to see code and design together.

Last weekend, I was able to re-build a mobile app I made a year ago from scratch with a cleaner code base, better UI, and implement new features on top (making the rewrite worth my time). The app in question took me about a week to write by hand last year; the rewrite took exactly 2 days.

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As a side note: a huge advantage of Zed with locally-hosted models is that one can correct the code emitted by the model and force the model to re-generate its prior response with those corrections. This is probably the "killer feature" of models like qwen2.5-coder:32b. Rather than sending extra prompts and bloating the context, one can just delete all output from where the first mistake was made, correct the mistake, then resume generation.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#332

Post by rubymamis »

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.

Sounds awesome. I would love to hear more about this. Any chance you can share this or at least more details?

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#333

Post by TeMPOraL »

yarekt wrote: post #291
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…

> 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…

> 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?

Devil's advocate: because unless you're working in heavily dysfunctional organization, or are doing a live coding interview, you're not playing "guess the password" with your management. Most of the time, they have even less of a clue about how the right solution looks like! "Building the wrong thing" lets them diff something concrete against what they imagined and felt like it would be, forcing them to clarify their expectations and give you more accurate directions (which, being a diff against a concrete things, are less likely to be then misunderstood by you!). And, the faster you can build that wrong thing, the less money and time is burned to buy that extra clarity.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#334

Post by thomastjeffery »

skydhash wrote: post #283
thomastjeffery wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural language can be precise, but only in context . The struggle is to provide a context that disambiguates the way you want it to. LLMs solve this problem by avoiding it entirely: they stay ambiguous, and just give you the most familiar context, letting you change direction with more prompts. It's a cool approach, but it's often not worth the extra steps, and sometimes your context window can't fit enough steps a…

That’s what programming languages are: You define a context, then you see that you can shorten the notation to symbol character: Like “The symbol a will refer to the value of type string and content ‘abcd’ and cannot refer to anything else for its life time” get you: const a = “abcd” That is called semantics. Programming is mostly fitting the vagueness inherent to natural languages to the precise context of the progr…

Yes, but programming languages are categorically limited to context-free grammar. This means that every expression written in a programming language is explicitly defined to have precisely one meaning.

The advantage of natural language is that we can write ambiguously defined expressions, and infer their meaning arbitrarily with context. This means that we can write with fewer unique expressions. It also means that context itself can be more directly involved in the content of what we write.

In context-free grammar, we can only express "what" and "how"; never "why". Instead, the "why" is encoded into every decision of the design and implementation of what we are writing.

If we could leverage ambiguous language, then we could factor out the "why", and implement it later using context.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#335

Post by daxfohl »

I agree with everything except there being a business opportunity there. Whatever ends up being the fix, all the big players will incorporate it into their own IDEs within a couple months. Unless the fix is something that is significantly different from an IDE, that incorporating it into one doesn't make sense.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#336

Post by coder543 »

patrickaljord wrote: post #129
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…

Instead of Cursor I would recommend two open source alternatives that you can combine: https://www.continue.dev/ and https://github.com/cline/cline

I used Continue before Cursor. Cursor’s “agent” composer mode is so much better than what Continue offered. The agent can automatically grep the codebase for relevant files and then read them. It can create entirely new files from scratch. I can still manually provide some files as context, but it’s not usually necessary. With Continue, everything was very manual.

Cursor also does a great job of showing inline diffs of what composer is doing, so you can quickly review every change.

I don’t think there’s any reason Continue can’t match these features, but it hadn’t, last I checked.

Cursor also focuses on sane defaults, which is nice. The tab completion model is very good, and the composer model defaults to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which is arguably the best non-reasoning code model. (One would hope that Cursor gets agent-composer working with reasoning models soon.) Continue felt much more technical… which is nice for power users, but not always the best starting place.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#337

Post by Sylamore »

taeric wrote: post #52

I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…

NC DMV replaced their regular forms with a chat bot and it's horrible. Takes forever to complete tasks that used to take less than a minute because of the fake interaction and fake typing. Just give me a damn form to pay my taxes or request a custom plate.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#339

Post by freehorse »

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…

Pair programming is imo great when there is some sort of complementarity between the programmers. It may or may not accelerate output, but it can definitely accelerate learning which is often harder. But as you say, this is not what working with llms is about.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#340

Post by hollowturtle »

wiremine wrote: post #294
bboygravity wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whenever I read huge productivity boost for developers or companies I shiver. Software sucked more and more even before LLMs, I don't see it getting better just getting out faster maybe. I'm afraid in most cases it will be a disaster
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