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.

Totally agree. Chat is a fantastic interface because it stays out of my way. For me it's much more than a coding assistant. I get live examples of how to use tools, and help with boilerplate, which is a time saver and improvement over legacy workflows, but the real benefit is all the spitballing I can do with it to refine ideas and logic and help getting up to speed on tooling way outside of my domain. I spent about 3.5 hours chatting with o1 about RL architecture to solve some business problems. Now I have a crystal clear plan and the confidence to move forward in an optimal way. I feel a little weird now, like I was just talking to myself for a few hours, but it totally helped me work through the planning. For actual code, I find myself being a bit less interactive with LLMs as time goes, sometimes it's easier to just write the logic the way I want rather than trying to explain how I want it but the ability to retrieve code samples for anything with ease is like a superpower. Not to mention all the cool stuff LLMs can do at runtime via API. Yeah, chat is great, and I'll stick with writing code in Vim and pasting as needed.