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Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

(danieldelaney.net)
858 points cryptophreak | 2 comments | 04 Feb 25 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | 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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taeric ◴[04 Feb 25 17:12 UTC] No.42935388[source]▶
Discord and slack baffle me. I liked them specifically because they were more ephemeral than other options. Which, seems at odds with how people want them to be? Why?
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1. mrweasel ◴[04 Feb 25 17:52 UTC] No.42936009{3}[source]▶
I really don't get why people are so happy about Slack (never used Discord). The interface is awful, it barely functions as a chat client, yet people adds bots, automation and use it as a repository for documentation. Honestly it would be better if history was deleted weekly or something, just to prevent people from storing things in Slack.
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2. parasubvert ◴[05 Feb 25 04:09 UTC] No.42943660[source]▶
It's the opposite in my experience, it's the best parts of IRC and the history is gold. Storing things in Slack is one of the most useful bits of it. I've seen several multi-billion dollar companies built most of their collaboration across offices around Slack.