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.

I even think it's bad for generalized communication (ie. Slack/Teams/Discord/etc.) that isn't completely throwaway. Email is better in every single way for anything that might ever be relevant to review again or be filtered due to too much going on.

I've had the opposite experience.

I have never had any issue finding information in slack with history going back nearly a decade. The only issue I have with Slack is a people problem where most communication is siloed in private channels and DMs.

Email threads are incredibly hard to follow though. The UX is rough and it shows.

I hard disagree. Don't have a conversation? Ask someone who does to forward it. Email lets the user control how to organize conversations. Want to stuff a conversation in a folder? Sure. Use tags religiously? Go for it. Have one big pile and rely on full-text search and metadata queries? You bet. Only the last of these is possible with the vast majority of IM platforms because the medium just doesn't allow for any other paradigm.

The fact that there's a subject header alone leads people to both stay on topic and have better thought out messages.

I agree that email threads could have better UX. Part of that is the clients insistence on appending the previous message to every reply. This is completely optional though and should probably be turned off by default for simple replies.

That's fine.

Email is really powerful but people simply aren't good at taking advantage of it and it varies by email client. Doing some IT work at a startup made this pretty clear to me. I found Slack was much more intuitive for people.

Both systems rely on the savviness of the users for the best experience and I just think email is losing the UX war. Given how terrible people seem to be at communicating I think it's a pretty important factor to consider.