Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

I'll preface this by saying I also dislike using chat as a pattern for AI tools. However, in theory, the idea has merit. Just as having 100% of the specifications and design guidance for a product is valuable before development, complete requirements would seem ideal. In reality, though, many requirements and specifications are living documents. Should we expect to rebuild the entire application every time a document changes? For example, if I decide to reduce a header's height, there's a significant chance the application could end up looking or feeling entirely different.

In a real-world scenario, we begin with detailed specifications and requirements, develop a product, and then iterate on it. Chat-based interactions might be better suited to this iterative phase. Although I'm not particularly fond of the approach, it does resemble receiving a coworker's feedback, making a small, targeted change, and then getting feedback again.

Even if the system were designed to focus solely on the differences in the requirements—thus making the build process more iterative—we still encounter an issue: it tends to devolve into a chat format. You might have a set of well-crafted requirements, only for the final instruction to be, "The header should be 2px smaller."

Nonetheless, using AI in an iterative process (focusing on requirement diffs, for example) is an intriguing concept that I believe warrants further exploration.