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.

Anything that needs to be filtered for viewing again pretty much needs version control. Email largely fails at that, as hard as other correspondence systems. That said, we have common workflows that use email to build reviewed artifacts.

People love complaining about the email workflow of git, but it is demonstrably better than any chat program for what it is doing.

I don't think I agree with this. Sure, many things should be versioned, but I don't think most correspondence requires it, which is emails primarily purpose.

Agreed if it is correspondence that we are talking about. So, agreed I'm probably too strong that anything needing filtering and such is bad.

I'm thinking of things that are assembled. The correspondence that went into the assembly is largely of historical interest, but not necessarily one of current use.