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Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

(danieldelaney.net)
858 points cryptophreak | 2 comments | 04 Feb 25 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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taeric ◴[04 Feb 25 16:47 UTC] No.42934898[source]▶
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 terrible way to build things. It can be a great way to communicate them, but being a separate entity, it is not necessarily good at making any artifacts.

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1. beambot ◴[04 Feb 25 16:52 UTC] No.42934997[source]▶
As a written form of "stream of consciousness", it seems to have a lot of value to me. It's noisy, inefficient & meandering -- all the things those polished artifacts are not -- but it's also where you can explore new avenues without worrying about succinctness or completeness. It's like the first draft of a manuscript.
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2. taeric ◴[04 Feb 25 16:59 UTC] No.42935181[source]▶
Certainly, it can have its use. But I question if it is stronger than previous generative techniques for creating many things. There have been strong tools that you could, for example, draw a box and say this should be a house. Add N rooms. This room should be a bathroom. Add windows to these rooms. Add required subfloor and plumbing.

Even with game development. Level editors have a good history for being how people actually make games. Some quite good ones, I should add.

For website development, many template based systems worked quite well. People seem hellbent on never acknowledging that form builders of the late 90s did, in fact, work.

Is it a bit nicer that you can do everything through a dialog? I'm sure it is a great for people that think that way.