Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

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.

Email threads seem better for documenting and searching correspondence.

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

I find things get buried just as easily in email. People on my team are constantly resending each other emails, because they can’t find the thread.

This is why, if something is important, I take it out of email and put it into a document people can reference. The latest and correct information from all the decisions in the thread can also be collected in one place, so everyone reading doesn’t have to figure it out. Not to mention side conversations can influence the results, without being explicitly stated in the email thread.