Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

I'm going to take a contrarian view and say it's actually a good UI, but it's all about how you approach it.

I just finished a small project where I used o3-mini and o3-mini-high to generate most of the code. I averaged around 200 lines of code an hour, including the business logic and unit tests. Total was around 2200 lines. So, not a big project, but not a throw away script. The code was perfectly fine for what we needed. This is the third time I've done this, and each time I get faster and better at it.

1. I find a "pair programming" mentality is key. I focus on the high-level code, and let the model focus on the lower level code. I code review all the code, and provide feedback. Blindly accepting the code is a terrible approach.

2. Generating unit tests is critical. After I like the gist of some code, I ask for some smoke tests. Again, peer review the code and adjust as needed.

3. Be liberal with starting a new chat: the models can get easily confused with longer context windows. If you start to see things go sideways, start over.

4. Give it code examples. Don't prompt with English only.

FWIW, o3-mini was the best model I've seen so far; Sonnet 3.5 New is a close second.

I agree with you.

Yesterday, I asked o3-mini to "optimize" a block of code. It produced very clean, functional TypeScript. However, because the code is reducing stock option chains, I then asked o3-mini to "optimize for speed." In the JavaScript world, this is usually done with for loops, and it even considered aspects like array memory allocation.

This shows that using the right qualifiers is important for getting the results you want. Today, I use both "optimize for developer experience" and "optimize for speed" when they are appropriate.

Although declarative code is just an abstraction, moving from imperative jQuery to declarative React was a major change in my coding experience. My work went from telling the system how to do something to simply telling it what to do. Of course, in React—especially at first—I had to explain how to do things, but only once to create a component. After that, I could just tell the system what to do. Now, I can simply declare the desired outcome, the what. It helps to understand how things work, but that level of detail is becoming less necessary.