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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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t_mann ◴[04 Feb 25 17:37 UTC] No.42935789[source]▶
Ok, but what is a good pattern to leverage AI tools for coding (assuming that they have some value there, which I think most people would agree with now)? I could see two distinct approaches:

- "App builders" that use some combination of drag&drop UI builders, and design docs for architecture, workflows,... and let the UI guess what needs to be built "under the hood" (a little bit in the spirit of where UML class diagrams were meant to take us). This would still require actual programming knowledge to evaluate and fix what the bot has built

- Formal requirement specification that is sufficiently rigorous to be tested against automatically. This might go some way towards removing the requirement to know how to code, but the technical challenge would simply shift to knowing the specification language

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1. taeric ◴[04 Feb 25 17:49 UTC] No.42935971[source]▶
I'd challenge if this is specific to coding? If you want to get a result that is largely like a repertoire of examples used in a training set, chat is probably workable? This is true for music. Visual art. Buildings. Anything, really?

But, if you want to start doing "domain specific" edits to the artifacts that are made, you are almost certainly going to want something like the app builders idea. Down thread, I mention how this is a lot like procedural generative techniques for game levels and such. Such that I think I am in agreement with your first bullet?

Similarly, if you want to make music with an instrument, it will be hard to ignore playing with said instrument more directly. I suspect some people can create things using chat as an interface. I just also suspect directly touching the artifacts at play is going to be more powerful.

I think I agree with the point on formal requirements. Not sure how that really applies to chat as an interface? I think it is hoping for a "laws of robotics" style that can have a test to confirm them? Reality could surprise me, but I always viewed that as largely a fiction item.