Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

danieldelaney.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 432 posts

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#361

Post by skydhash »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #313
frocodillo wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that is a feature of pair programming, not a bug. By forcing you to use the slower I/O parts of your brain (and that of your partner) the process becomes more deliberate, allowing you to catch edge cases, bad design patterns, and would-be bugs before even putting pen to paper so to speak. Not to mention that it immediately reduces the bus factor by having two people with a good understanding of the code…

I guess it depends on a person. My experience is close to that of 'ryandrake. I've been coding long enough to notice there are times where the problem is complex and unclear enough that my own thought process will turn into pair programming with myself, literally chatting with myself in a text file; this process has the bandwidth and latency on the same order as talking to another person, so I might just as well do t…

As I work, I pepper the files with TODO comments, then do a quick rgrep to find action items.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#362

Post by ern »

stevage wrote: post #330

Boy does this feel like the author has never actually used any AI tools for writing code.

I had the same feeling reading this, but a large number of developers struggle to communicate verbally and would hate a chat based interface. Some years ago, I worked with a very intelligent person who had come into development with math-related degree.

We tried a pair-programming exercise, and he got visibly angry, flustered and frustrated when he tried to verbalize what he was doing.

One of the reasons Business Analysts and the like exist is that not everyone can bridge the gap between the messy, verbal real world, and the precision demanded by programming languages.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#363

Post by hinkley »

frocodillo wrote: post #230
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…

I would argue that is a feature of pair programming, not a bug. By forcing you to use the slower I/O parts of your brain (and that of your partner) the process becomes more deliberate, allowing you to catch edge cases, bad design patterns, and would-be bugs before even putting pen to paper so to speak. Not to mention that it immediately reduces the bus factor by having two people with a good understanding of the code…

Efficient, but not always more effective.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#365

Post by quantadev »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #309
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

Yep. "Threaded" might be what the kids are callin' it nowadays. It's always been trees for me. I had a 'Tree-based' chat app for OpenAI (and as of now all other leading LLMs, via LangChain/LangGraph) within one week of them opening up their API. lol. Because my Tree-based CMS was already done, to build on.

OpenAI finally made it where you can go back and edit a prior response, in their chat view, but their GUI is jank, because it's not a tree.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#368

Post by esafak »

zahlman wrote: post #358
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.

Why? Since you are vetting the code it generates, the rate at which you end up with code you accept seems like a good measure of productivity.

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#369

Post by esafak »

kristofferR wrote: post #288
pc86 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me. I wonder if Claude is better at some languages than others, and o models are better at those weaker languages. There are some devs I know who insist Claude is garbage for coding and o3-* or o4-* are tier 1.

o4 doesn't exist (in public at least) yet.

OP means 4o

Re: Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

#370

Post by esafak »

goosejuice wrote: post #163
packetlost wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I even think it's bad for generalized communication (ie. Slack/Teams/Discord/etc.) that isn't completely throwaway. Email is better in every single way for anything that might ever be relevant to review again or be filtered due to too much going on.

I've had the opposite experience. I have never had any issue finding information in slack with history going back nearly a decade. The only issue I have with Slack is a people problem where most communication is siloed in private channels and DMs. Email threads are incredibly hard to follow though. The UX is rough and it shows.

In Slack people don't even consistently use threads, because they are not forced to, so conversations are strewn all over the place, interleaved with one another. Slack has no model of a discussion in the first place.
Post reply on HN