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Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

(danieldelaney.net)
858 points cryptophreak | 4 comments | 04 Feb 25 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. freedomben ◴[04 Feb 25 16:54 UTC] No.42935058[source]▶
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 to generate an image, which is a ridiculous amount of friction.
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2. joe_guy ◴[04 Feb 25 16:58 UTC] No.42935134[source]▶
There has recently been a pretty large UI inclusion for midjourney directly inside Discord which has the option of being used instead of the text input.

As is often the case in these sorts of thingsz your milage may vary for the more complex settings.

3. ijk ◴[04 Feb 25 17:13 UTC] No.42935407[source]▶
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.
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4. troupo ◴[04 Feb 25 21:58 UTC] No.42939495[source]▶
Their website UI is great. Discord is nigh unusable