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Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

(danieldelaney.net)
858 points cryptophreak | 1 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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dapperdrake ◴[04 Feb 25 17:08 UTC] No.42935321[source]▶
Email threads seem better for documenting and searching correspondence.

The last counter argument I read got buried on Discord or Slack somewhere.

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jayd16 ◴[04 Feb 25 17:14 UTC] No.42935429[source]▶
Isn't this entirely an implementation detail of slack and discord search? What about email makes it more searchable fundamentally? The meta data if both platforms is essentially the same, no?
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1. mrweasel ◴[04 Feb 25 17:49 UTC] No.42935957{3}[source]▶
No, it has to do with context. In an email you will frequently have to provide more context for your answers to make sense. Chat is a conversation, which search drops you straight into, may with AI you could get placed at an appropriate starting point, but you're still reading a conversation. It's much easier to get dropped into a correspondence. To me the difference is like reading someones letter, vs. overhearing a conversation in a bus.

This obvious assumes that who ever wrote the email isn't a madman, who insist on using emails like it was a chat.