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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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1. gagik_co ◴[04 Feb 25 17:54 UTC] No.42936034[source]▶
I think “correspondence UX” can be bad UX but there’s nothing inherently wrong with chat UI.

I created the tetr app[1] which is basically “chat UI for everything”. I did that because I used to message myself notes and wanted to expand it to many more things. There’s not much back and forth, usually 1 input and instant output (no AI), still acting like a chat.

I think there’s a lot of intuitiveness with chat UI and it can be a flexible medium for sharing different information in a similar format, minimizing context switching. That’s my philosophy with tetr anyhow.

[1] https://tetr.app/