Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

Narrative text is a worse UI pattern. It's impractical to read. Also how exactly do you merge narrative changes if you need to write several transformations as updates? Are you expected to update the original text? How does this affect diffs in version control?

I think it's more ideal to have the LLM map text to some declarative pseudocode that's easy to read which is then translated to code.

The example given by Daniel might map to something like this:

  define sign-in-screen:
    panel background "#f9f9f9":
      input email required: true, validate-on-blur: true
      input password required: true
      button "Sign in" gradient: ("#EEE" "#DDD")
      connect-to-database

Then you'd use chat to make updates. For example, "make the gradient red" or "add a name field." Come to think of it, I don't see why chat is a bad interface at all with this set up.

It's interesting, it seems that we are looping back on the old trend of Model-Driven Architecture

lol. I’ve tried to get my LLM to produce something like that. Prompt was like “I’m going to feed your output to another model, please don’t write a narrative write what we’ve discussed in a machine readable format”.

It decided to output something JSON and maybe YAML once.