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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

#351

Post by godelski »

wiremine wrote: post #287
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…

> 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. That's interesting. I found assistants like Copilot fairly good at low level code, assuming you direct it well.

I have a response to a sibling comment showing where GPT 4o and o1-preview do not yield good results.

  > assuming you direct it well.
But hey, I admit I might not be good at this. But honestly, I've found greater value in my time reading the docs than spending trying to prompt engineer my way through. And I've given a fair amount of time to trying to get good at prompting. I just can't get it to work.

I do think that when I'm coding with an LLM it _feels_ faster, but when I've timed myself, it doesn't seem that way. It just seems to be less effort (I don't mind the effort, especially because the compounding rewards).

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#352

Post by taeric »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #345
taeric wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this gets to how a lot of these conversations go past each other? A chat interface for getting a ride from a car is almost certainly doable? So long as the itinerary and other details remain separate things? At large, you are basically using a chat bot to be a travel agent, no? But, as you say, a chat interface would be a terrible way to actively drive a car. And that is a different thing, but I'm growing con…

> But, I don't think sticking to the chat window is the best way to interface with what it delivers. You almost certainly want to be much more actively "hands on" in very domain specific ways with the artifacts produced. Yes, this is what I've also tried to hint at in my comment, but failed part-way. In most of the cases I can imagine chat interface to be fine (or even ideal), it's really only good as a starting poin…

Oh, apologies, I meant my post to be a highlight of how I agree with you! Your post is great!

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#353

Post by taeric »

SoftTalker wrote: post #343
taeric wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is something I didn't make clear on my post. Chat between people is the same bad UI. People read in the aggression that they bring to their reading. And get mad at people who are legit trying to understand something. You have some of the same problems with email, of course. Losing threading, in particular, made things worse. It was a "chatification of email" that caused people to lean in to email being bad…

Yeah this is part of why RTO is not an entirely terrible idea. Remote work has these downsides -- working with another person over a computer link sucks pretty hard, no matter how you do it (not saying WFH doesn't have other very real upsides).

Agreed.

I'm actually in an awkward position where I was very supportive of RTO two years ago, but have since become very reliant on some things I could not do with a rigid RTO policy.

Regardless of RTO or WFH, patience and persistence remain vital qualities.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#354

Post by muzani »

The first wave was not chat, it was completion. Instead of saying "suggest some names for an ice cream shop", the first wave was "Here are some great names for ice cream shops: 1. Nice Cream 2." Chat was a lot more intuitive and low effort than this.

Chat is also iterative. You can go back there and fix things that were misinterpreted. If the misinterpretation happens often, you can add on another instruction on top of that. I strongly disagree that they'd be fixed documents. Documents are a way to talk to yourself and get your rules right before you commit to them. But it costs almost nothing to do this with AI vs setting up brainstorming sessions with another human.

However, the rational models (o1, r1 and such) are good at iterating with themselves, and work better when you give them documents and have them figure out the best way to implement something.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#355

Post by jug »

matthewsinclair wrote: post #153

Yep. 100% agree. The whole “chat as UX” metaphor is a cul-de-sac that I’m sure we’ll back out of sooner or later. I think about this like SQL in the late 80s. At the time, SQL was the “next big thing” that was going to mean we didn’t need programmers, and that management could “write code”. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course, as we all know. I see chat-based interfaces to LLMs going exactly the same way. Th…

I think a counterpoint to this is that SQL has a specific and well-defined meaning and it takes effort to get what you actually want right. However, communication with an AI can sometimes request a specific context or requirements but also be intentionally open-ended where we want to give the AI leeway. The great thing here is that humans _and_ AI now quite clearly understand when a sentence is non-specific, or with great importance. So, I think it’s hard to come up with a more terse or approachable competitor to the sheer flexibility of language. In a way, I think it’s a similar problem that still has engineers across the world input text commands in a terminal screen since about 80 years now.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#356

Post by taeric »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #342
taeric wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it has to do with mental models. For my model, at large, conversations are worthless. Anyone that tries to hold you to a conversation from weeks ago that didn't secure a stronger commitment is almost certainly flying loose and more than willing to selectively choose what they want to be committed to. Does that mean I can't have some pleasure in conversing about things? Of course not. But, I also enjoy some…

My preferences are the opposite, but my mental frame is more about utility than about safety. I'm not worried about someone fishing for something I said that could be construed as commitment or admission - they can just as easily do that with e-mail[0]. For me, conversations can be extremely valuable , and I gravitate towards people and places where that's a common case. HN is one of such places - the comment threads…

I think this is fair. And I should be clear that I'm not so worried about someone digging to find something stupid I said here on HN. Or in a chat. I'm more thinking about people that are afraid of saying something stupid, to the point that they just don't engage.

I think my mental model is more for chat rooms to take the place of coffee room chats. Ideally, some of those do push on something to happen. I'm not sure that forcing them into the threaded structure of conversations really helps, though?

Maybe it is based on the aim? If the goal is a simulacrum of human contact, then I think ephemeral makes a ton of sense.

I also kind of miss the old tradition of having a "flamewars" topic in newsgroups. I don't particularly love yelling at each other, but I do hate that people can't bring up some topics.

(I also miss some old fun newsgroups. I recall college had Haiku and a few other silly restrictive style groups that were just flat fun.)

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#358

Post by zahlman »

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…

LoC per hour seems to me like a terrible metric.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#359

Post by zahlman »

javier2 wrote: post #231
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…

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

>In my tears of working

Sometimes typos are eerily appropriate ;)

(I almost typed "errily"...)

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