Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

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 focus on the high-level code, and let the model focus on the lower level code.

I've yet to see any model understand nuance or detail.

This is especially apparent in image models. Sure, it can do hands but they still don't get 3D space nor temporal movements. It's great for scrolling through Twitter but the longer you look the more surreal they get. This even includes the new ByteDance model also on the front page. But with coding models they ignore context of the codebase and the results feel more like patchwork. They feel like what you'd be annoyed at with a junior dev for writing because not only do you have to go through 10 PRs to make it pass the test cases but the lack of context just builds a lot of tech debt. How they'll build unit tests that technically work but don't capture the actual issues and usually can be highly condensed while having greater coverage. It feels very gluey, like copy pasting from stack overflow when hyper focused on the immediate outcome instead of understanding the goal. It is too "solution" oriented, not understanding the underlying heuristics and is more frustrating than dealing with the human equivalent who says something "works" as evidenced by the output. This is like trying to say a math proof is correct by looking at just the last line.

Ironically, I think in part this is why chat interface sucks too. A lot of our job is to do a lot of inference in figuring out what our managers are even asking us to make. And you can't even know the answer until you're part way in.

This is why I think LLMs can't really replace developers. 80% of my job is already trying to figure out what's actually needed, despite being given lots of text detail, maybe even spec, or prototype code.

Building the wrong thing fast is about as useful as not building anything at all. (And before someone says "at least you now know what not to do"? For any problem there are infinite number of wrong solutions, but only a handful of ones that yield success, why waste time trying all the wrong ones?)

Devil's advocate: because unless you're working in heavily dysfunctional organization, or are doing a live coding interview, you're not playing "guess the password" with your management. Most of the time, they have even less of a clue about how the right solution looks like! "Building the wrong thing" lets them diff something concrete against what they imagined and felt like it would be, forcing them to clarify their expectations and give you more accurate directions (which, being a diff against a concrete things, are less likely to be then misunderstood by you!). And, the faster you can build that wrong thing, the less money and time is burned to buy that extra clarity.

Doing 4 sprints over 2 months to make a prototype in order to save 3 60 minute meetings over a week where you do a few requirements analysis/proposal review cycles.