Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

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. The LLM will move down the stack (rather than up) and much more appropriate task-based UX/UI will be put on top of the LLM, coordinated thru a UX/UI layer that is much sympathetic to the way users actually want to interact with a machine.

In the same way that no end-users ever touch SQL these days (mostly), we won’t expose the chat-based UX of an LLM to users either.

There will be a place for an ad-hoc natural language interface to a machine, but I suspect it’ll be the exception rather than the rule.

I really don’t think there are too many end users who want to be forced to seduce a mercurial LLM using natural language to do their day-to-day tech tasks.

> The whole “chat as UX” metaphor is a cul-de-sac that I’m sure we’ll back out of sooner or later.

Only when someone discovers another paradigm that matches or exceeds the effectiveness of LLMs without being a language model.

Or DSLs like cucumber for acceptance tests. Cute for simple things, but for anything realistic, it's more convoluted than convenient.

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.

I actually came to the same conclusion. I am currently working on a side project that's an AI powered writing app for writers, and while I still provide chat because that seems to be the expectation, my goal is to abstract all the AI assistance a writer might need into curated UI options.